At the time of making this film, Prodger worked six-hour shifts as a DJ to sustain her art practice. Subsequently many of the anecdotes she uses in her practice are rooted in music subculture. Her love of records – using matter to punctuate and measure time – echoes her investigations into the materiality of film. A Forest for The Neighbours continues Charlotte Prodger’s exploration into the tension between language and material and the way oral narratives transmutate through time and space.This 16mm film relates an anecdote about a teenage goth in her bedroom in a Scottish New Town in 1980, performing The Cure song ‘A Forest’ to her neighbours through the window as they stood in the street watching. Prodger uses the formal parameters of the wind-up Bolex to agitate the relationship between the mechanical eye of the camera and the bearded mouth of the narrator. The technology is unfaltering in it’s parameters, bringing to bear the slippages and visceral minutiae of speech.
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