Film screening in Herðubreið – cinema, 24:21 min.
Luke Fowler’s films dwell on potentiality: what might be, what might have been, what might still be if the world were to turn in a different direction?
But film time runs in many directions, as do arguments. Film made only recently can be easily confused with the archival vintage of washed-out or saturated tones and blurred edges.
Only the disjunction between sounds that live close within the ear and rich voices from a fading past distinguish archive from present.
Gradually the pieces converge: our nostalgia for ancient folkways, traditional song and the romance of freedom, all undercut by scientific rationalism and the pressures of normativity bringing law to bear on lives resistant to conformity.
What is an archive if not a collection of letters to ourselves?
Luke Fowler (b. 1978, Glasgow) is an artist, filmmaker and musician based in Glasgow. His work explores the limits and conventions of biographical and documentary filmmaking, and has often been compared to the British Free Cinema of the 1950s. Working with archival footage, photography and sound, Fowler’s filmic montages create portraits of intriguing, counter cultural figures, including Scottish psychiatrist R. D. Laing and English composer Cornelius Cardew.
A part of the Assembly of the Hyperboreans
Photo Alan Dimmick
