Playing in IFFR’s ‘For Real’ strand, The Sputnik Effect installation offers a fresh angle on 3D. It’s creator Simon Pummell talks to Edward Lawrenson
The Sputnik Effect – a striking new installation by Simon Pummell showing at the TENT gallery during the IFFR – takes its name from a phenomenon described to the filmmaker and artist by a psychiatrist he was interviewing. “When the Sputnik went up,” he says of the launch of the Russian satellite in the 1950s, “people started arriving in psychiatric casualty wards claiming that Sputnik was spying on them. It seemed to be the moment when technology became the persecuting element: instead of God using machines to spy on you, the machines themselves were spying on you. It’s a moment of some fundamental shift in our relation to technology.”
Conversation
That sense of unease and the distorting impact of technology on forms of perception are explored in this haunting piece. Using red-and-green anaglyph 3D – of the kind associated with 1950s sci-fi US movies, whose mood of subtle paranoia the exhibition evokes –
The Sputnik Effect combines still images and two film pieces, looped on large screens in two chambers. A repeated motif of the installation is a free-floating, metallic-looking sphere, studded with typewriter keys and sprouting luminescent tentacles.
The device is a ‘writing-down machine’ that Pummell designed for his latest feature,
Shock Head Soul (also playing at IFFR). A moving and insightful portrait of Daniel Paul Schreber, a prominent German judge who became psychotic at the turn of the last century and who wrote
Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, the movie combines imaginative recreations of Schreber’s life with interviews with critics and psychiatrists (one of whom introduced Pummell to the wave of ‘sputnik effect’ incidents).
The new installation is intended “to be in conversation with
Shock Head Soul”, says Pummell, but they are also both “stand-alone pieces”. The installation is part of Signals: For Real, IFFR’s strand of work that explores ‘cinematic’ experiences outside of the traditional film auditorium. “In some ways,
The Sputnik Effect is one of the most literally cinematic elements in this strand,” says Pummell. “Many of the other pieces are about the cinematic effect, totally divorced from projected images, whereas
Sputnik uses those classic 3D movie glasses.”
And yet the gallery-based nature of the work “gives it a different quality from a 3D film in a cinema.” Pummell continues: “People have been commenting that the images seem quite sculptural: even though it’s projected light, it has a kind of weight and substance. It becomes something different when you stand in a gallery and look at it.”
Transmedia
Creating this recent piece for a gallery space has been a bracing experience for Pummell. “It’s a really precious thing for me: the idea that I can make work in a space without the superstructure that any feature film has – the financial, logistical demands and so on. It’s a much more intimate scale. So in a way it’s a space where I can work very intuitively. You can make big changes much later on in the process – which is something that happened in
Sputnik. The third room was something that evolved and was completely revamped only two or three weeks ago.”
For Pummell,
The Sputnik Effect has returned him to the preoccupations of his early work, albeit with modern-day digital technology. “My first films for [British broadcaster] Channel 4 were hand-drawn animations, and the concerns of animation – distortion, minute attention to details of speed, the ability to blend together different worlds – have come back really strongly in this project.”
“I made a transmedia project called
Bodysong (which played at IFFR in 2003) a few years ago, and one of the problems for me as a maker was that that project felt very
sui generis. The moment it was finished, there was no strand I could take it further with. The elements of this project – its relation to drawing, its relation to cinema in gallery spaces, its relation to the human body and how we define our identities – all extend into the past of my work, and more importantly into the future. I feel like I’ve just charted the territory of where I want to go – it’s like a sketch for what I want to explore.”
Also on the horizon is
Brand New-U, a transmedia work that the Netherlands-based British filmmaker brought to CineMart in 2010. The British Film Institute recently committed production finance, with production executives Chris Collins and Lizzie Francke from the BFI developing the project.
More on
The Sputnik Effect here.
More on
Shock Head Soul here.