Freeze (Touched by Love)

1998. There’s a skip outside Film House just round the corner from my office. It’s full of – mostly broken – grey and brown 1960s office furniture, but amongst this are some short rolls of 16 and 35mm film. I take all I can find and head back to the studio. At the lightbox with a loom I take a look at what I’ve scavenged. The 16mm film is monotone but with a strong blue cast, and the image quality is grainy with lots of scratches on the surface. The 35mm film rolls include some of that familiar ‘film leader’ (a countdown from ‘9’ to ‘START’), and parts of the title sequence to Touched by Love. I don’t know the film and don’t bother to find out about it. Not long after this my friend Niall is curating a show at Arthouse, and he’s looking for submissions.^{71 71.} Freeze ’98 (a winter projection festival), Arthouse, Dublin, 1998 was curated by Niall Sweeney. I contrive two installation pieces I will make with this film material, and another piece, Somebody Else’s Holiday (1964), using slides I came by in a London market in the early 90s. I edit the 16mm film digitally into Gucci, Trash, Canvas, Points (1998), a four segment silent, slow-motion film, with each of these four words used as an intertitle directing our attention to an element within the frame that was incidental or extraneous to the original scene. Dramatically slowed down, the scratches dance and dart across the screen. From the Touched by Love footage I make six lightboxes with ‘Duratrans’ enlargements of single frames, contriving a title for each frame in an interplay between what is depicted in the image and the materiality of the film stock. The series is wall mounted in a row and they glow in the darkened gallery like colourful boiled sweets.

Fig. 39 Freeze (Touched by Love)