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Time and duration are key concerns of many of the films featured, and part of the re-claimed subject of film by the avant-garde (from Andy Warhol to Chantel Akerman). The most powerful and arresting treatment of time and duration is River Yar (William Raban & Chris Welsby, 1972). This film engages with landscape and environment, themes expanded upon in Chris Welsby’s repeated attempts to create a harmony between natural or organic cycles and the mechanics and cycles involved in film. He states his wish is to create a synthesis between these two modes, mechanical and natural (what he terms intellectual and organic) – from Wind Vane (Chris Welsby, 1972), where the camera is mounted on a wind directed tripod, to Forest Bay II (Chris Welsby, 1973), where the cycle of the tide is set against the time-lapse cycle of the revolving camera. River Yar is a lengthy study of duration and cycles, employing time-lapse photography (Willam Raban pioneered this technique at the Co-op with other films like Broad Walk [1972]) and two-screen projection (a whole programme, ‘Two Screen-Films,’ is dedicated to films that employ two 16mm projectors, projecting side by side onto the screen.)
River Yar employs time-lapse photography to accelerate 24 hrs to last only one minute. From a fixed vantage point, we watch an open landscape – distant hills, an estuary on the left of the screen, a meadow on the right – speed from one dawn to the next. (The sound is recorded at 4 points in the day for 15 secs.) The day’s cycle, depicted on one screen – the sun rising, the early mist, the tide rising and falling, the people and animals in the field, workers on the bank – is juxtaposed by a ‘real-time dawn’ on the other screen. This juxtaposition is hard to perceive, as the light of dawn gradually illuminates the screen. The imperceptible pace of the ‘real time’ dawn is mesmerising in its stillness, next to the rapid progress of the day on the other screen. River Yar is an utterly moving and poignant evocation of time, the seasons, and cycles of day and night, as well as a successful experiment in drawing one to reflect on the time spent recording the footage and the time spent watching it. This engagement in the representation of time in film and in the process of viewing film is no more powerfully evocated than here. Tremendous.
The fascination with landscape and the ethereality of time is also explored in Sheet (Ian Breakwell & Mike Leggett, 1970). Here the spectator’s eye is focused by the insertion of a white sheet in the image. Sheet, which is one of the few films featured in the season that explores London’s streets and buildings at that time, succeeds in leading the viewer to engage with place, atmosphere and duration. In John Smith’s slightly uncharacteristic but not unaccomplished film Leading Light (1975) he employs ‘time lapse’ and ‘real time’ photography to follow sunlight around his room, and so explores the confines of just four walls “by showing how many rooms the camera can make from just one.” (A.L.)
in http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/02/21/shoot_shoot_shoot.html
