(Late) of The Primates Place
About
An autobiographical travelogue that bridges a period of six plus years and two coats, enfolding a series of personal and national misfortunes which find only indirect representation. Splayed across the film's terrain are a collection of portraits, several postcards, unfinished film, films or parts of films made by others, demonstrations, detritus, notes and paratactic formations. Four parts fall roughly under the headings the east, the middle, the borders. There are times when it appears caught in a vise of separate, even antagonistic, histories: public and private, natural and man-made, internal and external, material and imagined. As I was putting it together there were moments when the sequence resembled a highway; not the famous grand unfinished turnpike but the more commonplace site of static objects and bodies in motion, compounded of routine dangers, boredom, anthropology, advertising and the edges of the forest. I tried to pay off many debts here. Doing so meant resorting to a degree of the self to which I trust I will not have to return anytime soon. Dedicated to memory of Jack Arthur.
