Magnificent Ray

2000
Country: UK
Duration: 23 mins
Colour,
Sound: sound
Available Format/s: DVD / Digibeta tape / SD Digital file

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Magnificent Ray explores the western by focusing on gender relations in a confluence of dream movie genre and everyday life.Filmed on location in Bridport and Portland in West Dorset, and featuring locals as extras and principal players, Florence encounters Ray a subtle souled girl slipping into forgetfulness. Their journey from showdown to slowdown explores the nature of dreams whilst sensing a narrative. Florence and Ray….Florence Ray.’A world of emotional and sensory experience eddying endlessly, in atmosphere of the mind and in twilit regions of memory where past and present blur. Life is mysterious, a luminous halo, a semi transparent envelope surrounding us from beginning to end, consciousness is the end’ Virginia Woolf.Miles teases out the glamour cowgirl/boy in teenage girls through music and costume as they adventure through a rich, wild, west landscape.Jo Lanyon, Director of Picture This Moving Image from the catalogue to the show.Sarah Miles, a young English director knows how to guide someone’s attention in a unique way. Based on her influence interesting and fascinating thought processes get in swing.Taxi driver in Oberhausen

Sarah Miles takes the measure of her practice through the tropes
and fictions of Hollywood. Her films exist in the uncertain space
between documentation of real lives and a cinematic imaginary, in
which ensemble casts are gathered from a network of friends and
family who play out their resemblance to fictional counterparts. In the
case of Magnificent Ray this transformation extends to place, as the
Dorset town of Bridport becomes the one horse town of a Hollywood
western. The town’s inhabitants are the stars of a fragmented narrative
rich with the signifiers of the wild west: it’s shoot outs, saloons and
cowboy hats. But Magnificent Ray is not a pastiche of Hollywood.
Rather, Hollywood enables Miles to frame a profound portrait of a
small West Country town, where the invitation to collaborate in the
fictions of the western allows it’s townspeople to reveal something of
themselves.

More works by Sarah Miles

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