Simon Faithfull

Simon Faithfull- Escape Vehicle no.6

Simon Faithfull- 30 km (2004)

These two short film by Simon Faithfull show the the footage of the camera, attached to a weather balloon and set free to the edge of the space. In 'Vehicle no.6', the camera shows the journey of the domestic chair, while the second film, '30 km' is 'objectless', but framed in this circular frame. Both of the films are becoming very strange at the moment when the camera is reaching the space edge, the image is not clear, the sound becomes broken, and in the rare moments of clearness of the picture the viewer can see the outlines of the earth and the darkness of the space. the mixture of these 'ingredients' create a truly surreal experience for the viewer, when it is so easy to imagine yourself sitting on that chair and flying off to the atmosphere. There is certainly something very strange about such a simple object, a chair, to be seen in such an unusual environment. It almost breaks all the odds: a chair, something so stable, something that was built to celebrate the gravity, something meant for relaxation,  being so distressed and brought 'out of a comfort zone' into the exploration of the new.

very inspiring.

Simon Faithfull's website

Stan Brakhage, the interview.

Chodorov (Rail): Could you read these opening lines from your 1963 book,Metaphors on Vision, and expand on them and explain how these ideas influenced your filmmaking?

Stan Brakhage: Imagine an eye unruled by man-made laws of perspective. What a way to take it. Imagine an eye unruled by man-made laws of perspective. Our whole structure of visual thinking is based on manmade laws of perspective and so on! But imagine! I say in my youth, an eye unruled by man-made laws of perspective, an eye unprejudiced by compositional logic, an eye which does not respond to the name of everything but which must know each object encountered in life through an adventure of perception. In other words everything you see, you have to be having an immediate adventure with it. It’s not canned in any sense.How many colors are there in a field of grass to the crawling baby unaware of green? How many rainbows can light create for the untutored eye? In other words, can we actually see the rainbow at all unless we’re squeezing the eye in that particular way that causes that diffraction? How aware of variations in heat waves can that eye be? In other words, can you really see the quivering, the actual quivering little wavelets through which every little shaft of light is, you know, feathered onto your consciousness? Imagine a world alive with incomprehensible objects, imagine it just alive with things we don’t know what they are, incomprehensible objects and shimmering with an endless variety of movements, everything moving. There’s not a moment of stillness anywhere and innumerable gradations of color. I mean, you start naming the different shades of, let’s say, these pants, blue-black? Are they gray-black? Are those socks then black-black? You have all these varieties…Here’s a blue…And you start naming: is this Prussian blue? Is this cobalt blue? Is this navy blue? And those are just blunt gradations, names that are given, and you can go on and on and on and you run out of words, finally. You’d end up with a dictionary full of words trying to delimit and otherwise describe a quality of blueness, very shortly, just along the line of these black pants and black shirt and black socks on this quilt which I will make no attempt whatsoever to try to describe. [laughs]

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