Machine on Black Ground

(UK 2009, 16mm, 15 mins)

Machine on Black Ground combines archive material and original footage in a film which suggests both the construction of a utopian building and the world viewed from some kind of imagined subterranean space or vantage point.

The film switches from the poetic style of late post-war architectural documentary, via BBC OB coverage of Tangerine Dream live at Coventry Cathedral, to extended, immersive sequences of abstract stained glass. As the film develops it plays on two concurrent formal analogies; firstly, an equivalence between modernist stained glass and the film-strip and secondly, a suggestion that modernist sacred spaces are vast light modulators or projectors.

Currently in post-production