Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight
2009
16 mm double projection
Colour, sound
7.09 min
Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight encapsulates the manner in which ancient mythology foreshadows and calls forth modern society. A frieze of Roman marble serves as the inspiration for a staged play; a choreographed sequence involving five actors.
The film stages the collision of ancient myth and modern dance through a split screen. One side of the screen slowly roves over a Roman frieze depicting the myth of Medea. Running parallel on the adjacent side of the screen, actors perform an avant-garde inspired dance, responding directly to the gestures and actions depicted in the aforementioned frieze. These simultaneous streams of film sharing the screen create a synchronicity between past and present, overlapping different temporalities and causing them to converge.
As they mingle, move and merge, the bodies of the actors become a conduit through which myth and history are viscerally articulated in the present. Current interpretations of the past and past projections of the future intermingle and reconfigure each other. Caught within one another’s mutually looping gravitational pull, they become inflected with the influence of the other. ‘Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight’ thus fractures the traditional linearity of history and film, allowing new connections and narratives to manifest. Here the collusion between the bound identities of film and fictionalised history reinforces the artificial space of cinema, amplifying the self-reflexive construction and disruptive chronology of structuralized filmmaking.
Cast
Manuela Ruggiero
Emile Clarke
Marc-Alexander
Morelli
Jamie de Spirito
Irene Cioni
Directors of Photography
Belinda Parsons
Margaret Salmon
Producer
Ioanna Karavela
Editors
Ursula Mayer
Konrad Welz
Michelle Deignan
Dance Choreography
Manuela Ruggiero
Sound Design
Konrad Welz
Stylist
Margaret Andrew
Make-up
Fiona Tanner
Gaffer
Frank Usher
Props
Martin Fletcher,
Lighting Assistants
Gareth Brough
Mark Bayley
Supported by
Monitor Rome
Giorgio Angella
Alfred Mayer