Output details

Ivul, feature film, gallery installation, gallery performance, gallery exhibition

Ivul extends my ongoing investigation into experimental narrative feature-film making within the context of landscape and autobiography. It continues the theme of This Filthy Earth but here the story is set above ground, inspired by Tarzan, Robin Hood and my own experiences as a child of hiding up trees from a tyrannical father. First commissioned by BBC Scotland as a feature-length script called Off Ground He, it continues a body of work entitled The Land Work Trilogy in which I wanted to develop three experimental narratives around themes from Emile Zola’s La Terre. It also extends my research into ‘expanded cinematic language’, which was initially undertaken through an AHRC project, In The Wake Of A Deadad (2003–6).

This research explores the interface between the cinema and the gallery, a rich vein that I feel is overlooked by both programmers and curators: work either belongs in the black box, or the white cube, and rarely exists in both at once. This has led me to develop a theory around ‘spillage’: the idea is that various outcomes can all spill out of the same source or core idea, manifesting themselves as a series of outputs with clearly defined or connected forms and narratives. Work is adjusted or re-worked to become site-specific, ‘expanded’ and ‘deconstructed’. Ivul has been shown in a range of formats as well as the original feature film and forms a key part of this experiment.

The script was developed through BBC Scotland, BBC, Film Council and Tall Stories and the film was produced through Sciapode, Box Productions, TSR – SRG SSR, Le Fresnoy with the participation of Cinécinéma and support from L’Office fédéral de la culture (DFI), Suisse, La Région Aquitaine, La Région Midi-Pyrénées, Le Centre National de la Cinématographie, Screen South, and Screen Archive South East.