We are screening Sarah Turners Ecology (2007) on Carroll / Fletcher Onscreen until January 6. Jean Genet described the family as the most destructive cell. Located somewhere between meditation and dream, Ecology is a film in three parts that fuses an exploration of narrative with Turner’s dedication to formal experimentation to look at the unsettling side of families. While on holiday at an eco-retreat in Majorca, three characters – mother, daughter and son – tell three different stories about the same violent incident. Composed as internal monologues narrated as voice-over, each sequence entraps us within the psyche of a character, reinventing a modernist literary sensibility within a cinematic language that exploits an innovative range of grains and gauges. Whilst referencing a debate on the ethics of the environment, Ecology’s real concern is ideas of psychic re-cycling, the debris that’s passed on and re-circulated amongst people; it takes the three themes of the environment, familial psychic structures and technology as critical sites of crisis and change and insists that we consider them together. Shot on location in Spain and England on multiple formats including Super 8, stills, DV and mobile phones – technologies that live inside one another as they evolve – the imaging of the film mirrors the characters struggle for stability and consistency. The three parts of the film can be viewed in any order. The possibility of viewing the sequences in any order (there are six possible permutations and exhibitors determine which version they’ll screen – although onscreen is only presenting one version) confirms the circularity that is at work that denies causality to events or a hierarchy to the media. The stories, like the psyche, like media, incorporate others but also refer us on in an endless chain of suggestion. There is no conceivable resolution, rather we are part of an endless recurrence, a mode of transmission rather than comprehension. wp.me/p4eBUt-oU Image: Sarah Turner, Still from Ecology, 2007
Posted on: Fri, 19 Dec 2014 12:38:09 +0000
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