Carriage

Suess, Eleanor [Artist] (2017) Carriage. (Artists' Film).

Abstract

Suess's film Carriage, and it's shorter version Parallel Carriage, use iPhone footage, quickly captured as an immediate response to a fleeting spatiotemporal condition, to explore ways of expressing the uncanny nature of commuters' experience as two trains perform their nocturnal parallel dance. The process of filmmaking translates experienced space to filmic space, providing the film's viewer an experience which is analogical to the original uncanny experience from which the footage was recorded. Drawing on her unique transdisciplinary positon as architect and artist filmmaker, Suess's filmmaking methodology borrows a contextually responsive, iterative and reflective process from architectural design. Using digital editing and effects, Suess uncovers and extends qualities embedded in the raw footage, manipulating and transforming them to heighten their affect. Image and sound are slowed, preserving and amplifying the eerie quality of the transitory experience. Individual train windows are extracted and magnified, these pools of light in a black void offering portals into another, parallel world. The slowed footage makes the occupants of those carriages more individually distinct, holding these moments - without any provided narrative structure the half-formed images of the inhabitants of that other carriage take on their own narrative interpretation, and then are lost, into the night. Informed by the use of repetition in structural film, Suess's film builds slowly, from individual windows, to a jumbled overlay (utilising 28 superimposed video and audio tracks) where windows have transformed to screens. The spaces seen through each window/screen become layered, individual "characters" recognised, their journey across the screen, and through the night, repeated. The film's coda reconnects the separate windows, the train carriage presenting the unified space in which all of the unknown, but now familiar, characters reside.

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