 | |||||
 |
|||||
|
Stephen Sutcliffe
Come to the Edge 2003, DVD, 1 min 49 sec
Stephen Sutcliffe’s two films take poems as their starting points. Transformations is based on the Thomas Hardy poem of the same title. Hardy draws attention to the cycles of death and rebirth that are ever present in the countryside. He describes a man his grandfather knew and his wife, and a ‘fair girl’, who, in a process of organic renewal, have been transformed into trees and flowers:
...they are not underground
But as nerves and veins abound In the growths of upper air...
Come to the Edge uses a recording of the poet Christopher Logue reciting a poem originally written in 1968:
Come to the edge.
We might fall. Come to the edge. It’s too high! COME TO THE EDGE! And they came, and we pushed, And they flew. The poem is combined with video footage shot in a 6th form common room. In the footage a good-humoured scene is suddenly transformed into something altogether more sinister as the group of schoolboys enact a ritual humiliation upon a seemingly older, mustachioed boy. Sutcliffe has an extensive archive of audio and video recordings. In constructing these films he began with the soundtrack and then, through a process of association, added imagery, sometimes also later adding music. The meshing of soundtrack and visuals was determined by matching a key moment in each to the other; thus, in Come to the Edge, the moment the poet screams the title is aligned to the cry of the boy under attack. However, the relationships Sutcliffe establishes in this way are complex and not simply illustrative. While in Transformations the imagery confirms the surreal pastoralism of Hardy’s poem in Come to the Edge a profound disjunction between image and soundtrack is created – between Logue’s inspirational invocation of risk and the unsettling violence of the film – leading to a profound reassessment of the meaning of both.
Stephen Sutcliffe - Biography | | | ||
enlarge
