Flemo: notes from Long Film

[Lucas and Flemo about 9pm on Friday 16 March, photo by Peter Shaw taken from outside Track 12]

A few folks who we invited to experience our private “screening” of Long Film for Ambient Light have begun to filter back with their thoughts after the event. First cab off the rank is Flemo.

Thanks for the invite to say something, although – at this stage – I’m unsure I have anything to say except thanks for the invite to say something. I was serious, by the way, about the idea of a “natural screensaver.” As much as applications have progressed, screensavers are still about the most interesting things computers do. Arriving late at night (-or late for me, a confirmed father and nerd), didn’t seem to bear out the screen-saver intuition. Perhaps this would have been different were I to have come during the day. So what of the film(ing), as I saw it? The experience of being in the space seemed to have an almost-sedating effect on me: there was something chruch-like – simply in the size of the space, the darkness I found quietening (and provided a kind of ‘cover’: a way of being non-selfconsciously alone with other people present); there was, I think, a kind of alteration of time and space that I can’t quite describe… or perhaps I don’t have the patience, now
mindful of having to leave my computer and get somewhere else soon.

What seems to be pushing itself into mind now is the difficulty of separating my experience of the filming from what else happened on that day. It has become blended with a slightly fraught day at work, the arrival of my in-laws and my buying two ice creams on the way home from the film, the first (ice-cream) of which tasted perhaps like the nicest thing I’ve ever eaten. (I’m not sure why; I’ve eaten lots of Mango Weiss Bars before.) It’s also bound up with sitting outside with you (L.), which now seems associated with things slowing down somehow. The banal point is, of course, that there’s no “pure phenomenology” in the way someone like Husserl would have wanted – that the frame blends into the artwork, blah blah blah blah. Perhaps a more interesting thing to think about it to reverse the priority here and ask why the ice creams and other things are now so vivid? Might it be because the experience of the work was strong enough “in itself” to frame the things that fell
around it, so that the “in itself” becomes hard to articulate, except insofar (and in the way) as it made my other “experiencings” on that day for me more vivid, more indelible. If so, why so? I don’t know.

Flemo.

PS. Two students just came into my office and grilled me about a graduate diploma that I don’t teach in and know nothing about. When I returned to this email I wondered why I hadn’t thought about that solitary globe in the film(ing) as representing perfect interrogation lighting?

Notes: Makes me remember the other events on that day.
Mafia light.