The Quality Of Sprawl and other tales
an experimental on-line documentary film series in development.
inspired by the science-fiction novel “roadside picnic” and the poems of Les Murray.
A series of short(<10 min.) hybrid documentary films set around situations that exist on the margins of dominant narratives. Explorations are of places affected by bushfires, feral animals, dam sites, infra-structure projects such as prospective space-bases in the Kimberly and dam sites. In each episode an unseen voice, a “Stalker”, guides the viewer.
Episode 1. Picnic Places
The post-colonial landscapes, helpfully enabled for road-side dinning by the architects of the setter state, are de-populated. Only their aspirations remain, in the designs of their shelters. Lizards and birds look on at these vestiges of the civilising endeavour. The great emptiness preys on the imagination. The omnipresence of the alien force remains in the forms they left behind.
An explorer ’s video documentation tries to discern meaning in what they, the unseen aliens, discarded. Giant factories occasionally appear in the wilderness, seen from afar. There are artefacts; space junk, lawn mowers, wires, over engineered items left over from the cult-of-iron.
The explorer’s encounters are interpreted by a distant researcher, the first “Stalker”. In a lecture the voice of a Polish archeologist sets out the explorer’s fragmentary record and speculates on its purpose.
Directors comments
Picnic Places is an Australian reimagining of the Russian science fiction novel of the same name. A guide takes us into a zone that had once been occupied by an alien invasion. The aliens made no effort to connect with the life of the places they occupied and they departed just as inexplicably as they had arrived. The objects they left behind became a source of wonder and a sign of their omnipresence.
Cutting together scenes filmed, but not used, during the making of a documentary shot across outback Queensland, the Northern Territory, Western Australia and South Australia, Roadside Picnic is a synoptic look at the affect of Australian landscapes of the interior, and a film maker’s descent into solipsism and madness. He is reading Dante’s “Inferno” as a guide!
The visit to Lassetter’s cave was inspired by the Australian poet John Kinsella’s verse, where Lasseter communicates in his delirium with the mad Babylonian King, Nebuchadnezzar. Lasseter may also have been a trickster and a con-man. The narrator of our journey is potentially similarly unreliable.
The search for metals may be the reason the interpretive plaques have been removed. Perhaps someone does not want a certain narrative to be told?
The expositional stories of the plaques located at the picnic locations do not further understanding. The use of the foreign language (spoken in Polish) and subtitles explicitly reminds us that the alien’s world seems to demand other ways of interpretation. Languages have been stolen from these places. This distant observer brings an association with the omnipotent departed aliens.
The surreal encounters with the objects are laced with irony. The trees that may have once provided shade have been replaced with utilitarian “shade structures”.
Production
Picnic Places 6’30” . This pilot is released May 2020 as part of the Prototype project (https://youaretheprototype.art/) A suggested budget for episode is ~ $15000, comprising voice over recordings, translations, writing, editing, sound mix and design and on-line delivery.