Themes
“ With Frozen I wanted to explore two key themes: the nature
of unresolved loss and obsession, and the blur between perception and reality.”
“
The newspapers are full of stories of those who turn their despair at unexplained
disappearance of a loved one into an obsession. Witness Suzy Lamplugh’s
mother’s mission to prevent the same thing happening to other unescorted
young women and Julie Ward’s father’s decade-long crusade to
bring his daughter’s killers to justice.”
For Kath, particularly, perception and reality is a crucial concern. Everyone
around her tries to explain away the reality of something she believes
to be true. Steven tells her that the “rogue frame” she
discovers on CCTV footage of her sister’s last walk is a “random
magnetic blip”. Noyen explains it away with an inkblot test. Even
the coastguard claims she cannot have been out on the sands she knows she
has visited.
“
It is given to Noyen to articulate two other sub-themes in the film: Hope,
although generally celebrated as a positive emotion, can be very destructive.
Finally, even in today’s pragmatic, quantified world, mysteries exist
that are beyond our understanding.”
The Bay and the Liminal
“
I am interested in liminal places – borderline landscapes, the places
in-between. I live and work on that great seductive sprawl of estuary,
Morecambe Bay, which is literally the borderline between earth and sea.
The Bay inspires me to tell stories. I often wonder about the links between
the geographically liminal and the mentally liminal. The subliminal area
of consciousness, the sub-conscious, is the place where stories and dreams
are born. There is a definite but mysterious link between geographic and
mental liminality.”
“
Kath, in the film, is drawn to the places in-between. She returns again
and again to the blind spot between two cameras. Her visions take her to
an estuary landscape and an underwater place where the sky and air is still
visible. Increasingly, as the film progresses, she inhabits a borderline
world – somewhere in between past and present, living and dying,
waking and dreaming, reality and fantasy, sanity and madness.”
“
I’m also fascinated by John Ruskin’s notion of the 'pathetic
fallacy' – the attribution of human emotions to landscape.
Most of my short films, both narrative and experimental, have been inspired
by landscapes. The scripts I write are based around real places. Once I
have found the landscape, it tells me what story I will write.”
On Using Digital
“
Five digital video formats were used in the making of Frozen – High
Definition, DVCam, Mini-DV, Super VHS and digital stills work, treated
and worked on in Avid Xpress. Even though I worked for years, in 35mm and
16mm film as a film artist, I am beguiled by the freedoms that the digital
format offers.”
“
In particular, it rids me of that awful sense that hundreds of pounds are
ticking away every time the camera turns over! It’s a liberation
in terms of feeling able to experiment, to improvise and to invite the
cast to have another take until they are happy with their work.”
CCTV and the Video Landscape
“
The landscape and textures of the film and video image also fascinate me.
When Kath obsessively freeze frames, and enlarges the CCTV footage of her
sister’s last walk she is, like me, spellbound by the poetry of
the digital image blown up and breaking down into pixels.” “ I am also interested
in the way that chance, randomly framed, CCTV images of people before
they disappear forever can acquire, in retrospect, an
iconic status and meaning. Examples that spring to mind are the Bulger
toddler being led by the hand in a Liverpool mall and Damilola crossing
a deserted library square – both, unwittingly, minutes before
death.” |
