22nd/23rd January 1879 | :30s
Collapsed movie experiment
Over twenty years ago, the first piece I made when I arrived at The Jan van Eyck Akademie was a flattened out version of The Shining. Something that took all the drama, suspense and horror out of the film, and distilled the experience essentially to a single frame. I’ve always wanted to do more with that idea, and I’m finally getting around to trying out some new things with it.
I’ve been working with the framework of thirty second increments, and in thinking about which movies to choose, wanted to pick something that was highly informed by those minute-by-minute decisions. The events at Isandlwana and Rorke’s Drift on the afternoon and evening of 22nd/23rd January 1879 certainly fall into that category. One set of decisions spelling disaster and death, the other a celebrated historic defense. In flattening out these events into single frames, much in the same way the retelling of these stories does through historiography, we immediately see where things went right, and where things went wrong. An accelerated, expedited lens through which to view human strength and weakness. On the technical side, this work combines two different movies, and you can see where they’re stitched together with the credits appearing in the middle of the sequence - one as closing credits, and one as opening credits.
I’m not sure where the journey with this idea will go next, but I’ve been really enjoying working with the procedural, algorithmic approach to creating these, and I look forward to (finally) building out a larger body of these in the future.
This will probably break your browser.
