ISOLATION DREAMING
April 2020
Blackmans Bay, Tasmania
Filmed and edited by Ilona Schneider
Music by Oliver Gathercole
16mm BW film
A call from the Artist Film Workshop (AFW) in Melbourne, during the Covid 19 Pandemic under the title 'Window'.
One day you wake up in the morning and you realise that this is it. Nowhere to go, the whole world is shut down by a pandemic. Everything changed. Time has stopped. What was important yesterday, is meaningless today. Stuck behind the windows of my house, I began to dream. Looking around, walking and pacing the house, discovering the familiar, the home in which I live. Familiarity in reflection. Memories interfere and the imagination keeps flowing. In- and out-side appear in layers on reflective surfaces. Double exposures allow for translucent observations. None of these double exposures where exactly planned. They are created by the imagination of what is on the film already. It is a blind date. The immediate landscape in the reflections are overlapping. Looking out, the birds dance on powerlines and antennas outside my windows, like musical notes on and between the lines, creating a score on their own. They entertain me on the inside. Playing, twittering, and changing their positions. They are free, with wings given by nature, they come and go, flying through the air, and in my dream I sing their song. All of a sudden, time has a different meaning. The interior landscape become even more important to our sense of being. The past becomes a memory, and the present is all there is.
The images are underwritten by a melancholic rhythm. Composed by Hobart musician Oliver Gathercole. I sent Oliver the film by email, without sound, and asked him, if he would be interested to compose a piano piece for the film. I mentioned to him that this film is about melancholy, loss, longing, and nostalgia. After a couple of versions we concluded with this piece called Melancholy. Melancholy, a feeling of sadness and longing. Film as well as music are both bound by time. They complement each other. Spacing and timing are the fundamental elements of both mediums. Creating a film is like composing a piece of music. Analogue film is imprinted time. They are stills on a physical film, put into a time frame, which create a piece of harmony. Like music, they are not bound to words or descriptions. They exist through the experience of the viewer and listener. He cannot separate the individual notes or images but experiences the work as a whole.
