SHU (Blue Hour Lullaby)

2002/2008
Film/Video Installation

12:30 minutes
High Definition Video HDV
Soundtracks optional

A remote prison in the desert during the blue hour. The compound prepares for the night, the lights are gradually switched on. Simultaneously to the illuminating on the ground approaching aircraft lights appear in the evening sky, one after the other, slowly accumulating, hovering, floating.

The filmed prison is the California Correctional Institution (CCI) in the Mojave Desert. The CCI is one of four prisons in California providing the infamous SHU: „Security Housing Unit“ = „Level IV, but designed to provide maximum coverage“, - meaning: „Solitary Confinement“, partly as life sentence. SHU/Solitary Confinement is the most severe penalty in US American criminal law after Condemned (Death Penalty). In 1998 Amnesty International classified SHU/Solitary Confinement as „Torture“.

The prison footage was filmed in High Definition HD in 2004. The lights in the sky are digitally composed of hundreds of single airplanes arriving in flight corridors during the blue hour, filmed on DV from 2002 until 2005 at the airports of Los Angeles, Frankfurt, London, New York.

SHU (Blue Hour Lullaby) was partly inspired by the famous Walt Disney Movie Logo of Sleeping Beauty Castle and Stars circling it. Further, its reference encompasses an eclectic line up of classic film topics as Science Fiction and War of the Worlds, but also the Roadmovie motif, Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point, Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, Jackson Pollock’s Drip Paintings, Van Gogh’s Arles series, and the tradition of the German Romantic landscape painting.

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Team:

Visual FX & Postproduction:
Matthias Neuenhofer

Camera:
Philipp Lachenmann
May Rigler

Soundtracks:
Soundtrack 1 (Desert) Gerriet K. Sharma
Soundtrack 2 (Music) Wolfgang Voigt/Kompakt Label Köln Soundtrack 3 (Silent)

Soundmix:
Alexander Peterhaensel

Thanks to:
Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI), Los Angeles
Matthew Coolidge
Steve Rowell
Betty Freeman