23M 2000 filmed on 16mm and Dvcam mastered to Digibeta

FROM SHOWDOWN TO SLOWDOWN

COMMENTS FROM AN AUDIENCE IN OBERHAUSEN
Sarah Miles an English director knows how to guide someone’s attention in a unique way. Based on her influence interesting and fascinating thought processes get in swing.      Taxi driver at Oberhausen 

‘I returned to the West country where I grew up looking for a sixteen year old girl to look into a dream’

The western is a genre of long looks usually precipitated by a remotely sensed violent action…but what if the frontier the open spaces were not an invitation to gunplay but to stillness and wonder.

SHOOTING I shot the first part of the film myself on dvcam and the second part is shot on 16mm with a cameraman.

In 2000 Picture This and South West Media Development Agency commissioned Magnificent Ray as part of Remote Sensing: Outlook and Observation in collaboration with Spacex Gallery and Prema.

Ray explores the western by focusing on gender relations in a confluence of dream movie genre and everyday life. Filmed on location in Bridport and Portland in West Dorset, and featuring locals as extras and principal players, Florence encounters Ray a subtle souled girl slipping into forgetfulness. Their journey from showdown to slowdown explores the nature of dreams whilst sensing a narrative. Florence and Ray….Florence Ray.

Premiere Spacex Selected festivals Oberhausen Wand 5 Stuttgart Impakt Brief Encounters Bristol UK.

Virginia Woolf

CREDITS
CAMERA NICK GORDON SMITH
EDITOR JAMES WHITEHORN
CAST KITTY BEAMISH
GEORGIA PLATT
MAX EMBLEM

Production UK
A  world of emotional and sensory experience eddying endlessly in atmosphere of the mind in twilit regions of memory where past and present blur and complement each other.

‘life is mysterious  a luminous halo a semi transparent envelope surrounding us from beginning to end consciousness is the end.’

‘a shock will access the reality behind the appearance,’

Virginia Woolf

Dreamwork cleansing the wound

The appeal of the film is certainly supported by the magic of the girls and women in the film. There is a mood of beginning and ending and of melancholia maybe melancholia of a beauty in being lost.

I don’t know, but the image of a girl living in a lost place but still being somehow outstanding of that in terms of beauty of charms and sensitivity that one might see as an opposition to the conditions she is living in.

For me it is a strong image because there is no negation in all that and in this melancholic feeling.  Under the weight of lostness, memory, false conditions there is love in it.

I think this is quite unusual.    Florian Baudrexel artist

The notebook film is a preparatory essay for another film to come, as well as a kind of foretaste to convince producers to finance the future film. It might typically feature the casting of actors, rehearsals with actors or technicians, exploration of locations, the testing out of ideas and possible narratives, or more general reflections from the director or other members of the team. In short, the film becomes an audiovisual “notebook” in which a future work is sketched out, and in that perspective these films exemplify one of the key features of the essay film, which is to show us the creative process of film-making.

Muriel Temple