Focal Lengths

Picture Planes * and Focal Lengths attempt to develop ideas established in the earlier double screen film, Five Bar Gate*, in that the nature of camera function, the connotations of the recorded image and the way that these elements are constructed (either in camera or brought together in a final assembly) form the basic area of concern.
The fixed focal length of the lens, the function of the aperture and the manner in which the film is transported through the camera gate, serve as parameters during events-at-the-time-of-shooting which seek to both establish and deny spatial precepts inherent in the perceptual-retinal features of the work as a whole, in conjunction with the single frame as a basic unit (as in Focal lengths) or the 100ft roll (as in Picture Planes*).
In Focal Lengths the manipulation of the zoom lens forms a continual effect on the perception of a filmed space. Picture Planes attempts to create a ‘duality’ formed by perspective illusion and the emphasis of the two dimensional flatness of the image surface. – D.P.
‘David Parsons, in both Focal Lengths and Picture Planes * explores the ‘relativity’ of temporal/spatial experience. Focal Lengths is a particularly successful film: it has precise limits and clear strategy but avoids mechanistic system and its fallacious myth of objectivity. Using both different lens focal lengths and camera distances from the subject, much in the way which Giacometti defines and redefines the relationship between the observer and the space observed in his drawings and paintings, the point of observation is continually taken backwards and forwards into the space. This is done in discrete jumps, so that the different distance effects superimpose and fuse with each other in clusters of spatial flux adjustments. Parsons though, subtly, makes use of another order of temporality in larger scale changes of lighting and changes in the objects before the camera, giving awareness of another form of temporal placing for the film process than that of the small time scale shifts in the spatial ‘clusters’.’ – M. Le Grice, from ‘Notes, programme 1’ ‘New British Avant Garde Films, Edinburgh Film Festival 1978.