Images & Words: A Double Bill @ Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh

Images & Words combines two short films which both use spoken word and video, but which couldn’t be more different

Article by Dominic Corr | 13 Feb 2019
  • Images and Words

Sometimes life just isn’t fair, is it? You’ve spent your years obsessively controlling its day-to-day aspects, every frame, each tiny detail carefully considered and then BAM! Someone ends up pregnant. How do you care, teach and nurture a child when you’re still trying to do this for yourself?

What Ainslie Henderson, the creator and performer of Adjust (★★★★) accomplishes in 15 minutes for an unrefined product is remarkable. To produce a stop-motion animated short, including set-up, capture and editing is commendable.

At first, his fidgeting manner – fumbling around with lighting rigs, cameras and audio – seems worrisome, and the lack of focus onscreen does make us wonder how "work in progress" Adjust actually is. But every anxious thought is quashed the instant the frames are pasted together to show the first scene.

Using no more than seeds, grains and other size indicators of the foetuses’ growth, Henderson achieves emotion as well as showcasing technical capability. The set-up works too, striving for control amongst the chaos of equipment all around serves to further the narrative.

Adjust in its current state shows exponential promise as both short film and live theatre. Henderson’s humour, sincerity and stage presence as an animator and not a performer all work in his favour.

Herein lies an issue of theatre and film, the two are monumentally different in the most trivial of ways. Here, cinematic coverage feels to be in competition, not balance, with the live performance aspect. Whilst Adjust integrates the two seamlessly, in Looking for Lucey (★★), produced by Femmes Film Curators Collective and Hall of Bright Stones, the attempts to work off of one another causes friction.

The images onscreen are sourced largely from the work of the scienfific film pioneer, Eric Lucey, with the aid of the University of Edinburgh’s Centre for Research Collection. Lucey’s intent was to offer a deeper understanding of the world through a variety of cinematic techniques. Edited by Becca Selby-Heard, the film itself is impressive and cut together in a rounded, if slightly erratic manner.

The cinematography consists of lighting effects or microphotography; intense zooms on materials such as plant matter. While the aesthetic is pleasing, and the technical capability is evident – the real question is: why? We see the flowing nature of the microscopic plants, spliced with images of small objects, Edinburgh, and vintage train rides but it all seems to be style over substance.

Then there’s the narration. Whilst in Adjust, the narration was flowing – emotive and concurrent with precisely what was happening on screen - in Looking for Lucey, JL Williams’ poetry cannot find footing. The words and images feel as though they were created separately, then merged together, so the semiotics are lost between overly-saturated poetry and too literal film technique.


Images and Words: A Double Bill @ Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, run ended
manipulatefestival.org/whatson/images-words-a-double-bill