Morgan Quaintance: Four Shorts

(Morgan Quaintance, UK, 2020-2022)

Surviving You, Always (2020, 18 mins)

As in much contemporary film and video work, London-based artist-critic Morgan Quaintance likes to set two starkly different tracks in parallel motion. In the case of Surviving You, Always, both tracks involve drug use.

On the soundtrack, the mellifluous tones of Timothy Leary and Ram Dass extoll open pathways of perception and a drug-purified reality. Meanwhile, in still photos, 1970s video footage, and text printed on screen, we imbibe a very impure, gritty British reality: a pained recollection of wasted years, violent suburbia, imprisonment, looming psychosis, and a doomed love relationship.

Surviving You, Always is a haunting and unadorned testament that works in the gap between Utopian fantasy and crushing mundanity.

A Human Certainty (2021, 20 mins)

The design of the credits suggests a parody of soap opera, but Quaintance’s recounting of a lost love is serious business.

As in Surviving You, Always, sound and image split: a narration inscribed in titles rubs against archival songs (The Turbans) and speeches (positive-thinking guru Norman Vincent Peale) on the audio track.

Here, however, the essayistic musing wanders far: to the autoimmune condition of Saint Lidwina, the tabloid photographer Weegee, and a spiritualist grandmother.

What connects it all is the memorial spectre of death and loss – which definitely rate among the rare human certainties.

Sixth Form Acid (2022, 2 mins)

Structuralist-formalist montage to a techno beat: at first, it would seem that Quaintance is revisiting old video footage to evoke a 1990s memory of music and experience.

But then our perception shifts: it is current footage, but shot where: maybe UK, USA, or Rotterdam’s WORM Institute for Avantgardistic Recreation?

As always, Quaintance deliberately scrambles the time-frames, cultural contexts, personal recollections and collective chronicles. Catch whichever wave you can in it, and do it quickly, because the work doesn’t last long in projection!

Rollostraat 18 (2021, 1 minute)

Like Sixth Form Acid (and at half of that film’s 2-minute length!), this forms part of Quaintance’s ongoing Miniatures series, each dedicated to exploring “a single formal, conceptual or structural idea”, using “cheaper and handheld mediums” to allow a “quicker, more intuitive and playful approach to production”.

Its title pegs an address in Rotterdam, but these flashes of everyday impressionism (set to cool jazz piano) of and from an interior space – walls, corners, lights, plants, shadows, the trees outside, a cat – evoke sensations that belong to many times and places, in both the filmmaker’s biography and, beyond the frame, the spectator’s own.

© Adrian Martin October 2021 / August 2022