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
Exhibition Dates
Estuary 2016: Points of Departure
17 – 30 September 2016
Humber Street Gallery, Hull
5 April – 17 June 2017
Screenings
Medicine Unboxed, at the Parabola Arts Centre
19 November 2016
Awake But Always Dreaming, at Shoreditch Church, in association with Alzheimer's Research UK
24 November 2016
Southbank Centre
21 — 22 January 2017
BRAINFest 2017, Cambridge
23 June 2017
Goldsmiths, University of London
18 October 2017
Poetry in Aldeburgh Festival 2017
5 November 2017
Commissioned by Film and Video Umbrella and Metal with the support of Wellcome Trust. Supported by Arts Council England.
Film Credits:
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Media
See morePress
The Guardian | ‘The Saturday Poem: My Father Cannot Stop’
17 September 2016
Link to article