Landfall

Maybury, P. (2020) Landfall. Dual channel digital video with dual stereo sound. duration: 1:00:00.

Landfall (2020) a dual-screen, dual-stereo film installation of one hour duration ostensibly comprises documentary or observational footage shot in the Republic of Ireland over the period 2012–19. The material was recorded by me using a DSLR camera, in a Direct Cinema tradition (single camera, using only available light). The footage consists primarily of tripod shots with panning, zooming and varying focus-points, and a small element of hand-held footage. Exceptionally, two sequences were recorded using a mobile phone camera. The camerawork intermittently makes itself conspicuous through abrupt movement, or focus-finding, adding a self-reflexive element. In contrast, much of the soundtrack is heavily processed in post-production using Ableton Live software – where I combined direct sound (recorded either in-camera or using an additional audio recorder); sound generated using analogue synthesizers; Foley techniques; and field recordings from non-contiguous sources. Often there is no actual correlation between sound and image as the sound has been entirely synthesized, but the viewer imposes one. The film is a succession of vignettes which combine to form interrelated observations on the island of Ireland as a set of conditions – geographical, political, ideological – with emergent themes of contested ground, boundaries, containment, resources, energy, systems, and structures. Chronology and geography are disrupted, thus correspondences across the material are explored through sequence and juxtaposition and recurring motifs or themes.