Time . Distance . Duration
This installation, located at studio 1 Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Melbourne, explored the time/space relations depicted in the project titled Motel: a triptych of short films by the interdisciplinary team David Carlin, Paul Ritchard, Christine Rogers, Anthony Fryatt and Roger Kemp.
One of the aims of the Motel project has been to explore the creative potential of interdisciplinary collaboration; for the film-makers, working with interior designers rather than a specialist film production designer, as would usually be the case, has provoked a challenge to the way the film scripts have been developed and interpreted before the film triptych was shot, and enabled fresh perspectives on key aesthetic and stylistic production issues. The distinct conceptual approach the interior designers bring to the concept of interior, in particular, has meant that the process of visualizing the film’s settings has expanded into a dialogue as to how this idea of interior can be brought to bear on the narrative themes of intimate connection and distance that run through the triptych.
For the interior designers, working in the hitherto unfamiliar realm of film production has prompted new perspectives on the idea of interior that is by definition central to their practice and research. These are; the use and production of narrative in forming interiors, the camera as a spatial mediator, the relation between interior and image, and the implication of time, duration and distance in interior environments.
Within the 3 films time is explored through ideas of time travel, duration, extension and compression. Distance is a significant driver in the work considering spatial relations between intimacy to infinity.
The installation comprised: Film shorts, prints of stills, scripts, diagrams and drawings, models, video cameras, television monitors, film props and partial set installations. It investigated the various media based spaces defined as imagination space, set space, camera space and film/screen space.