Behind the Shadows
16.30 minutes, 2009

With score by Martin Arnold
Performed by Continuum Contemporary Music
 
Outside the window a storm unlike no other is taking shape. Behind the Shadows documents the imagined moment when the delicate balance between natural and developed worlds began to shift. Looking back upon an event yet to occur, time inside this threatened world is caught in an endless loop.  Seeming to have no end, it stutters…repeats…extends. As if caught in a void between dream and reality, characters struggle to reconcile threats from the outside environment
.– Christina Battle  
 
Filmmaker Guy Debord, during the early days of the Situationist International, led the formulation of a particular concept of drifting, the dérive: “a technique of transient passage through varied ambiances. The dérive entails playful-constructive behaviour and awareness of psychogeographical effects; which completely distinguishes it from the classical notions of the journey and the stroll.”  Behind the Shadows is not about a dérive; rather it offers—at least, to my mind—an amorphous, shifting network of locations, varied ambiences, for my imagination to constructively drift through.  The psychogeographical effects that accompany my dérive certainly take place in spaces that are well behind the shadows; but they are also radically in between any solid surface that would catch and hold a shadow.
- Martin Arnold

Behind the Shadows was commissioned by The Images Festival (Toronto) as a part
of SHIFT: A Transatlantic Festival of the Arts in Amsterdam, November 2008.

Thanks for the generous support of the Canada Council for The Arts and Continuum Music