St. Malo, Facsimile

St. Malo, Facsimile: an essay [January 2004; Cambridge University Moving Image Studio] is a digital video that examines the experience of walking the French city of St. Malo. Musicians Chris Weston and Eric White were asked to compose a soundtrack using an original poem ‘St. Malo, Facsimile’ as a loose script. The video derived from four-days spent filming inside the old city walls of St. Malo. The method used was adapted from the Situationiste Internationale’s practice of the dérive to explore the city’s architectural routing and re-routing of pedestrians, and also included a simultaneous investigation — through written notes, which eventually became a second poem also titled 'St. Malo, Facsimile' — of the subjective and at times obstructive experience of interacting with the city via the camera lens. Following, a rough cut was made of the footage, and then the final piece amalgamating music/images/text was negotiated with Weston and White. Both the source poem ‘St. Malo, Facsimile’ and the video script ‘St. Malo, Facsimile: An Essay in Three Parts’ are available to read on my Substack Orium: In Process.