The poet Lavinia Greenlaw has written and directed The Sea is an Edge and an Ending, a short film investigating what it means to lose your memory and disappear into the present tense. Its framework is a sequence she wrote about her father’s death from Alzheimer’s. The film focuses on what it means for your sense of self to come loose and for the past to float free. It carries echoes of Shakespeare’s Tempest in its study of a man under a kind of spell, whose child must observe his strange and terrifying liberation. The film moves from the shifting coastal landscape of the east of England, a geography central to Greenlaw’s life and work, to eroded interiors containing only the bare structures and reduced emblems of this man’s life. The Sea is an Edge and an Ending is Greenlaw’s first film and extends the practice she developed in her award-winning sound work, Audio Obscura.
The Sea is an Edge and an Ending
Lavinia Greenlaw
Single channel HD video, 20 minutes, 47 seconds, 2016
Project Overview
Exhibitions
Premiere tour:
Estuary 2016, Tilbury Cruise Terminal: 17 - 30 September 2016
For current exhibitions and screenings, see below or check our What's On page.
Commissioned by Film and Video Umbrella and Metal with the support of Wellcome Trust. Supported by Arts Council England.
Media
See morePress
The Guardian | ‘The Saturday Poem: My Father Cannot Stop’
17 September 2016
Link to article