Uncertainty

Uncertainty takes the form of three separate films, all silent, which use a mixture of reworked film of the Tottenham Riots, domestic interiors – rooms – filmed in a variety of ways, and exterior views of hoardings and reflections in shop windows.
The Tottenham Riot footage consists of several shots in various degrees of close-up, all of the same scene. Each shot is seen once at normal speed and once at half speed.
The interior treatments range from the static wide-shot to pixillated close-ups in which the camera movements suggest a mimicking of human eye movements. The exteriors, of multiple window reflections and hoardings with successive layers of partially obscured posters, suggest an infinite regress, or layering, of meanings in which the ‘real’ recedes behind its successive representations.
The films are intended to show that even a finite and knowable space like a small room can yield unexpected views and images, and that if one is tempted to think of the camera as a revolutionary or analytical tool, there can be no definite revelation, no final analysis.
This suggestion is similarly applied to the riot film, in order to question its status as information (as revelation of truth). – N.H.
NICKY HAMLYN’s work “has explored, with great formal control, the difficult terrain of the private space, physical and emotional interiors, often elliptical and ambiguous, but always exact and precise in tone…” – Michael O’Pray, Independent Media.