After choosing which videos I wanted to
work with I opened them in imovie and started using technology to manipulate
them. I used the slow down function to control the speed particularly around
parts where mum featured in the video to try and grasp once again that sense of
her essence- now heightened by seeing her in the moving image – another
dimension compared to the static still photograph. It feels like an illusion –
you can see the person yet cannot reach them.
Video of Ross and mum that I edited 2014
Video of Mum, Z and Jo (IOM) that I also slowed down and used reverse
I slowed down portions so I could take my
time and examine this figure made of pixels, which showed my mum. I took the
impulse further and utilized technology to reverse certain moments. An
especially poignant one for me was when mum and my son Ross were hanging out in
the lounge and I spent some time when she blinked slowing that down and
reversing it – opening her eyes over and over again as if willing them to stay
open and simultaneously coming to terms with the fact that they were closed for
good even though I hadn’t been there for the end as it was sudden. Maybe it was
a way to get some closure of how she looked with her eyes closed, as there is
an element of peace in the slowed down movement of blinking.
An artist who undertook this journey in a
different way was Sophie Calle in her film work “Pas pu saisir la mort” (2007). Here she films the last minutes of
her mother’s life as she lay on her deathbed. In contrast to my work she does not manipulate the film in any way - the power of the work comes from it being a real event happening which although an incredibly potent event ,the finishing of a life, this is highlighted in a sense by the absence of being able to recognise exactly when this moment is. As Ken Johnson [1]writes
The most interesting part is the deathbed
film, which was first shown in the 2007 Venice
Biennale. To make it, Ms. Calle set up a camera to record her mother
continuously while she was dying; what you see is the 11 minutes during which
she expired.
It shows Ms.
Sindler in profile, lying still with eyes closed, asleep or unconscious. At one
point, the hands of otherwise unseen attendants touch her neck and her chest to
determine whether she is still living and then adjust the covers. We briefly
hear a piece of music by Mozart that Ms. Sindler had asked to be played upon
her death. By the end, she has died, but it’s impossible to say exactly when —
hence the film’s title, “Couldn’t Capture Death.” It’s eerily uneventful. There’s
no perceptible change in her physical being, no last word or gasp, no
discernible evidence of the soul leaving the body. If it seems ghoulish to
present such a document as a work of art, that just makes it all the more
riveting to watch and ponder.
Extracts from Sophie Calle's Pas pu saisir la mort 2007
[1] Johnson, K 2014
‘As maman lay dying her spirit became art’, The
New York Times viewed 16 Oct 2014 http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/16/arts/design/in-rachel-monique-sophie-calle-eulogizes-her-mother.html?_r=0
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