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Experimental Film: Mustek Metra

Through Mustek Metra, Sidell felt he was able to compound and consolidate his practice as an experimental filmmaker. His long-standing preoccupation with the subject, materials, processes and aesthetics of re-presentation and replication were finally combined in a single-screen work made for cinema.

The interest in the tension between object and image, clear in his canvas-based work, evolved into a study of the physical properties and processes that constitute the cinematic experience: celluloid, glass, light and projection. By extension, this developed into an awareness of a more conceptual projection – that of the viewer responding to images by projecting their own thoughts, feelings and desires back on to the very same screen that presents them, almost to complete the experience - the very essence of cinema. Despite this new awareness of the medium’s own means, Mustek Metra remains an escapist fantasy, rather than a continuation of the tradition of structuralist experimental film, referring only to its apparatus.

Evolving from a practice of drawing, collage, photography, painting and video installation, two key strands of Sidell’s research were combined through Mustek Metra. Firstly, he adopted a very painterly – almost formalist – approach, to the point of developing equivalent techniques of breaking and remaking the image, much like his canvas-based work. Secondly, a more conceptual manifestation of the obsession with cyclical, layered re-presentation (and subsequent degeneration) of images, but one in which the viewer is complicit.