Hannah Starkey: reconstructed scenes from everyday life
"Using actors within carefully considered settings, Hannah Starkey's photographs reconstruct scenes from everyday life with the concentrated stylisation of film. Starkey's images picture women engaged in regular routines such as loitering in the street, sitting in cafes, or passively shopping. Starkey captures these generic 'in between' moments of daily life with a sense of relational detachment. Her still images operate as discomforting 'pauses'; where the banality of existence is freeze-framed in crisis point, creating reflective instances of inner contemplation, isolation, and conflicting emotion.
Through the staging of her scenes, Starkey's images evoke suggestive narratives through their appropriation of cultural templates: issues of class, race, gender, and identity are implied through the physical appearance of her models or places. Adopting the devices of filmography, Starkey's images are intensified with a pervasive voyeuristic intrusion, framing moments of intimacy for unapologetic consumption. Starkey often uses composition to heighten this sense of personal and emotional disconnection, with arrangements of lone figures separated from a group, or segregated with metaphoric physical divides such as tables or mirrors.
Often titling her work as Untitled, followed by a generalised date of creation, her photographs parallel the interconnected vagueness of memory, recalling suggestions of events and emotions without fixed location or context. Her work presents a platform where fiction and reality are blurred, illustrating the gap between personal fragility and social construction, and merging the experiences of strangers with our own."
(Saatchi Gallery)
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
A Game with No Rules: rear projected Kiwi short film melodrama
"A trio of future Kiwi screen stars smoke, smoulder, steal - and worse - in Scott Reynolds' serpentine short noir. Kane (Marton Csokas) and his Zambesi-clad woman on the side (Danielle Cormack) set about ripping off Kane’s rich wife (Jennifer Ward-Lealand) with bloody results. Writer/director Scott Reynolds and longtime partner in crime, cinematographer Simon Raby, serve notice of their talents - and inspirations - with heady lighting, deliberately shonky back projection, and opening titles right out of Hitchcock [Saul Bass inspired]. Muso Greg Johnson supplies the horns."
(NZ On Screen)
Fig.1 Scott Reynolds/Zee Films (1994), "A Game with No Rules" Aotearoa New Zealand, 35mm 16 minutes.
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
CINEMA ESSAY: SHALLOW FOCUS, DEEP FOCUS, TRACKING SHOT, ESTABLISHING SHOT
Majestic Micro Movies: Lloyd Fonvielle, James Lester, Kendra Elliot, Joe Griffin and Jae Song.
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
The Six Million Dollar Man: the evolution of an iconic title sequence
"The Six Million Dollar Man started off as a novel by [Martin Caidin] called Cyborg, but over the course of its development from book to movie to TV show, it not only changed name, it changed tone.
The book is essentially a thriller that tries to ground itself in reality as much as possible to make Steve Austin a super-spy. Sure he has a bionics left arm (yes, bionics in the book, not bionic), bionics legs and bionics eye. But he can't feel anything in his bionics limbs and his bionics eye won't let him see, only take pictures. And sure, he's very strong, but when he kicks a golf ball, that bionics toe of his still gets crushed by the impact.
It was bionics, but still tried to be relatively aware of the laws of physics and what was practical."
(The Medium is Not Enough TV blog, 9 July 2010)
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
