Circumambulations2018

MADE WITH ANDREW RANVILLE 

A side-by-side dual-projection film built from two 16mm camera rolls that loop and interface, dialogue and diverge. The rolls were shot on Rabbit Island, a remote 91-acre wilderness located in Lake Superior, the largest freshwater lake in the world. Mapping the circumference of the island (9,504 ft.) to the length of a standard camera roll (4000 frames), the filmmakers walked the island's coast in opposite directions on subsequent days, exposing a single frame of film roughly every 2.376 feet. When projected side-by-side, the resulting films combine to form an alternative representation of the island, collapsing its dense interior and evoking a shifting land mass defined by a constantly fluctuating border of water and stone. An original score by Roarke Menzies accompanies the projection, included as a digital file. Working entirely with field recordings taken on the island, Menzies looped, overlaid, and played back selections of the recordings at different speeds, altering and re-recording these selections in his studio to poetically retrace the filmmakers' steps through time, equipment, and multiple material transfers. 

"The film projections embody points of touching and separation of bodies... Circumambulations uses the double projection format to cut out the body. An island is being explored by its perimetter, by the edge of it, that which defines it as a body, separate from another. The body should be between two projections, but it is not. This doubly articulates the feeling of a line, a trace between two projected images, around an island, we can not see." - Katherine Bauer, 2019 Lausanne Underground Film & Music Festival programme