LIDF

The Free Word Centre was packed for the second half of tonight’s shorts and second showing of London Perambulator, which was shown last Saturday at The Hub during ‘The Invisible City’ day. The preceding shorts, ‘LoopLoop’ from Canada and ‘Surveillance of a Camp in Spring’ from Taiwan, were perfectly chosen to create a dialogue between the three films of forgotten, liminal spaces. ‘LoopLoop’ loops sliced images viewed from trains to a clunking, rhythmic train-track soundtrack, using animation and almost optical-illusion to create an experience something any commuter will be familiar with. The overall effect is pleasing and clever, despite also, as perhaps an afterthought, creating a sense of isolation for the viewer with a predominance of images of darkened windows and barred doors. The audience responded very well however, and quickly we were watching ‘Surveillance of a Camp in Spring’, a slightly longer piece and just as experimental as ‘LoopLoop’; split-screened sections of ‘surveillance’ tape of natural images were slotted into a black screen in time to a charming piece of Beethoven, interrupted by radio noise. There was an element of humour to the split screened images – at times half a cat floated above its other half, or birds faced off against eachother – which was underscored by unnerving scenes of racist behaviour among teenage visitors to the Camp, Auchwitz, that was challenged by a camera-wielding voice.

Together with ‘London Perambulator’, discussed earlier this week, the films questioned the presence of places and spaces in our lives.The Panel discussion afterwards, chaired by Patrick Hazard, the Director of the Festival, with John Rogers, Nick Papadimitriou, and some guest speakers familiar with the concept of Deep Topography/Psychogeography, discussed the loss of spaces where surveillance couldn’t stop you going about your business “in an unregulated fashion”, and although Nick himself said he didn’t really care about surveillance and the rules of boundary lines as such, even in this age where looking through railway line fences seems to be suspicious (he was once questioned by police after peering onto sidings), he recognised that some felt this was a problem. Yet, this ironically seems to protect some of the overlooked spaces he finds so special, this idea that most wouldn’t go beyond the set ‘legal’ boundaries – the idea of ‘Psychogeography’ appeared to be killed off when it was written about in academic journals and became less ‘hidden’. Other topics included what of our modern landscapes Wordsworth would have found inspiring and poetic were he living today, having been inspired by what were wild and ‘other’ landscapes that are now framed by him for us as the ideal, and the fact that human involvement with place seems to define it; John Rogers admitted he was out to make a deep topographical film before he realised it seemed to be Nick that was the more interesting of his two subjects, and is now again involved in creating a ‘portrait’ piece as his next project. Seeing ‘London Perambulator’ in this additional Panel and Accompaniment setting, it was worth another viewing.