Synopsis and background to the ideas contained in ‘Death + the Monument’

Run time 55 mins Pal DVD

Death and the Monument’ is an artist made film with a complex narrative, shot almost entirely in close-up and big close-up. Beginning with a prelude in total darkness (3 mins approx), a live recording from an actual event (radio ham recording), we hear the radio communication between the flight control tower and a stricken plane controlled by a terrorist. If the prelude starts with a scenario where things are beyond our control, the main body of the film starts with a narrative that is vaguely situated in the 1950’s and tells us of a man whose vision is to rid us of bad memories. Our protagonist is a film archivist who edits out the frames that contain man made disasters; he keeps what remains as the time before where landscapes of peace and stillness existed. We first catch him five minutes into the film. A gun is shot, he falls to the earth as though he was born out of the mud and the race begins. Stumbling, he flees into the wilderness followed by his persistent doubt in an upwards chase through a mountainous landscape.

Eventually doubt catches up with him. He fights his opponent in a scene that becomes sexually charged as pain gives way to mentally constructed carnal release. He is suffocated but manages to defeat his opponent and ends up with a half-hearted attempt to save his attacker. His doubt, in the shape of a romantic Hollywood chase apparition, falls from a cliff face to the ground, while remnants spill out of his pockets and fall with him. He lays there dead. A photo of a young woman lays by his hand, the wind blows the photograph and it moves out of our view. Doubt rots back to the ground.

Our protagonist now continues his ascending journey relieved of his physical manifestation of doubt. He pauses to enter a cave and builds a foxhole radio out of a razor blade, safety pin and an earphone. Tuning into an imaginary/real woman radio operator high up in the sky, we are transported out of this claustrophobic world to another one where she is with him and speaking through him tells him of a time when he liked to swing on a swing as a boy, as he thought of feelings he didn’t have words for yet and he repeated in his head: anticipation / ecstasy - birth / death continually.

‘Death and the Monument’, new to me in that it straddles the boundaries between art and classical film editing and narrative, limits our vision to what is above (the sky), and what is below (the earth). We never see what is in front of ourselves. The sky becomes our temporary release, the soil our physical dimension. Micro moments/frames that separate life from death form our anxiety in the macrocosm and microcosm. The protagonist’s life becomes compressed like a bullet that follows him through his mental construct of a utopian landscape, a landscape which is his own drawn invention and which has been interpolated throughout the film. He falls after observing for a moment his conquered landscape (the only wide shot in the film so far) as if in ecstasy: he has reached the top of a mountain, the panoramic view is sublime and that moment is the moment the bullet passes through him.

Half dead, he once again looks up, a glider soars through the air. We are a passenger. It is our point of view, we circle and idly look down, we see a swing and then a boy swinging from far above.

Characteristic of my work by the continuing motivational drive towards the highly physical close-up entrapment of the body and mind (most notable in ‘Struggle’- see showreel), my video works generally deal with the trichotomy between physical, mental and imaginary. Raw physicality and movement has nearly always been incompatible with the notion of art as a frozen relevant moment or entity. This also becomes a problem when narrative plot is involved, which, generally is not an art concern. ‘Death and the Monument’ is the first film I have made to contain plot and brings together a range of ideas dealt with in previous works. The rawness of the physical usually exists is in the realm of the transitory and unimportant. If the Hollywood action genre is characterized by relentless movement at the expense of transcendence, my recent work toys with the play between still and the physical, close-up and wide shot, the inherent problems contained within narrative and the still, that is to say, the difficulty in prolonging the beauty of the moment and the texture of inner landscape whilst creating tension and suspense so characteristic of the thriller genre my film emulates.