Ends Meet is an experimental film about clouds, represented within an impossible object, simultaneously analog and digital, still and moving.
Two photographs of cloudy skies were transferred onto 16mm colour film through a darkroom process allowing for direct printing of digital images onto photo-chemical film, preserving and bringing forth the unique characteristics of both materials. Each frame includes a small portion (around 47 pixels) of the original still image, and each horizontal line of this image becomes an animated sequence in the film.
The soundtrack is composed of excerpts from the intimate letters of Alfred Stieglitz and Georgia O’Keefe, sent between 1916 and 1929. In a style fluctuating between mundane and lyrical, the two artists provide lengthy descriptions of the weather conditions in various locations in the United States, depicting changing light and colour in great detail. The choice of this material relates to the iconic series Equivalents (1925-1934), and to my own interest in the place of affect and ambiguity within abstract or strictly formal modernist works.
Project supported by Sirius Arts Centre Cobh, Baltic Analog Lab Experimental Film School 2023, and L’Abominable-Navire Argo.
“For Stieglitz, The Steerage is a highly valued illustration of this autobiography. More than an illustration, it is an embodiment; that is, the photograph is imagined to contain the autobiography. The photograph is invested with a complex metonymic power, a power that transcends the perceptual and passes into the realm of affect. The photograph is believed to encode the totality of an experience, to stand as a phenomenological equivalent of Stieglitz-being-in-that-place. And yet this metonymy is so attenuated that it passes into metaphor. That is to say, Stieglitz’s reductivist compulsion is so extreme, his faith in the power of the image so intense, that he denies the iconic level of the image and makes his claim for meaning at the level of abstraction.” (in Photography Against the Grain, A. Sekula, 1984).
