A Would-be Wasted Youth

Watching a variety of underground surrealist short films in a former horse hospital hosted by the one-time PA to Siouxsie & the Banshees is the sort of thing I should have been doing when I was 20, not knocking 50, but back then I wouldn't have been able to have been invited to such an event by my friend Ms DarkMorte who has known all these people for ages. I thought that perhaps the Horse Hospital's name was just macabre whimsy, but no, that's exactly what the late-18th century building was, as revealed by the sluice-channels cut into the gallery floor (not that different from my garage, which used to be a stable). 

I was most taken by the first of the films, Eliott Edge's Hello Sexy Curse which despite its name is very un-sexy indeed. It's an attempt to create a horror movie without narrative or explicit events, using the mere force of sound and vision. For twenty minutes, strange shapes resolve themselves into images you just begin to recognise when they disappear, there are moments when the screen goes dark, and sound or silence move across the visual display in an apparently unconnected progress but one which is in fact carefully composed to unsettle. It works very well. It's also quite exhausting, partly because of the tense worry of what might be coming next (at one point a woman's eye comes into view together with a long, flat object which might be a sword, and you think it's going to go all Un Chien Andalou but are relieved when it doesn't), and partly because the human brain being what it is you are continually straining to make logical sense of what you are seeing even while telling yourself that there is no narrative to be grasped, and your grey cells shouldn't really be bothering themselves unnecessarily. And that was probably a metaphor for my younger days, too.