Gorge, 2025
Digital video
Duration 5min 26sec
Gorge 2025 works with several seconds of Ingmar Bergman’s 1966 film, Persona, which I have flipped upside down and stretched. What emerges is a slow series of jumps between the individual frames of the celluloid film strip that Bergman used, before digital film was invented.
The sound that I have introduced is a quote, read by myself, from page 8 of Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain: a celebration of the Cairngorm Mountains of Scotland, published by Canongate Books, in 2008.
Drawing attention to the integration of these two different mediums, I reversed the subtitles that translate the alien form of communication (stretched sound), creating a counterpoint / split perspective, as a sign of reflection.
Attempting to shift the focus of attention outwards, towards the nature of existence, through an earth-shattering experience rather than any internal narrative, my intervention formed a counter-fiction and a mise en abyme (a film within a film), which is my first time working with a film, as material, something I’ve been wanting to do since building my FILMOGRAPHY FOR A PRACTICE.
Gorge, 2025 is my second time working with Bergman’s film, Persona, in relation to mountains. The first was in 2016, in a short essay film that I made from a collage of still and moving scenes that jumped between silence and sound, which evolved while attempting to mirror a disjuncture that I had faced within my practice, when I was (rather bizarrely) trying to build a mountain out of hundreds of baking tins that kept collapsing and consuming me.