Psychotel
Psychotel is an essay film that uses the metaphor of the hotel to explore the psyche. The film investigates the uncanny as a state of being relating to the split nature of the self by combining fictional stories, dreams, philosophical commentary, and complex voice-over that complicates the authorial voice. The architecture of the psyche is presented in a richly textured audio-visual landscape, explored through tales of strange happening in hotel rooms; the returning dead, the spirit guide turned bad, the folding of the city.
Psychotel premiered at the 66rd International Short Film Festival of Oberhausen in May 2020 (in an online presentation format due to the Covid-19 pandemic) in a two programme retrospective: 'Profile: Susannah Gent'.
Psychotel premiered at the 66rd International Short Film Festival of Oberhausen in May 2020 (in an online presentation format due to the Covid-19 pandemic) in a two programme retrospective: 'Profile: Susannah Gent'.
Psychotel : watch full video (60 mins)
A review of Psychotel written during the Oberhausen retrospective can be found at:
https://scratch-utopia.blogspot.com/2020/06/on-66th-internationale-kurzfilmtage.html
accessed 24/6/20
Unhomely Street
Unhomely Street follows a female protagonist in a state of fugue following a head injury as she wanders an alienating city underbelly of clubs and free parties. Through recollections of anti-capitalist conversations, historical information about wartime atrocity, and human brutality, she searches for hope in an increasingly frightening, subjective landscape.
The film explores the Derridean concept of hauntology both in terms of its original context taken from Spectres of Marx where Derrida suggests that ‘time is out of joint’ and that we are haunted by spectres of those dead and those not yet born, as well as recognising Mark Fisher's interpretation that mourns the lost futures of the twentieth century, suggesting we live in a time of mental illness, unable to envisage a future that is different to current times.
At the Wither Marxism? conference, California, 1993, where the term hauntology was first used, a conference aimed at exploring the future of Marxism following the fall the Berlin wall in 1989, Derrida states ‘the world is going badly’. Twenty three years on we live in an age of digital capitalism and according to Michael LePage, writing for the New Scientist in 2015, we face a mass extinction of the Anthropocene, the geological era that began with the industrial revolution and defined as the period when human activity began to have a profound global impact. This underpins the multiple narrative strands that question whether humankind's behaviour is inevitably underpinned by brutality.
Unhomely Street is a deeply personal film that aims to employ new approaches to filmmaking through multiple narrative strands and a focus on tone and metaphor in an attempt to communicate a subjective experience.
Unhomely Street premiered at the 63rd International Short Film Festival of Oberhausen in May 2017.
The film explores the Derridean concept of hauntology both in terms of its original context taken from Spectres of Marx where Derrida suggests that ‘time is out of joint’ and that we are haunted by spectres of those dead and those not yet born, as well as recognising Mark Fisher's interpretation that mourns the lost futures of the twentieth century, suggesting we live in a time of mental illness, unable to envisage a future that is different to current times.
At the Wither Marxism? conference, California, 1993, where the term hauntology was first used, a conference aimed at exploring the future of Marxism following the fall the Berlin wall in 1989, Derrida states ‘the world is going badly’. Twenty three years on we live in an age of digital capitalism and according to Michael LePage, writing for the New Scientist in 2015, we face a mass extinction of the Anthropocene, the geological era that began with the industrial revolution and defined as the period when human activity began to have a profound global impact. This underpins the multiple narrative strands that question whether humankind's behaviour is inevitably underpinned by brutality.
Unhomely Street is a deeply personal film that aims to employ new approaches to filmmaking through multiple narrative strands and a focus on tone and metaphor in an attempt to communicate a subjective experience.
Unhomely Street premiered at the 63rd International Short Film Festival of Oberhausen in May 2017.
Unhomely Street clips
Unhomely Street: watch full video
Unhomely Street is discussed in the article EXORCISING UNHOMELY STREET: FILMIC INTUITION AND THE REPRESENTATION OF POST-CONCUSSIVE SYNDROME
in the peer-reviewed Journal for Artistic Research
https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/285865/285866
Scanner
An experimental documentary made as a result of an fMRI survey that used image sets to investigate the neurological underpinnings of the uncanny.