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Vicky Smith, Fixation

Vicky Smith’s “Fixation”, is a new 16mm animated film using a unique ‘solarflare’ technique which premiered at this years London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival. She discusses the technique and themes with film-maker, Sarah Pucill.

There is a brief filmography at the end of this interview.

Vicky Smith: Fixation is a series of animated camera-less shadow-grams. The solarstain is a collage of objects, whose 'breath of light' is cast onto photographic paper by exposure to solar energy. The sensitive paper absorbs light for 30 mins+ causing objects to delineate themselves where the sun’s rays cannot go. The discolouration of the paper becomes the image as brown sepia tones (like old photographs) by chance also evoke the immateriality of ghosts and memories that are referenced in the film. The stained paper is then fixed, forming a landscape of self and the boundaries of the body, where brown suggests blood, white evokes bones.

A walking figure has to face the shadow monster by studying its reflection in a shield.

Sarah Pucill: What particularly interested me in your film was the seemingly incongruous link between the psychological phenomenon of fixation, that is the re-enactment of an early trauma as repetition with the scientific photo-chemical process. I like the interrelations between the chemical, the emotional and the psychological where both emotional states and the photographic and filmic image are chemically produced. For me these links are what give the film its edge. I like the juxtaposition of the vibrancy of the unknowable witches potions with the more clinical frame of the photo-chemical laboratory where everything is knowable.

VS one of the starting points for the film was the word fixation which is common to the different spheres of psychology and photography. I wanted to compare the two sciences through the notion of arrested development and chemical balance. To stabilise a thing, not merely by repeating to the extent of self paralysis but by considering it from different angles through photo representation.

SP I am interested in the process you have used to ‘directly’ animate the solarstain on contact with liquid the photo paper becomes tonally lighter and you have used this subtle technique to make figures magically appear.

VS I used this method of liquid animation to reference the alchemy involved in the making of the solarstain and the process of photography generally.

SP There is a real sense of intimacy but also of a physicality in the film where the process of making and the process of viewing somehow meet in a close relationship.

VS In most photography it is possible to recognise forms or identify with characters. In the solarstain there are few external references visually so you have to believe in the spells cast by the artist. The atmosphere of privacy and confession in Fixation conveys the solitude of the animator. I have used my own body in these images, but the solarstain mutates the human form and also records that which is normally invisible, such as the immateriality of breath- so the viewer finds themselves in a familiar yet strange space, exacerbated by the monochrome confines of the solarstain.

Vicky Smith, Fixation

SP Aspects of the film hint at the idea of the gaze as potentially murderous, and the photograph as poisonous. Like the Medusa, the witches gaze is powerful.

VS On a formal level I've tried to create a sense of overload, and that was my notion of poisoning as an excess that is why I've condensed a lot of images and sounds into a small space, to exorcise the fixated image by first ingesting and then expelling it.

SP A key element in the film for me was the celebration of texture both as image and as sound. I felt I was being taken on a journey beyond figuration into a sensory landscape of visual and aural textures, a strange balance being created between intimacy and abstraction. Fragments of sentences from different conversations are threaded through a texture of trees, a wood or a forest. There's a difference between re-presenting hysteria and communicating something about hysteria, in this sense the film travels a difficult edge.

VS Although the compositions are of objects from actual sources they are de-contextualised, becoming purely textural modulations of light and shadow. Similarly my voice is defamiliarised by splicing word fragments together and blending the known and unknown to create a texture of partially recognisable sounds. Unlike the surrealist photograms, I have mostly avoided trying to attach an objects impression to its referent, rather I am suggesting a kind of inscape, conveyed through recurrent motifs.

SP I was interested in the relationship in the work between the witch's magic as hysteria where hidden knowledge is articulated as hysteria because it cannot otherwise express itself.

VS Yes, I've tried to recuperate notions of feminine incoherence by turning the hysterical voice into something like incantation. I'm exploring the crossover between the so-called 'irrationality' of the witches magic and the 'objectivity' of science, the authenticity ascribed to the photographic image and its potential for recording subjective states such as sleep and the invisibility of the moisture of breath.

SP You’re making solar stained images so the sun is important for reproducing images and we see representations of the sun as reminders of the source of the light. It is also dangerous to look directly at the Sun which resonates with the whole danger-of-looking theme.

VS The motif of the sun is a reference to the use of minimum technology in solarstains. The theme of burning for me refers to a wasting of something precious, the persecution of witches and the photopaper. I'm aware that when I burn or overexpose the photopaper I'm committing a crime against photography. I feel the photo image can give away too much, in that sense it kills.

SP The myth of Medusa who turns everything she sees to stone is similar to the way the camera turns everything it sees into a fixed image. But the solar stains are produced without a camera, so there isn't a fixed image as such, only the fixated image which cannot be seen or can barely be seen. In psycho-analytic terms this would be the unvisitable unconscious or the (Lacan's) Real which makes sense in terms of how repetition is the persistence of the still active but invisitable trauma.

VS Fixation considers the possibility of changing destiny by overcoming paralysis. The film attempts to move beyond the The Medusa scenario where the figure petrifies whatever she sees. The process of making the film evolved through personal experience rather than through reading theory. For me the film approximates the fixated state by creating a tension between confronting and avoiding emotional experience; between fixing and undoing. I have attempted to simulate the fixated state of being doomed to repeat to a point of paralysis.

Vicky Smith Filmography:

Fixation (2002) 16mm
It's impossible to look directly at the monster so a shield is used to study its reflection. Through animated solar stains, fixation explores family history, witches and the alchemy in spells, chemistry, psychological and photographic fixations. The solar stain is a collage of objects whose 'breath of light' is impressed upon photo paper which has been exposed to UV then fixed. The discolouration of the paper becomes the image, brown monochrome shadows.

Rash (1997) 16mm
...the thing that I needed to scratch no longer existed so I made a representation...this film explores fetishism

My Moon, Her World (1995) 16mm
...animation and pixillation describe a fall......

for more information see www.vickysmith.info
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