400 Feet in Forgotten Time

Prokopic, Pavel

Abstract

Statement



The internet portal eBay is a global, virtual marketplace for any material object conceivable. However, this virtual/material duality also resonates with my experience of eBay as a contingent and invisible networked film archive. As part of my AHRC-funded practice research in film, I acquired more than 60 reels of Super8 found footage on the site – in a largely blind, random process – including home movies and obscure commercially-released dramas and cartoons from the period between 1960s and 1990s. As the material arrived in post, I filmed it using a digital camera, and slowly began isolating short segments (new shots), whenever a moment of film could be pulled out of its ordinary, coherent context, on the basis of what Shklovsky (1997) refers to as ‘defamiliarisation’. When I had obtained enough of such moments to fill one 400ft Super8 reel, I physically edited the film, for the maximum effect of defamiliarisation. Music was later composed by Isabel Benito-Gutierrez to respond to and amplify the (latent) fragments of feeling in the images, while bringing non-narrative unity to the piece. The resulting film, entitled 400 Feet in Forgotten Time, emerges from this practitioner encounter with the contingent, invisible film archive – crossing repeatedly the boundary between physical and virtual, between photochemical and digital: first the physical film stock had been developed and/or printed, and the virtual images gradually forgotten under the dust of the physical medium. I discovered the films on eBay, virtually, and made all editing decisions based on a non-linear digital representation, but eventually spliced the film together physically. The resulting digital scan exposes the marks of the physical age, and bears the scars of the destructive splicing process.



The project presents a set of aesthetic and ontological questions grounded in film theory and philosophy, particularly in relation to Deleuzian affect theory. Affects, based on Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy, are impersonal, undifferentiated singularities contained in the work; they exist independently of the human being as a subject – they exist as ‘sensible experiences in their singularity, liberated from organising systems of representation’ (Colebrook 2001: 22). Another important concept, chiefly applied in post-production, is what Shklovsky’s (1997) refers to as ‘defamiliarisation’ – removing ‘objects from the automatism of perception’ (4). My use of defamiliarisation in post-production expresses the Deleuzian notion of ‘molecular’ (as opposed to ‘molar’), which is fundamentally linked to affects. Affects, especially in a film work that does not present visual and/or narrative sequential coherence, lead to a certain molecular effect, which is another highly relevant Deleuzian concept. The molecular is the ‘domain of chance or of real inorganization, [from which] large configurations are organized that necessarily reproduce a structure’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 289). The molecular approach disregards the coherent context of the whole and prioritises fragmentary affective expression in disjointed moments (the delimitation and immediate correspondence of neighbouring shots).



References:

Colebrook, C. (2001) Gilles Deleuze, London, New York: Routledge.

Deleuze, G., Guattari, F. (1983) Anti-oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Deleuze G., Guattari, F. (1994) What is Philosophy? New York: Columbia University Press.

Shklovsky, V. (1997) ‘Art as Technique’ in K. M. Newton (ed.) Twentieth-Century Literary Theory: A Reader, Macmillan Education, 3-5.

Citation

Prokopic, P. (2024). 400 Feet in Forgotten Time. [Video]

• Digital Artefact Type: Video
• Online Publication Date: Jul 4, 2024
• Publication Date: Jul 4, 2024
• Deposit Date: Jan 23, 2025
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.17866/rd.salford.23532084.v1
• Publisher URL: https://salford.figshare.com/articles/media/400_Feet_in_Forgotten_Time/23532084