Jamie Limond
WIND-BATTERED Lewis has been home to a rich Gaelic history of folklore and storytelling for thousands of years, from the water spirit Seonaidh to the Blue Men of the Minch. Accounts of an da shealladh or the ‘second sight’, remain part of the island’s living culture even today.
For Glasgow artist Sarah Forrest such tales of prophetic vision offered a compelling research subject within her ongoing exploration of the slippery nature of fiction and reality, seeing and believing, and became the basis for her new film April, which will premiere at the Glasgow Film Festival on February 26.
Forrest’s films are by turns poetic, funny, eerie and banal – much like the world their words and images are trying to touch. The artist, who was born in Dundee in 1981, is the recipient of the prestigious Margaret Tait award. Named after the acclaimed Scottish experimental filmmaker and recognising innovation by Scotland-based artists who work with the moving image, the £10,000 commission allowed Forrest to dedicate a year to researching and making the piece, and to spread out into longer format filmmaking.
Inspiration for the resulting work, April, came from the artist’s mother, who grew up on Lewis hearing stories of deaths foretold and unexplained premonitions.
Researching the film there, Forrest attended a lecture by her aunt (who teaches at the University for the Highlands and Islands) on local folklore and superstitions. And while things like fairies and witches were consigned to the distant past, for the islanders second sight remained very much in the present.
“When she started speaking about second sight there was a definite sense of people wanting to talk, to tell stories”, Forrest recalls. “It seemed like everyone had an experience to draw from, however removed.”
Rather than investigating the veracity of these stories or the phenomena itself, Forrest wanted to evoke the sensual dislocation of actually experiencing such visions.
“It felt important to let the images work within the idea of a loop, allowing them to repeat”, she explains. “April doesn’t address the subject of second sight directly, but considers or tries to perform the feeling of being unsure of what you have seen or heard, placing a sequence in memory – within the film – over a new sequence that you are seeing.”
Similarly, although April is tied personally and indelibly to Lewis, the film is not constrained by it, leaving the specific location open for the viewer to inhabit.
“All of the images, apart from a few interior shots filmed after I got back, are of the island’s landscape,” she says. “They were so linked to my experience of being there. Inseparable. But during the editing process the images started to lose their specificity. The narration doesn’t name the location, other than being an island, and I wonder now if it could be mistaken for a lot of places.”
For Forrest the final film is just the tip of the iceberg, one possible iteration of her subject.
Being true to the experiences and difficulties in making work, even if loosing 90 percent of the research that goes into it, is very important for her.
“There is almost always a moment where I am completely overwhelmed by it” she describes, “a feeling of being lost in an overcomplicated and over-thought edit. Usually the way out for me is to stop and just tell the truth.”
Forrest’s commitment to avoiding falsity also extended to the film’s aesthetic. She was especially careful not to fall into the lyrical clichés that can accompany representations of the Scottish landscape.
“I was wary of romanticising the place,” she recalls. “I use a disco track in the film that plays out at the end which I think plays with or draws attention to this. The same images used to tell a slowly paced narrative feel completely different when set against disco’s rhythm and mood.”
In a previous work about her learning to throw pots, Forrest included a snippet from Unchained Melody – drawing smirks from anyone who’s seen the movie Ghost.
Such self-aware notes of humour frequently punctuate her work.
“There is a lot of humour that I think is linked to melancholy”, Forrest muses. “I take the process of making work so seriously, it consumes me. I get so lost in it.
“When I catch a glimpse of myself on an island speaking to no one for weeks, filming flies bouncing against window panes, writing lists of everything that’s definitely ‘real’ and definitely ‘not real’ because I want to think more precisely about what I mean when I say ‘fiction’ – in these moments I see myself from the side.”
“The absurdity of whatever it is that I am doing, and my own uncompromising sincerity when seen from a distance, is where the humour sits for me.”
April will premiere at the Glasgow Film Theatre on February 26 as part of Glasgow Film Festival, which runs February 21 - March 4
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