Interview with Scott Barley
Rushnan Jaleel • 20.11.2024
Scott Barley is one of the foremost practitioners of a form of autonomous first-person cinema that
concerns, among other things, the tactile, optical and extrasensory properties of the digital image.
Over the course of his filmography, Barley has crafted films that are simultaneously vast and
minimal, tenebrous and shapeshifting monuments to darkness, mysticism, cosmology and the
Anthropocene. His work often interrogates these subjects through inquiries into the fundamental
issues of photographic representation. Sound fulfils an even more important role in his films,
imbuing the void of the image with a mystical, incantatory power. Besides film, Barley has also
worked in the capacities of a painter, writer and musician – with his involvement in these other
mediums often influencing his filmmaking practice.
In his astonishingly detailed, sprawling and lyrical responses to my questions, Barley spoke at
length on a vast number of subjects close to his heart – from the affinities between science and
gnosis, to the hold of the unknowable on his work, and finally onto pivotal experiences from his
childhood that have fundamentally shaped his life and art.
Rushnan Jaleel: In some ways, your work expresses the longing for a reconciliation of some kind. There is the sense that you are attempting to transcend the anthropocentric viewpoint, although that is perhaps impossible. I'm curious if this is partly your intention.
Scott Barley: It is my intention, and I have a tendency to wish for impossible things. Reconciliation, in various forms, and transcending the anthropocentric are significant aspects of my work. One thing that I have been trying to do for a long time is to make films that possess a visible absence.
I’ve long felt that the most potent, boundless visitations of presence manifest from our most absolute experiences of absence. One fundamental aspect of my films is to address the Anthropocene through a conspicuous absence: there is no human presence. Instead, attention is redirected to landscapes, the earth’s intricate web of life. Everything you look at is also you. In the negation of human presence, that absence becomes visible.
Alongside that, I have often aspired to make work that is not reliant on symbolism. Cinema is a lingua franca, and I think paradoxically, the non-anthropocentric, the mysterious, even the lack of semiotics can enhance that universality; for those able to acquiesce to a different form of communion with a film. I think it can open up a deeper form of communication. I hope for my films to be an invitation for audiences to contemplate their own place within the natural world. Some might watch my films and be compelled to consider the impact of humanity’s actions on a broader ecological scale, which is good, but my intention is never to make dogmatic or didactic cinema. I’m principally interested in the experiential and the sensory. I aspire to make a personal cinema that unravels from and back into the impersonal.
In 2019, not long after Phil Solomon died, his partner, Melissa introduced me to Georg Trakl’s poetry. Each line is so sonorous in its vividness, but when one finishes the poem, and sees it as a whole, it becomes rendered inscrutable. Not in an emotionless sense, but in a wholly enigmatic way. Not unlike experiencing a deeply vivid dream, that upon recall mostly escapes you; like water straining from a sieve. Trakl was a revelation. It was the first time I had come across an artist—in any medium—achieve precisely this aspect that I intuitively aspired for in my own work.
The tension between vividness and inscrutability manifests differently in cinema than in poetry, given the camera’s indexical relationship to “reality”. While Trakl could use language's abstract potential, film often must negotiate more with the concrete world it records. My approach has been to embrace this paradox: to use cinema's optics and sonics in aberrant ways, to reveal the world's fundamental strangeness. There is nothing more unreal than reality, nothing more mysterious than what we take for granted, what we individuate as the mundane.
For a long time, and particularly with Sleep Has Her House, I aspired for each shot to render the incorporeal corporeal; to present both with the same presence, on the same corporal footing. Where each shot is vivid, sonorous, and yet, as a whole, it disappears into itself—vantage point-less. To arrive at an inscrutability through vividness. In practice, this often has meant creating landscapes, scenarios, at the threshold between recognition and abstraction, employing various layering techniques, stacking dozens, sometimes hundreds of layers footage of varying fidelity and resolutions, combined with different media, like my drawings and paintings, working with temporality in distorted ways, and embracing noise. At least, that’s some of the more surface level technical elements. There’s something more mereological about it.
When I’m successful in all of this—the visible absences, the inscrutability through vividness—it can leave my work in a more vulnerable position than most films. It leaves the films more open to ridicule. These films only live and thrive when the spectator is able to surrender to that absence, and in turn, see themselves in it. This requires a fundamental shift in the spectator—from the traditional position of supremacy over the image to one of receptive vulnerability. When the spectator surrenders, the absence becomes generative rather than lacking. The films become less objects to be decoded and more environments, experiences, that are completed by each viewer's unique presence and perception. This kind of cinema isn’t for everyone. Perhaps it isn’t in everyone. I don’t know. But I know it to be in some who don’t know it themselves yet.
With many of my films, I have tried to present landscape as flesh, and in films like Womb (2017) flesh as landscape; to render the human body as alien terrain. I’ve also described seeking a flesh of the wind—to attempt to make visible the invisible. I want darkness to come into the room, and hit the retina like sunshine. I am trying to show the world, what is known to us, and render it unknown again. We wade through it together, and the moon in the night sky is always like seeing it for the first time. To look out, deeply into the world, and to see ourselves there too. To see ourselves within the world has something to do with confronting mortality too, of course.
Death is the process of becoming landscape. Becoming landscape, again. We are the only species that attempts to extricate itself from landscape. We excoriate the landscape, to seemingly sever ourselves from being it. It is folly, it is pyrrhic, of course. Landscape is not a prospect of objects to be harrowed. It is an endlessly unravelling, inextricable rhizome of which we are a part. We are infinitesimal dendrites, felling ourselves. I think, in part, we do this because there is this egoistic, dualistic belief in some, that if we conquer landscape, we conquer death.
The land subsumes the dead. Itself into itself. The personal into the impersonal. The known into the unknowable. Itself into itself. It is nature’s life-force. We rot to be returned. Returned to the silent sculptor, tireless, peerless in her design. She works with the sound of bone, and the flecks of adipocere. She is the spider, spinning her silk from the sidereal. In our ruin, she carves a constellation out of our night. From ruin, flowers grow. Life, affirmed, in death’s renewal.
All creativity born from a deep need is this. It is like nature itself. I’ve always believed that true art is about taking your inner chaos, your inner pain, and rearranging it into something beautiful—like a garden, a landscape. Every aspect of us is fundamentally embedded in nature. We are ephemeral, individuated fragments of the larger world, destined to return to it.
R.J: I want to return briefly to the subject of reconciliation again, but in a different sense. During
one of our earlier conversations, you mentioned the importance of reconciling science and
gnosis as a possible path going forward in a world on the brink of collapse. What role, if
any, can art fulfill in this reconciliation?
S.B: Art and creation inhabit—and invite us into—a vital, boundless space. The Western world has
sacrificed the Pythagorean confluence of mathematics, music, and mysticism to our compulsion for
dichotomy. Yet art can still bridge these divides, precisely because it transcends the empirical and
logical frameworks that often constrain our current discourse.
While I deeply value science, dismissing everything beyond measurement and conventional perception is both ignorant and asinine. We are inherently limited by the cognitive frameworks that shape our perceptions, bound to the sensory tools that filter our experience of the world. I am not certain that consciousness is something inside of us, rather, we are housed inside consciousness.
Many of us assume that our perceptions—the sensory “screen” through which we experience reality—function as transparent windows into the actual world. In truth, our perceptions are constrained by how they are encoded; we are inferential beings, interpreting rather than directly experiencing reality. We are not unlike radio antennae that tune into a specific frequency; a “slice” of the whole gestalt of reality. If we received all frequencies at once, it would be intolerable chaos, entropy. Our cognitive instruments provide valuable but mediated, limited information.
I liken it to ancient mariners navigating by the stars. The constellations were used as guides, helping sailors find their way across vast, unknown seas. However, in this sense, the stars themselves are not the ocean. They don’t reflect the fathoms below, the myriad creatures beneath, the hidden reefs and trenches, or the turbulence of the waves. The stars offer direction, but they are only distant points of reference—not the world beneath the keel. Simply, the map is not the territory.
Art, unlike these instruments, can gesture toward the unseen, the unknowable. If we are open, the creative act and bearing witness to art permits us to adjust our frequency, our state of consciousness, and become conduits for the numinous and the invisible. For the unknowable, the unseen, and the extraordinary to flow through us and ensnare our senses, and to bloom with presence. Where we can become both witness and choir.
Art can reveal tendrils, paths, oceans upon oceans of complete and inordinately complex worlds and actualities that remain hidden behind mere measurement. Art is like magic. Between and beyond what we describe as the four dimensions of space and time lies imagination, creativity. An idea seems to come from nowhere, rising to the surface of our minds, nebulous but potent, and in turn, we make it physical, tangible, expressive. We make something manifest that previously did not exist. If that’s not magic, what is?
Yet, the world does feel on the brink of collapse. There are many fears now, but I think for me, and many of us, the ongoing reality of the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians overshadows everything else: disease, malnutrition, starvation, amputation, annihilation. Dust, carrion, rubble. Maimed and murdered children. Families carbonised while seeking shelter in churches and hospitals. Tens of thousands exiled, some without even the clothes on their backs. Ownerless, atrophied dogs, terrified, shaking, crying out in perpetuity under the dawn-till-dusk chorus of bombs, bombs, bombs.
Governments that exhibit an unspeakably sadistic contempt for human life, for different cultures, for truth, for peace, for union; attempting to condition us to accept such horrors. There is ceaseless deception, corruption, and malevolent fanaticism—a genocide being funded, aided,
and legitimised by our most illegitimate, bought, self-serving, spineless “leaders” and affirmed by much of the media. We are witnessing war begetting war, hate begetting hate, in an endless night of incalculable, unnecessary and utterly senseless loss.
In the face of such horror, art can feel less than inadequate, worse than redundant. How can we keep on keeping on? Sometimes, I don’t know. Yet, within this gyre of horrific suffering, there exists, miraculously, hope. There are dreams. There is boundless courage in the Palestinian people and among jews across the world protesting the atrocities committed by the Israeli government; supported by the U.S., the U.K. and other countries perpetuating their long history of imperialist, colonial regimes. The solidarity and resistance spans all walks of life, together in opposition of the indefensible, united in the belief that hope can emerge from such despair.
As Jean-Luc Godard said, "Even if nothing would be as we had hoped, it would change nothing of our hopes.” It is in this hope that art finds an essential role. The artist observes the world, and reports back. This simple vocation is inherently hopeful. Fear often leads to little other than inaction. Inaction, or falling for fascists. But in the calyx of pain blooms hope. Art bears witness. It testifies to the dignity and humanity that refuses to be extinguished.
R.J: You have mentioned before that music and literature tend to inspire your creative process more than cinema. You’ve also spoken of wanting to create a film that activates the spectator’s imagination, likening this to literature’s ability to do the same to a reader. How do you set about achieving this, and could you speak more to how these other mediums directly influence your practice?
S.B: Several pearls of wisdom from Robert Bresson immediately come to mind: “The ear is profound, whereas the eye is frivolous, too easily satisfied. The ear is active, imaginative, whereas the eye is passive.” “The eye solicited alone makes the ear impatient, the ear solicited alone makes the eye impatient. Use these impatiences.” And lastly, “Ideally, nothing should be shown, but that's impossible.”
Cinema has been hijacked more comprehensively than any other art form. Orthodoxy, homogeneity, and marketing have created a vast disparity between its unique potential as a medium and what it has predominantly become. Having both the optic and the sonic element proliferates the possibilities of what one can do, especially when one plays off the other. And there are no rules.
There are many ways of activating the imagination. For example, in Sleep Has Her House, I knew that for much of the penultimate sequence, it would be complete darkness, briefly unstitched by the storm’s fulminations. Ninety-nine percent of that sequence is imageless—black noise. I wanted the end of the film to be a cataclysmic onslaught, and for me, the best way to do that was play on the audience’s ear far more than the eye. I wanted the absence of visual stimuli to force the audience into a heightened, imaginative state, where they could not chart or navigate. Where no light is present to enter the eye, there is no light to ward off the imagination. Darkness, umbra, noise—it possesses something very deep, multi-layered, rhizomatic. It’s the pulse, the vibration of the unrecordable, the unseeable. Darkness—pure darkness—is an ocean without a shore. It is boundless and—in symbiosis with the experiencer—generative. The audience’s imagination is far greater than any visual depiction.
That was an incredible day, filming that storm. It was the first thing that I shot for the film, but I didn’t even know I was going to make a film then. An old friend of mine invited me for a drive to
the Brecon Beacons in South Wales. He was studying photography at the time, so he was busy photographing the landscape, and I was filming different flora and fauna on my phone. Then, in the early evening, suddenly, the entire sky fractured. The aureate light of sunset was defenestrated by a pall of darkness that overwhelmed everything. The tumult of it was so beautiful, so violent, so unreal.
The wind howled. Thirty, fifty feet tall trees were being felled all around us. Wild horses emerged from the shrinking forest, galloping towards me. I held my phone as tightly as I could and kept filming, and I closed my eyes. In that moment, I completely surrendered. I surrendered to the chance of being struck down by the horses, flattened by a tree, or even carried away in the wind. The horses galloped past, right beside me—so close that I could have extended my arms outwards and touched them. It was ecstasy. Pure, trembling ecstasy. In that moment, I neither cared if I lived or died there.
We were lucky to get out safely, and back home. My friend’s car was quite badly damaged. In that moment though, I wanted to remain there. The terrain was being unmoored around us in a rapturous dance of the elements. I was taken with these two horses we found on the way back to the car, nestled into one another. They are the horses that feature in the film’s penultimate sequence. They are there in the very first shot of the film too—before the slow tracking shot away from the waterfall.
Perhaps that is also why I ended up having so much of the final sequence imageless—because I myself had my eyes closed during most of it. So much of my time editing is spent on the struggle in attempting to approach the apogee of experiencing things directly. Most of the time, the camera, and what it records, in and of itself, only reduces. In a bad film, there is an attempt to conquer something. I am not interested in conquering anything. Every good film is not conquering, rather it is a conjuring, it’s an incantation.
Most of the time, the power of an image has desperately little to do with what has been recorded. It’s a mereological, symbiotic, rhythmic, and mysterious process. It’s very difficult to attain a mysterium tremendum et fascinans in cinema. Whether you recorded one or not has zero bearing on whether it carries from the rushes to across the z-axis of a cinema. The audience are part of the sum decision on whether it manifests or not, not the filmmaker alone, but inventive, judicious editing and sound is essential.
Direct experiences, heightened or limit experiences, nature’s uncanniness, its beauty, its violence, its sublimity, its mystery—these are the things that fuel me. I don’t know if there is any medium or specific work that directly influences me—at least consciously, while making, but in general, I find that literature and music often permit greater room for experimentation and engagement with the audience’s imagination than cinema currently does.
I sometimes find myself thinking, where is cinema’s Finnegans Wake? “…the obluvial waters of our noarchic memory withdrew, windingly goharksome”—what would that look like, sound like? How would it move, shape-shift? I think the same when reading Beckett, Blanchot, Ann Quin, Antonio Moresco, or Robert Pinget—or in poetry: Georg Trakl, Paul Celan, Joyce Mansour, Nina Cassian, Octavio Paz, Vladimír Holan, Roger Gilbert-Lecomte… How can a cinema be made that is wholly its own language, and by which, it transcends its own language, representation, or vantage-point? We have Charalambides’ Joy Shapes, we have Scott Walker’s Tilt, we have Xiu Xiu’s Girl with Basket of Fruit, we have Phill Niblock’s Pan Fried 70. We don’t demand music to be logical. Why should cinema be any different?
R.J: At the risk of oversimplifying, your films, especially Hunter onwards, witness a shift from a loose, sporadic approach towards a kind of delicate formalism that incorporates slower, durational elements. What motivated this shift?
S.B: I found my own voice more. Hunter is the first film that felt wholly mine. I feel very close to it, more than any of my other short films I have released, because, similar with Sleep Has Her House, the following year, I was battling a debilitating depression. I credit the film for saving my life. It gave me something to live for, to give to, and to see through.
In the process of finding my voice as a filmmaker, I intuited a need to return to an earlier self, to painting, to achieve that. I see myself more as a painter than a filmmaker. The process remains very similar to when I was painting with my hands with large amounts of oils, ash, spider’s silk, earth, and tree bark. Now, it’s painting with pixels, augmented by sound, movement, time.
Part of my attraction to digital is in aspiring for the texture and tactility of painting and sculpture in a flat medium where such qualities are avoided by convention, or simply do not exist. In that sense, every work I make is a failure. I enjoy that inherent failure with digital. In combination with my sensibilities and interests, digital presents both a limit and a challenge.
R.J: I’m curious about your process for sound, which you’ve mentioned comes prior to the images both in the process as well as in its importance to the work. You’ve also mentioned your preference for sound over image, both in its importance in film as well as a medium. When it comes to images, you've described making a film 'where every image is as real, and yet as spectral as the wind'. The low-fidelity digital image, faced with darkness, 'invents the simulacrum it has been instructed to create.' Do you view sound in terms of degrees of proximity to the real? Does it occupy a more corporeal or abstract dimension in your practice?
S.B: I think that the real has inherent abstractions and paradoxes. What we consider “real” is already layered with perceptual complexities. For instance, with sound: the way a forest at night contains both immediate, identifiable sounds but also an unknowable aural dimension that is placeless. It seems to exist at the edge of perception. It could be the sound of forest itself, or conjured by the liminal nature of us experiencing it. Reality is so multifaceted, so complex, so unknowable, it is both corporeal and abstract simultaneously.
I have a syncretic approach with sound. I like to mix more corporeal sounds with something more disembodied—occasionally, that is as simple as having various copies of the same sound played at different pitches and frequencies. This creates a kind of acoustic uncanny valley where the familiar becomes strange through minimal intervention. I also play with spaces. Sometimes something that has a more directly perceptible, audible sound is placed very quietly in the mix, while something almost inaudible is amplified, or layered with reverb, delays, and distortion. Something very disembodied and echoey may be placed directly in the mix, with the echo removed, and vice versa. And sometimes, none of those things.
The power often lies less in the sound itself, but in what I think of as the angels between the notes—those spectral spaces where perception wavers between the real and the imagined. I try to explore that, conjure that, through texture, frequency, harmony, disharmony, and dynamics. Sounds are waves, and those waves collect at our shore, where they meet the shadows that have collected against the walls of our skull. Just as we see pareidolic phantoms in darkness, we too create our own waves and shadows with sound. Each and every experience is not merely an encounter with an object, but an encounter with ourselves, our reflection. Anaïs Nin said “We don’t see things as they are; we see them as we are.” It’s true.
Sound forms the emotional, sensual backbone of my work, emerging through an entirely intuitive process. While creating sound and music, I sometimes enter a trance-like state—feeling like a conduit for something larger than myself. It can happen when I’m editing too. In these rare moments, I disappear entirely. Later, when I return and listen back, what I hear often moves me deeply, as if I'm encountering it for the first time. This deep immersion in sound and music offers a vessel for raw emotion that, for me, visual work rarely achieves with the same intensity. There’s nothing really intellectual about it—it's pure, unadulterated feeling.
While the visual elements in my films demand considerably more time technically, it's the sound that ultimately carries them. You can have the most perfect images in the world, but if the sonic choice isn't right, even the most striking images will keep you firmly earthbound. And of course, silence can be a sonic choice in the right moments too.
I love how Pythagoras described all matter as frozen music. It resonates deeply with my own experience of the world. You can observe this directly through cymatic resonance—each frequency manifests its own distinct geometry. Sound waves carve at our bodies, our spirit. We are primarily water, and sound is vibration, resonance. We are frozen music, and when sound absorbs us in a certain way, we deliquesce into songs of rain, river, ocean.
When I created the score for Sleep Has Her House, I wasn't consciously composing for the film—I wasn't thinking about the film at all. I was sitting at my piano one afternoon, and I was not in a good place mentally. I had my phone's Voice Memos app recording on the piano lid. As I played, something shifted. I began to sing, though “sing” isn't the right word. What emerged were raw, wordless wails—a primal expression of pain that I felt, which transcended my very obvious technical limitations. Looking back, I see it as perhaps the purest form of expression I've achieved.
During this period, I had been obsessed with David Bowie's Low, particularly the track, Warszawa. Bowie's approach was revelatory—he used phonetic approximations of Polish folk songs from the Śląsk choir's Helokanie, creating lyrics that carried no literal meaning yet conveyed profound emotional weight. It remains one of the most deeply moving pieces of music I’ve ever heard. Looking back, perhaps Warszawa unconsciously influenced me—though in that moment, I wasn't trying to make music at all. I was just crying, wailing, while badly playing the piano.
R.J: You have many exciting upcoming projects in-progress, both in film and elsewhere, including your second feature The Sea Behind Her Head. While Sleep Has Her House was shot entirely on iPhone, I remember you mentioning that your approach towards this new film changed a little: from embracing different cameras, and even writing a kind of script. In addition to Womb and Ille Lacrimas, it is also one of your few films to bring the human figure to the fore. I would love to hear more about these changes and the direction you feel your cinema is heading in.
S.B: After completing Sleep Has Her House just after my 24th birthday in 2016, for a long time, I felt that I did not have another film within me, and I was content with that.
The initial idea for The Sea Behind Her Head came from a short story I wrote in the spring of 2018. For a while, I saw it solely as a small writing exercise; a short story for myself more than anything else. It wasn’t until the end of the year that I realised it could be the lynchpin of a much larger film idea. At that point, the film’s working titles were Dream Upon The Wind and The Flesh of the Wind. I settled on The Sea Behind Her Head the following year. The title comes from two lines I read in Scott Walker’s book of lyrics, Sundog; published the year before he died. The lines are from the final part of the book: new songs—lyrics he wrote that we will now never hear. When I read those lyrics, I immediately knew that would—should—be the title.
The Sea Behind Her Head has been the first film I have done active research for, which has been incredibly illuminating, but has also made the process even slower than my usual. I undertake every aspect of production alone, and the layering and animation is created on a frame-by-frame basis. It’s tedious work the far majority of the time. I have been researching in tandem with production of the film for the past six years or so. A few years ago, I felt that I would benefit from writing a script—something I have never done before for my previous work. Ultimately, I found that I needed to write the script—precisely to discard it.
In the past year, I have found the best way to go from idea to actuality is to write small poems, either for an overall idea, or for a specific sequence. Some of them are more Dickinson-like than I tend to write, while some are more abstract in form. They have now become the sole reference point for me to then go on to create the sequences, or embellish and improve existing ones with what I feel they are missing.
Each filmmaker, each artist is different, and I think there is pressure placed on filmmakers to use tools that convey a false sense of professionalism rather than asking whether those tools are actually serving them. There is no right or wrong way. It's simply about finding the tools that actually aid you, and discarding the ones that don't. In my case a poem works far better than a script, and storyboards don't help me at all. But it will be the opposite for somebody else. We shouldn't feel pressured to adopt tools or specific equipment to come across as legitimate in what we do. Our convictions, our expression, our work, our resilience, our patience, our passions legitimise what we do, not the extraneous materials and equipment we use.
As for cameras, the old adage, “the best camera is the one that is with you” still applies, and the far majority of The Sea Behind Her Head so far has been shot on iPhone. Several different iPhones—iPhone 6 Plus through to 15. There’s also some drone footage, and I have also used a Sony A7sII for some small parts.
The budget for Sleep Has Her House was £0. No money was spent specifically for making the film at all. I gave my friend some money for petrol when he invited me for that drive to the Brecon Beacons, where I ended up filming the storm, but as I said before, at that time, I had no idea that I was going to begin making a feature film. The only true cost was time. Working night after night, often dusk till dawn, for a year and a half, hoping that by living through the making of the film, I would begin to live again myself. With The Sea Behind Her Head I received a small amount of funding from the BFI and DocSociety, but the money hasn’t changed the process at all.
I wouldn’t say that The Sea Behind Her Head brings human figures to the fore, but a part of the film involves our palaeolithic history, and a series of transmogrifications, among other things. In order for some of the ideas to be apprehended, the project requires some human figuration, at least at first, as it did in Womb.
Where Sleep Has Her House and much of my previous work was more concerned with the absence of symbols, with The Sea Behind Her Head, I’m more concerned with subverting symbols and iconography, so they no longer orientate; their meaning is obfuscated, perturbed. They create new myth out of old ones. Symbols are like a shorthand, offering a shortcut through the dark, and I’m trying to decontextualise these images from their semiotics, so certain scenarios become unnavigable.
I’m often described as a minimalist, but I’m more of an essentialist. The new work is much more heteroglossic, layered, and entropic, I think. But underpinning all of that, I hope, remains the essential.
R.J: The second upcoming project I am curious about is Within Without Horizon, where literally millions of layers of footage come together to create a violent, extrasensory experience. It also reminded me of your notes on the future of cinema: ‘We will become a chrysanthemum of senses, experiences, and selves. Maybe even further senses will reveal themselves within us in the process; those that we don’t possess yet, or simply are unaware of... Until, there is no distinction between self and experience, cinema and consciousness.’ It sounds incredibly intense in both its making and its form. So intense that it might perhaps result in a limit-experience for a potential viewer, the boundary between what is seen and imagined collapsing. Given your interest in the work of Georges Bataille, what are your thoughts on these inherently paradoxical experiences? Could you speak to the influence of Bataille on your work?
S.B: Paradoxes become inevitable at the limits of experience. While I'm not a dialetheist, I find a lot of value in embracing these contradictions. Bataille's work doesn't actively influence my making, but it affirms something essential—that art should beguile, mystify, rupture. There is limen in beauty and horror. We see this in nature. His writing achieves what I seek in my own work. Almost always, the art which I have an affinity with is comprised of things that affirm what I have deeply felt, intuited, long before I have encountered them.
Within Without Horizon is something different from the rest of my filmography so far. It's my first work edited at 60 frames per second. It is intensely stroboscopic, kaleidoscopic, and purely abstract. It’s more than 13 million layers of footage; all originally rushes of water; clips compounded, exported and reimported, repeating the process over and over, for the past six years. The editing process itself has become a kind of limit-experience—I have had periods after intense editing in the dark where, for a week or more, the frames remain burned into my retina, overlaying my vision. It takes a long time for my vision to resolve.
Within Without Horizon probes the paradox of placelessness—that limen where unity and non-being converge, where perception dissolves into pure experience. Both witness and choir. It’s something I’m always searching for in one way or another.
R.J: I would love to hear more about your writing. Besides your notes on cinema, you have shared a handful of poems and your writing appears to inform your films to a degree (the epigraph to Sleep Has Her House and the poem that accompanies Closer). Do you see yourself publishing some of your written work in the future?
S.B: I have always loved writing, and reading. There is no art form more democratic. Writing permits you to create a world by making a few marks on a page. I am slowly collecting some poems and short writings together—perhaps with some images, too—which I hope will eventually be part of a book.
Once the next few film projects are complete, I would like to spend more time working in different mediums for a period; writing being one of them.
R.J: We've spoken of your upcoming projects, but I am also curious about your past work. Of these, Painting (I) and Midnight sound incredibly radical, approaching the threshold of what cinema can be. Additionally, the astonishing images of the lost Death is a Photograph and Too Young to Die suggest a very different direction for your work. I would love to hear more about these films and if you would ever consider reviving them in another form.
S.B: Many of my projects are more questions about cinema's fundamental nature, and our limits of perception, but these were more on the deep end, conceptual examples.
Painting (I) (2016) was a thirty second tracking shot, moving toward, beneath, and away from a large tree which was then slowed down to 360 minutes in length, rendering the movement imperceptible to the naked eye. I wanted to undo all that is conventionally considered cinema, to reveal the tensions between still image and moving image, stasis and movement, space and temporality, the perceptible and the imperceptible.
Midnight (2017) followed similar questioning. It was a wholly imageless film, contextualised with the idea of an audience sitting in front of a screen with no illumination, with only sound there to suggest a narrative progression. I was searching for what remains when you strip away cinema's most essential element—light itself—while maintaining the context of “screening” it, with an audience, in an auditorium.
Too Young to Die and Death is a Photograph were going to be my first feature length works. In a way, it was a blessing that they never worked out, as I think Sleep Has Her House is a far more personal and realised work. I have no interest in reviving them as projects, but elements from those films, ideas, will surface in later work, I'm sure.
R.J: I am curious about the interconnections between sound and image as well as other senses in your work, which make me think of synaesthesia. I am curious if you experience synaesthesia, or any form of heightened experience that may be similar to it, and whether this influences your making.
S.B: I do have synaesthesia. While I don't consciously think about it during creation, I believe it fundamentally shapes how I perceive and work with the syncretic nature of image and sound.
I did have a very peculiar experience recently, where I experienced phantosmia during an extremely intense altered state of consciousness. The olfactory qualia was unlike anything I have ever experienced. It was a smell not of this earth, yet it felt telluric, ancient—and yet synthetic. Then the smell bloomed into image—veils of violet and dark emeralds. It penetrated and confluenced my senses intensely, completely. That was something else!
R.J: A sense of awe, of childlike wonder in the face of the sublime is characteristic of your films. I know you work intuitively, but I wonder if there are any pivotal experiences from your childhood – dreams, memories, anything at all – that you feel have shaped your work.
S.B: Childhood, specifically the qualia unique to childhood, is my philosopher’s stone. For me, the quality of childhood consciousness eclipses all else. The mystery of it, the ineffable swells of feeling. To feel things so deeply, so intuitively, yet without concrete knowing. As a child, you can transcend the limitations of what we descry as “intelligence”—unencumbered by the follies of rationalising the world—effortlessly. Yet, you are not taking the world for granted, but seeing it, navigating it, feeling it anew.
At times, it feels as though you can extend beyond the veil of self, and sense something less phenomenal, and apprehend something that, however inconceivable, seems intuitively, to be luring us toward the noumenal. Childhood invites visitations. As we grow up, we tend to have fewer visitors. We all share the same nights, but our nights are different.
I have had quite a few experiences that I feel have informed my work in one way or another, most of them in ways I don’t fully comprehend. I have spoken about a few of them before. I won’t—and cannot adequately—describe them all, but I will describe one of the earlier experiences that I can remember in some detail.
I think my Scottish grandmother understood me better than most from a young age. She had been an art teacher when she was younger, although I didn’t know this until I was much older. We never talked much, and I did not see her often. I was very obsessive, and had a predilection for—and a pervasion of—dark things, the melancholic, and the lyrical. I used to write for hours and hours and was a voracious reader. A little before my seventh birthday, she gifted me in the post, the complete works of Edgar Allan Poe. My parents allowed me to take one present on holiday in the week prior. I chose the gift from my grandmother.
That week, we stayed in an old stone house, at the top of a peninsula, overlooking the sea. There was a wind, and through the old stone walls I remember hearing the ocean below swell from an approaching storm. I lay down in bed, and began reading The Fall of the House of Usher, followed by The Black Cat, with barely enough light to pore over the pages intelligibly.
Reading in low light is not dissimilar to listening to music at a barely audible volume. Although I hadn’t thought this at the time, I had intuitively found that reading in low light permits the activity of reading to assume the properties of the environment and one’s qualia as a whole. One has to concentrate harder, and one’s percepts are heightened, sharpened by the penumbra. There is less distinction between the act of reading, your general phenomenology, and the environment around you. Everything deliquesces into an entropic, compounded ambience. I remember looking up from the pages, staring intently at the textures of the old walls and ceiling from the bed, the unyielding shadows in the corners concealing secret fulcrums from my vision, as my mind reeled with delicious fright and fascination from the pages turned.
The old stone interior had a presence, especially at night—I’d noted that previously. But on this night, the eve of my birthday, I noticed that the heavy buffetings of the wind paradoxically seemed to be drowned out by a silence inside the house. A silence that felt alive, possessing an agency of its own. It was as if this silence was listening, watching me, unable to suppress nor confess all its excitement. More than the storm, it was this silence that prevented narcosis from seducing me. I was frightened yet excited to read on, and also wired with a disquiet from—quite literally—reading the room.
After finishing The Black Cat, I turned off the lamp, and surrendered to the weight of the thick quilt, the enveloping darkness, and the elongations of night that accompanies insomnolence. After what might have been minutes or hours, what I intuited as the silence manifest, crawled out from behind the wardrobe in the far left corner of the room, and moved upward into the cornice. For a long time it remained there, still, like a patient spider. I remained very still, too, staring at it intently, knowing it was doing the same to me. Then, very slowly at first, indeterminately, it moved, in a series of viscous, ostensibly coleoideal traceries. Gliding over the walls, wet and tumescent, it engorged around the bedroom as I wrapped myself tightly beneath closed eyelids, and became dream.
Bodiless and slightly aerial, I drifted through an endless corridor, choked by shadow. A soundless, in-between place. The unadorned walls were painted a fleshy puce, like a wound. The floor was carpeted in lurid colours, thick, hairy in texture, which was only somewhat assuaged by the lack of light.
After drifting down this corridor for some time, very faintly at first, I began to hear the muffled ambience of voices, laughter, the ping of glasses, and slot machines being played. I could hear people, yet I could not see anyone. There were no doorways, windows, or any other corridors to my left or right. There was only this corridor. Then silence again. Eventually, the shadows devoured me completely, and for a period unbound by time, there was nothing. No-thing. No self. No experience.
Then—birds. Awareness flooded back with the onrush of scenery. Autumnal effulgence, the trill of birdsong, and crisp, cold air saturated my senses with astonishing clarity. I observed I was still without body as I looked down at the ground, blanketed in hazel sycamore leaves. Before me stood my school. I glided over the yard, and passed through the locked doors effortlessly. Inside, I found the building deserted.
Days blurred into weeks. Months untwined into years, and the abandoned school became my dwelling. Bereft of will or form, I had no faculty but to exist as the school's solitary, shapeless phantom—a spectral custodian of its empty classrooms and corridors. During the cycle of the seasons, I would hear birds singing from beyond the windows, but no one ever visited.
One morning, however, I heard the piano in the assembly hall being played. I quickly glided past the empty classrooms, down the corridors, and into the assembly hall. Somehow, I recognised the music being played. I ventured across the empty hall, over to the piano in the far corner, and looked over the lid. No one was sat there.
As soon as I saw that the stool was vacant, the music abruptly stopped. Carried by some unknown force, I sat down at the piano, raised my suddenly materialised hand, and instinctively struck the final chord. In the chord’s resonance, my entire body coalesced into being.
I looked up over the lid of the piano. The assembly hall, moments ago empty, was now filled with familiar faces—family, friends, everyone I had ever known—all lifeless on the cold floor.
Perhaps most uncanny of all, I had this identical dream recur around the eve of each subsequent birthday until I turned eleven. I’ve never had it since. I know it sounds risible, but it’s true.
Artist page: https://scottbarley.com/