seven days
Chris Welsby
1974
20 min colour sound
16mm
The location for this film was by a small stream on the northern slopes of Mount Carningly in southwest Wales.
(…)
There are two aspects to the structure of this film. i) The camera motion is mechanistic; time is accurately calibrated in frames, seconds, and minutes, and space is organized according to geometric principals which govern the operation of the Equatorial Stand. ii) The in-camera editing, however, is not at all mechanistic and is governed by the unpredictable nature of the weather: by the amount of cloud cover, which varied from day to day and by the speed of the clouds drifting across the sky, which depended on the strength of the wind. The final shape of the film is consequently a product of the interaction between the predictable mechanistic nature of technology and the chance-like qualities of the natural world.
Seven Days invites the viewer to contemplate the complex relationship between the structures we invent in order to observe the natural world and the structure we perceive as a result of those observations. The resulting sequences of images suggest a relationship between technology and nature based on principles other than exploitation and domination.
in http://www.luxonline.org.uk/artists/chris_welsby/seven_days.html
