#3

Summary

#3 is one of the first films by Joost Rekveld. He made the film by shooting footage of a moving light source with a slow shutter speed. This results in patterns that resemble the stripes of light created by car headlights in night-time shots of cities or highways.

What Rekveld wanted to do with this film was create static images by capturing moving objects. He records a process that plays out over time, because the movement leaves behind a ‘petrified’ process on the emulsion of the film. This process is similar to the crystallization processes that we know from the film Uit het Rijk der Kristallen by J.C. Mol, or from the cloud chamber (or Wilson chamber) used in physics; that is an instrument with which particles can be made visible in the form of condensation trails.

The moving light source is attached to a double pendulum. It is an instrument that demonstrates processes from chaos theory, whereby a second pendulum is attached to the first. This construction leads to unpredictable behaviour in the light source, and these movements are captured on the film.