Terminus
Experimental film, 34 minutes
*To watch the film please email me a request for a private link.

Terminus is a farewell to the passing era, visualising a collective precognition that humanity is on the cusp of a great new and unknowable age. Expressed through the dichotomy of audio-visual splendour and poeticism, together with implied terror and dread, the film recollects the past, echoing the history of our divine yet flawed nature and bidding it farewell. Motionless people, fossilized furniture, rotting quinces and cracked plaster heads appear coherently commonplace in this idiosyncratic world. Rendered beautiful in their stillness and resembling ravishing Flemish still lives, what horrors would unleash if these scenes gained motion again?

Rendered speechless amid the precarity of 2020 and 2021, Terminus transcends the familiar verbal dialogue to create a different kind of narrative. Describing the unspeakable and expressing the indefinable through the sensory language, Terminus seeks to access the emotional space of personal associations, nostalgia and memory.

Oscillating between two and three dimensions of the unique tableau vivant cinematographic style, this static kinesis creates a sense of collapsed time with a slow and meditative pace of watching. Looking and thinking is the only definitive action in this film experienced by each viewer, allowing for a unique, individual and intimate experience. Within this still and reflective space, objects and people begin to operate as mnemonic devices reminiscent of the allegorical, surrealist and symbolist paintings. A falling leaf, a blinking child, the slippages and imperfections of the mobile phone camera betray the photographic stillness of the film, momentarily activating the halted clock. Experienced within a random, unmonumental and banal domestic setting, the surreal and the allegorical is rendered true.

Images above are film screen shots and installation documentation at Blindside Gallery by Nick Archer, 2021.