Output details

Midnight, Mid-Atlantic

The single screen video ‘midnight, mid-Atlantic…’, the first in a developing trilogy, depicts a Researcher’s search for clues to a mystery surrounding a fictive movie director’s unreleased epic, entitled ‘Keflavik’. By initially exploiting the ‘Ken Burns’ and ‘travelogue’ documentary forms, the film’s visual and narrative trajectory shifts into the realm of magical realism, mystery and science fiction – mirroring the Researcher’s quest through Iceland’s landscape.

This piece examines the slippery nature of truth through the modes of address of document and fiction, by challenging viewers’ perception of how the authoritative ‘voice’ can write and/or re-write a cultural history. ‘midnight, mid-Atlantic’ distils many aspects of Ganley's artistic practice, and follows from earlier research exposing – through didactic text and spoken word – the fractious relationship between images and their institutionally presented context. This promoted new approaches that integrated content and form more reflexively, resulting in the creation of the central character of the Researcher, who acts as a kind of cipher between the ‘authoritative voice’ and the viewer. It also enabled working in feature-length narrative form.

This work aims to inform future research in the area and methodology of the film-essay form, and the potential for subsequent outputs exploring the continuing extrapolation of the fictive movie director’s work interwoven with historical archival research.

The video was screened at Testsite, Austin, (USA) in 2009. This coincided with the inclusion of the work in the group exhibition ‘I am not so different’ at Art Palace, Austin (USA).