Movie - Michelangelo Antonioni's The Passenger
Metaphor - Shadow
in regards to the installation i chose - The shadows reveal themselves as much more than images cast from the fragments of the blown-up garden shed. These shadows hint at the hidden reality, the unconscious, the undeveloped (transformable) field wherein meaning has been produced by simply turning on the light bulb. The fragments are finally able to become what they really are and replaced for what they could become. The past and present are conflated where this temporal nature is frozen.
The power of the shadow is that it creates an alternate reality from an illusion or turns the illusion into reality.
The images below are in response to the film i have been analyzing (The Passenger). The first image is a still of a particular scene where David Locke is about to drag the body of another person whom he will change identity with, Mr.Robertson.
The next image is a collage i had made to make my point - "shadow." "The Girl" is looking into the space through the window where David is dragging another person out (which is David in the scene) and the person to the right (David again) is watching all of this as well. I created this image by taking 4 different stills from the movie. David on the right is actually looking into an open locker, but i used the darkness of the interior of the locker as if it was a dark wall in the image.
The shadow can take on many meanings. The Girl is David's alienated self, desire, the psyche David wants to reach and is the subject outside the window. She attends his life as a 'shadow' spirit who has been assigned the duty of guiding him through his final acts on earth. David on the very right of the image who has already changed his identity as Robertson is looking at his old-self, the shadows. David on the left is dragging Robertson on the floor but I tried to make it so that he is really dragging himself out of this hallway. In a way, they are all casting a shadow of themselves in this one scene i had collaged.
Hence, shadow as knowledge - self-awareness is the kind of metaphor i'm trying to get at in this simple image where i wanted the shadows to have a kind of time and space of it's own.
As for my site, I've been thinking about filming some pedestrian street at the LowerEast Side where a lot of people pass by.
4 comments:
this is a great technique. collapsing time.
In choosing a site, you may simultaneously consider a more literal meaning of shadow and pay attention to the siting of your location. As the sun gets lower in the sky shadows have the potential to become a much more dominant quality to the physical presence of a site than they would during the summer for example.
have a look at plato's allegory of the cave
i think alex' suggestion is great...
Post a Comment