Still Image

The project here was, working with the methodology of structuralist/materialist filmmaking, to open a space in which the viewer might have access to a more politicised (more clearly enunciated Marxist) definition of the film construct. The sound-track consists of reiterated questions, at first complexly put in the style of French linguists, and later more rhetorical questions, regarding the socio-political realities of image production. The images are repeated, simple constructs, sometimes of particular relevance, sometimes not, often from print photographs from the print media. The questioning becomes its own subject, raising doubts as to the efficacy of its own text as a method of understanding. Like previous films it does not produce a resolved product, but raises the issue of the film construct’s embeddedness in the political structures of society, in a way that attempts to counter the accepted giveness of illusion and representation, and expose the ideological relationship of signifier and referent. More didactic than my previous work, it is closer in impulse to the political art of socialist countries, seeing the foundation of a combative socialist film art in the West as being based on the dislocated signifier of structuralist filmmaking, and its subject the process of representation itself.