Viewfinder Magazine
Articles Archive - page 7
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Home is a Fragile Place
10th November 2020
As sociologists David Madden and Peter Marcuse argue: 'Housing is more than shelter; it can provide personal safety and ontological security. While the domestic environment can be the site of oppression and injustice, it also has the potential to serve as a confirmation of one’s agency, cultural identity, individuality, and creative powers.' … continue reading.
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Inhabit of: Incubating Death Beyond the Domestic
10th November 2020
The pregnant body as a form of home, indeed the first home; with the female incubator as host and intrauterine caregiver is a one house fits all approach to constructing meaning via image. In considering my time-based media artwork Can You Hear the Interim (video, mixed media, Archibald, Clare, 2020) in relation to ideas of home, dwelling and inhabitation in the context of expected neonatal death, I aim to broaden the understanding of the body as home. To do so I will consider utilisation of moving image as interdisciplinary practice /life writing, visual representations of pregnancy/birth (homing) beyond the stereotypical horror or sci fi, women’s experiences of ‘home’ beyond the domestic and moving image as a means by which to explore bodily and artistic agency via the lens of ‘home’. As with the making of the media art, this paper is informed by my lived experience of giving birth to a baby that I knew would be born dead or dying due to irresolvable heart issues.… continue reading.
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Home, Class and Murder in South Korean Cinema
5th November 2020
'Well' my partner noted 'although lockdown has been hard - at least we don't have a secret family living in our house'. He was of course referring to Bong Joon-ho’s megahit Parasite (2019). The award-winning film offers a nuanced debate on class, money and prejudice in contemporary South Korea. The idea of home is central to the film’s narrative – the vast poverty gap in the film is most clearly highlighted in the difference between the dank, insect infected, basement flat (banjiha) where the Kim family reside and the vast luxury home of the wealthy Park family.… continue reading.
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Police Departments and Home Invasion
5th November 2020
Jack Webb’s cult account of ‘true crimes’ The Badge: The Inside Story of One of America’s Great Police Departments provides an imagined officer’s opinion on home burglary. The officer describes burgled houses having “not been forcibly entered--not a screen cut, a door forced, or a lock broken--and most of the victims had been lonely defenseless women.” … continue reading.
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Madness in Through a Glass Darkly
5th November 2020
Ingmar Bergman’s Through a Glass Darkly’s (1961) primary concern, as Robin Wood stated in his seminal book on the director, is a woman named Karin (Harriet Andersson) and her ‘madness’ (1969, 108). The sequence this article seeks to dissect serves as the climax of the film, the boiling point at which Karin’s madness reveals itself in a hallucination of a ‘Spider-God’. Marc Gervais reads this sequence as ‘Karin’s imagined final sexual assault by the Spider-God’ (1999, 75) and this analysis will take this reading and apply to it the further argument that the ‘Spider-God’ represents Karin’s internal fear of the patriarchal society that questions her sanity. The term ‘madness’ here will be approached through Rosmarie Garland-Thomson’s feminist understandings of the notion of ‘misfits’ (2011). … continue reading.
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Camp Followers of the Cold War
5th November 2020
Early November 2016, we arrive in Cyprus after nightfall. We are here for an artist residency, hosted by Nicosia Municipal Arts Centre, to research and shoot a collaborative essay film, Father-land, that investigates our ideas of home and displacement. As the children of military personnel who served with the Royal Air Force on the island during the Cold War, we are drawing on our memories of a militarised nomadic childhood to explore ideas of home and displacement. Both our late fathers were stationed in Cyprus prior to its division in 1974, which followed when Turkish troops invaded and seized the northern third of Cyprus in response to a coup by militant Greek Cypriots seeking union with Greece.… continue reading.
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Can You Hear Me?
5th November 2020
“Can you hear me?” this question rings out on a very regular basis for anyone in a profession which has moved to online spaces. It’s certainly become, in recent months, a familiar refrain in educational delivery across the country as teachers, college, and university lecturers moved abruptly into the very different realm of fully online teaching and learning. It is a sentence which encompasses the mix of technological unfamiliarity, self-doubt, uncertainty and sudden self-awareness that marks an online conversation or delivery of information, an undiscovered country that we all thought we knew something about. We also felt well prepared for it, but found that we are not as well equipped as we first thought, and that all the time we lavished upon social media has not really readied any of us to spend even more time online in a much more formal way.… continue reading.
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Domestic Horror and Trans-Femininity in Jamie Crewe's Ashley
5th November 2020
As the current pandemic has transformed our sense of home with feelings of entrapment and isolation, Jamie Crewe’s film Ashley (2020), premiered only a few weeks before the UK went into lockdown, speaks almost prophetically to the anxiety that has come to define our relationship with the domestic sphere in the past months. Ashley is the first stand-alone, cinematic work by the Glasgow-based artist, whose videos often form part of multi-media exhibition projects. Ashley was realised with a commission Crewe received as the recipient of the 2019/20 Margaret Tait Award, the most prestigious Scottish moving image prize awarded to artists for experimental and innovative work. Crewe described the 45-minute film as an ‘isolated film about isolation,’ which follows a single character played by the artist, Ashley, while they are spending a weekend away in a remote cottage in the Scottish countryside.… continue reading.
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Home and Englishness in the films of David Lean
4th November 2020
From his modest upbringing as an accountant’s son in a Quaker household in Croydon, and beginning his career in the film industry as tea-boy at Gaumont Studios, David Lean (1908-1991) developed into the most internationally acclaimed director of English cinema. He is responsible for epics such as The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), Lawrence of Arabia (1962) and A Passage to India (1984), which are about as far removed from his suburban background (which he hated), in terms of location, as one could imagine.… continue reading.
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Home: The Domestic Interior on Screen
4th November 2020
The book I am writing explores the creation of the home on screen from the perspective of the production designer using in depth case studies with designers. The case studies use a methodology developed for the analysis of production design called Visual Concept Analysis. The approach works through the five key ways a script is visualised by a production designer: 1) Space, 2) In and out, 3) Light, 4) Colour and 5) Set decoration. The case studies illustrate how decisions about the five elements are linked and return to the logic of the central visual concept driving the design.… continue reading.