It was interesting to watch David Hall's 1969 film Vertical this week, having recently written about Jessica Warboys' Pageant Roll. The films speak to one another – in their lyrical expression of heritage landscapes (with ancient hill figures and rings of standing stones); in their incongruous placing of modernist objects/sculptures in semi-wild, rural environments.
Hall's piece, however, seems a much more rigorous, structural enquiry, concerned with the mechanics of filmmaking and actions of framing/view-finding. His zooms, pans and rhythmic cuts draw mathematical attention to the lens, the edit; his geometric sculptural interventions serve primarily as props in a series of perspectival tricks and games of foreshortening – exposing the processes of the camera-machine.
It is important to realise that the sculptures only work because they are recorded on film. Their function in the film is to draw attention to the difference between our actual experience of space and the representation of three dimensions on a two dimensional surface. lux.org.uk
Vertical explores the role of the camera/lens in our perception of objects in space; Pageant Roll uses the camera to explore the poetical associations of specific objects in a specific space – Warboys' edit (just as visible as Hall's) a kind of dance of loops and repetitions that propels the viewer’s cognitive processing of these.
My current work is, I think, concerned with all of this at once! – the framing of landscape by/within man-made geometries, relationships between camera (2D) and physical (3D) space; visual and poetical associations between Modernist architectures and their more 'natural' surroundings...