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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Three Short Films: How it was made

Looking into the possibility of changing the perception of a site through filmmaking and editing process, allowing the site to dictate the process of editing. Throughout the process, the desired outcome would be to create a ’mental space’ (dream) within chosen sites.

Discovering the effects of different filming techniques and how the relationship between camera and filmed object interact once the aspect of randomness is allowed.

The creation of three short film has allowed me to unravel these possibilities. Thee films were filmed in three different spaces with completely different atmosphere. the only common thing that these spaces have is a strong directionality to them, either vertical or horizontal. 

here are some photographs i took during the process of the making.

space for film 1: White-ness

Space for film 2: Sunset-ness

Space for film 3: Float-less

Sigmund Freud 'Uncanny'-extractions and notes

image sourse


'...We can collect all those properties of persons, things, sensations, experiences and situations which arouses in us the feeling of uncanniness, and then infer the unknown nature of the uncanny from what they all have in common... The 'uncanny' is that class of the terrifying which leads back to something long known to us, once very familiar... The familiar can become uncanny and frightening.

...We tempted to conclude that what is 'uncanny' is frightening precisely because it is not known and familiar.

...Intellectual uncertainty: so that that the uncanny would always be that in which one does not know where one is, as it were. The better orientated in his environment a person is, the less readily will he get the impression of something uncanny in regard to the objects and events in it.

...According to him [Schelling] everything is uncanny that ought to have remained hidden and secret, and yet comes to light.

...'doubts whether an apparently animate being as really alive; or or conversely, whether a lifeless object might not be in fact aminate' (Jentsch)

...We know from psychoanalytic experience... that fear of damaging or loosing one's eyes is a terrible fear of childhood... No bodily injury is so much dreaded by them [adults] as an injury to the eye.

...It may be true that the uncanny is nothing else than a hidden, familiar thing that has undergone repression and then emerged from it, and that everything that is uncanny fulfils this condition. But these factors do not solve the problem of the uncanny. For our proposition is clearly not convertible. Not everything that fulfils this condition-not everything that is connected with repressed desires and archaic forms of thought belonging to the past of the individual and of the race-is therefore uncanny.

...An uncanny experience occurs either when repressed infantile complexes have been revived by some impression, or when the primitive beliefs we have surmounted seem once more to be confirmed.'