John Barlow / 'Coastal Drift' / 2017 / Anamorphic 16mm / Colour / Sound / Duration: 10 min., 16 sec.
Narrator - Colin Fitzgerald
Camera / Sound / Writing / Editing - John Barlow
Assistant Camera - David Barlow
Original Music - Sam Shaw
Film Processing & Scanning - idalies
Screenings & Awards:
Crossing the Screen International Film Festival (2017, UK)
Winter Gardens Film Festival (2019, UK) (Winner)
'Coastal Drift' explores the weather-beaten, yet resilient, seafront of Hastings, a once thriving resort town on England's southeast coast.
Opening with a series of colour saturated postcard images of the town from the 1960s and 1970s, after an interlude of black and white footage of a winter storm the viewer is transported forward in time to Hastings in 2016. Heightened by the monologue of the unseen narrator, traces of the past intertwine with the physical environment of the present, evoking a sense that the Hastings of today is haunted by memories of its halcyon days. The use of anamorphic 16mm (shot with a 1975 camera and an old projector lens from a closed cinema in New Orleans), the wide 2.76:1 ratio, the opening music theme, and the typography of the titles, all serve to further frame the present day in relation to the 1960s and 1970s.
