By Morag Colquhoun, Artes Mundi Live Guide
A pair of bare feet hang in a tree at a certain point in Adrian Paci's film, Per Speculum.
When I first saw this, I found it unsettling. It reminded me of a newspaper image from (I think) the Bosnian conflict: the feet of a young woman who had (presumably) hung herself in a tree.Other viewers have been troubled by the hanging feet. One woman rushed to move her grandchildren away from the film. She did not know what was going to happen but she was worried that they were about to be exposed to something awful.
If she had stayed, she would have seen that the hanging feet merely belonged to a child sitting in the leafy branches of an English parkland tree. In the film, several children are sitting in the tree and using broken pieces of mirror to reflect sunlight towards the viewer.
Earlier in the film, we gradually become aware that the children standing before us are not 'real'. As the camera moves backwards, we realise that we are watching the children's reflection in a large mirror. One of the children, a boy, takes a catapult out of his pocket and shatters the mirror.
Suddenly we are aware of a double illusion: the mirror's reflection and the illusion of film.
In the later scene when the children use the broken mirror to reflect the sun's rays, the choice of 35mm film rather than video helps us to remember that the light in our eyes is not actual sunlight but the cinematic illusion of projected light. In the darkened room of the gallery, the projector stands in for the sun. The noisy whirring of the projector and the lines and specks on the degraded film help to break the illusion.
In Per Speculum, the children play in and with the growth and energies of nature but their actions and their ambiguous expressions disrupt a simple reading of the artwork.
Magical: unsettling.
Natural: artifical.
Redemptive: illusionary.
Paci's film is laden with such ambiguity and the effect is both beautiful and powerful.
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