Gorge

This is my second time working with Ingmar Bergman's 1966 film, Persona, in relation to mountains. The first was in 2016, in a short essay film that I made from a collage of still and moving scenes that jumped between silence and sound, which evolved from attempting to mirror a disjuncture that I had faced within my practice, when I was, rather bizarrely, trying to build a mountain out of hundreds of baking tins that, inevitably, kept collapsing and consuming me.

Working with Persona, as a material, Gorge 2025 works with several seconds of Bergman's film, which I have flipped upside down and stretched. What emerges is a slow series of jumps between the individual frames of the celluloid film strip that Bergman used, before digital film was invented.

This intervention was intended as a sign of reflection. An attempt to shift the focus of attention outwards, towards the nature of existence, through an earth-shattering experience rather than any internal narrative.

The sound that I have introduced is the effect of stretching it alongside the image, which is a quote, read by myself, from page 8 of Nan Shepherd's The Living Mountain: a celebration of the Cairngorm Mountains of Scotland, published by Canongate Books, in 2008.