Ghost Dances
A family archive of home movies. Happy children dancing from the 1950s to the 1990s. But when you slow the film down, do you reveal a secret history or create a fiction? Do these faces foreshadow the nuanced emotions of their future lives, the people they became, at 10 frames a second- or does it impose a reading on them with the benefit of hindsight: a wisdom after the event that already knows some would live, some die too soon?
Some would live. But the children they were are all ghosts now, different people from a past recorded in lost places on a lost format. Slowly the lived truth will fade as the film fades, brittles, stalls in the gate, snaps- burns. Perhaps the flickering uncertain light from the projector of memory becomes itself the ghost that haunts this fiction or dream reading, raised or summoned through the paranormal motion. A film about memory and ghosts.
Chris Bowman is based in Glasgow, Scotland
Chris Bowman is a writer, filmmaker and sound designer. He is trying to find out what these terms mean by investigating different forms of narrative, putting words, sounds and images into whatever container and pattern seems most appropriate at the time. In this way he hopes to build some kind of multi-dimensional journal which will tell him what his life was later. The flaw in this ambition is of course the subjective nature of hindsight: which makes the aspiration at once constructive and probably doomed to failiure. Fair enough.
He has received several commissions and was EMARE resident filmmaker at Werkleitz Gesellschaft. His work has been shown widely in European and UK festivals, and his film afterlife toured the world with the best of Berlin Transmediale.03 Festival showcase.