Passing Ship

As in earlier tapes, George Barber appropriates popular film culture and engages with it on his own terms. He reclines in his bath narrating, in a loosely constructed monologue , an account of how he survived a plane crash over water and the events which led up to it. A montage of 1970s American disaster films accompany and interact with his tongue-in-cheek account. Passing Ship is concerned with ambiguity in the representation of events. Is he concocting a story inspired by watching too much television? Is he contrasting personal experience against the mass media as a critique of the latter? There is no single answer as the tape works at many levels.