Portraits

Summary

‘The film is like a cubist painting given a time dimension. At the beginning, shots of faces leap out at an enormous speed. Only a few faces are used, but Meter presents them, cubistically, form numerous angles, so that we come close to seeing the whole of the person in less than a second. One face tends to merge in with another; it becomes difficult to separate one image from the next. As the material is then re-photographed, the pace of presentation slackens. The screen thought splits into two and later four, so that the attention that was dealing with the speed of sequential imagery is now as active dealing with the speeds of synchronic imagery. Throughout, there’s a strong sense of the material qualities of the film, grain, scratches, flicker, etc. being used to give the work a dense texturing’.’

(John Du Cane, Time Out, 1973 in: Dossier Barbara Meter)