Gareth Evans Writes about Eelyn Lee's new Moving Image Work
Left: Gareth Evans during the lab / Right: Filming during the lab
Last week writer, editor, producer, presenter and programmer, Gareth Evans visited the Monster Lab, an experimental 5-day process led by Eelyn Lee to find new ways of making improvised film. Tonight he will be hosting a conversation with Eelyn Lee and her team of collaborators about their experiences, ideas and reflections in the Barbican Cinema 2. Read his own thoughts on their adventures in to devised filmmaking in this poignant and beautifully written guest blog. Here's an extract:
'.... Eelyn Lee and her Pit Lab ensemble are into their fourth day when I drop by, stacking up the hours without weather like their constantly shifting cardboard set, in freighted ventilation, cabled glow, a black walled box for 18, but strangely self-sufficient and like some ‘lord of the flies’ outcrop, seeming to run by its own unspoken rules and rituals, everyone getting on with something, and those who seem least active at a given moment still holding microphones on high stems, waiting for voices but maybe conjuring them too, sonic priestesses, aural conductors of the subterranean air....
...It’s about strangers in town (think Clint, Kitano, Kasper Hauser; think Dogville and the dunes of Kobo Abe). It’s about upheaval in the estuary, about monsters and the triggers they drag in with them, like a net full of old explosives just waiting to go off. It’s about work and love, and conflict and then death; but mostly it’s about the fear that comes from meeting with the ‘other’, from the monsters that we make through instinct and such ignorance; and it takes place in the estuary that took us on its boats to Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, that gifted us the toothsome Count, that traffics migrants in, blind with terror in some sealed container. In short, it’s about now, and now again, and then again some more...'
Read the full article here
