Between the Bullet and the Hole

‘Between the Bullet and the Hole’ is a film centred on the elusive and complex effects of war on women’s role in ballistic research and early computing. The film features new and archival high speed bullet photography, schlieren and electric spark imagery, bullet sound wave imagery, forensic ballistic photography, slide rulers, punch cards, computer diagrams, and a soundtrack by Scanner. Like a frantic animation storyboard, it explores the flickering space between the frames, testing the perceptual mechanics of visual interpolation, the possibility of reading or deciphering the gap between before and after. Interpolation – the main task of the women studying ballistics in WW2 – is the construction or guessing of missing data using only two known data points. The film tries to unpack this gap, open it up to interrogation. It questions how we read, interpolate or construct the gaps between bullet and hole, perpetrator and victim, presence and absence.