Screenings: BFI London Film Festival 2015 — Experiments In Cinema 2015 — Analogue Recurring 2015
Phi Phenomenon 2 is a 100ft restaging of Morgan Fisher’s 1968 film Phi Phenomenon. Shot on out-of-date stock, and featuring a clock fortuitously found on ebay, the film is the result of multiple experiments with hand processing in a rewind tank. Fisher's film adresses the fact that, as with the phi phenomenon, we see movement in film where no actual movement is presented to the eye. All the while he invites us to try to see the movement of a minute-hand which moves too slowly to be apprehended. To grapple with movement here is to grapple with both speed and transparency, and in this remake the transparency of the apparatus is foregone so that the slow speed of the minute-hand must compete with the fast and furious activity of the animated artefacts rattling through the projector to film's own beat. The materiality of film is brought to the fore in Phi Phenomenon 2 to show that the strip of film bearing the clock's image is moving and it is moving fast. |