Output details

I first saw the light.

Silent experimental documentary shot on Super 16mm with inter-titles that reproduce Merrick text; 12mins

I first saw the light is a silent short film commissioned by South London Gallery (2012) which also committed match funding to the project alongside Kingston University (3.5K). The film focuses on the two artefacts which constitute Joseph Carey Merrick’s surviving archive, one of which is a little known two-page autobiography sold to those who attended public exhibitions of Merrick as The Elephant Man in Victorian London. The text, displayed as intermittent inter-titles in the film, is coupled with stark close-ups and intimately filmed sequences of the second artefact, a model church Merrick built, now sealed within a protective glass and ebony container at Royal London Hospital.

A stark reminder of Merrick’s humanity and determination in the face of extreme adversity, Warnell’s work avoids the clichés of conventional documentary/biographical filmmaking through the mobilisation of an archive, reanimated through cinematic mediation. Consequently, Merrick’s model church is imbued with the qualities of an apparition and the film itself becomes a haunting representation of this poignant, fragile artefact. Warnell’s cinematic approach also serves as a counterpoint to David Lynch’s feature film, in which the model’s construction, literally dramatized and exaggerated, functions as a central motif and metaphor for Merrick’s psychological and emotional fluctuations. In taking an extraordinary character and his circumstances as points of departure, Warnell’s film brings objects (artefacts) bodily deformities and film’s materiality into a reconfigured shared proximity.

Following a Locarno International Film Festival screening (Aug. 2012) Warnell collaborated with curator Anne-Sophie Dinant at South London Gallery. Here the film was devised as a continuous looped installation, to emphasise an apparition-like, spectral continuity. The stripping back of the Gallery space to reveal its Victorian foundations created a temporal proximity which was echoed in the final installation of the work onsite (Nov. 2012). Four additional international screenings are referenced in accompanying portfolio.