FILM
FIRST PERSON MONOLOGUE
I have always been into motion-pictures and can take or leave plots, leaning more towards the offbeat, low-budget, arthouse, horror and related genres - ideally generally abstracted non-linear with legible segments interspersed; something like a full-length feature film of material in the area of the LSD freakout scene in Easy Rider (1969) - but didn't start trying to make them myself until I was in my late-teens.
Around 1989, I acquired enough Super/Standard 8 equipment (including an ingenious Super 8 camera with a flip-out mirror door by which one could add superimpositions as you were shooting the main scene) to get things off the ground, but I didn't really know what I wanted to do, couldn't be bothered learning the technical side of filmmaking, and the cine film stock, processing and other production costs were too expensive, and so didn't go beyond making film-loops from kung fu flicks and amateur striptease reels I obtained from mail-order emporiums.
With the welcome advent of cheaply available secondhand analogue video cameras, in the early-2000s I made a tentative foray into the production of no-budget experimental film, augmented by assembly-edit sequences sourced from broadcast TV as it happened and found video-tapes, that were laboriously but enjoyably constructed on two standard domestic VHS video recorders, but I wasn't happy with the results of what I had actually filmed so ended up deleting most of this original footage and only using the television cut/ups, with a dedicated OKOKian soundtrack, that ended up as the OKOK Videos 1, 2/3 & 4 (2002-2003), each being around 3-hours in duration. The whole lot (along with a few almost unpublished shorter works like Lucifer [2004] and myriad untitled items) really need to be digitised from the VHS master-tapes and then ritually concentrated into a single, super-powerful DVD release.
Now, in 2017, I possess rudimentary digital video cameras and basic digital editing software, plus gadgets like a spywatch (a wristwatch containing a hidden miniature video/stills camera) and a set of those universal clip-on (fisheye/wide-angle/macro) lenses, and have been working strong on some short and longer poetic and related videos. These none need explaining, just experiencing, suffice to say that they are made because they can be, and some take ages to do, without trying. I just create or accumulate varyingly disparate visual and audio material (that doesn't give a fuck about the fuck-giving; the luxury of the uncommercial underground), some of which may successfully meld together at an undefined point in the future. My Derive 2 (2017), realised in North Wales, is quite a good congruence:
I am continuing via "learning by doing", and like the action, the possibilities. These light-and-sound works are designed to be inventive, aesthetically accomplished and information rich, that also seem to, or perhaps ultimately, function as 'otherness advertisements'. Most of the 'finished' ones can now be seen in full on my YouTube channel. Others unsuitable for that platform's erratic, robot-led censorship policies can be found on Odysee. No adverts, paywalls, annotation pop-ups or usually not even title cards or credit rolls, as I want the whole of the material to be like a freeform jigsaw where each piece or partial thereof can be fitted somewhere else. This is where I am coming from.
THIRD PERSON MONOLOGUE
Mark Reeve is an experimental film-maker known for his surreal and apocalyptic visions of a dystopian present and future Britain. His deliberately short films function as avant-garde adverts or trailers for a beyond post-structuralist gambit, that explore dark and twisted hallucinatory notions of sexuality, politics, popular culture, religion, identity and uncertain reality, coupled with the possibilities of dreams and the subconscious. They feature anarchist malcontents, aliens, werewolves, living skulls and other strange characters, with an overall theme of iconoclastic psychedelic mysticism, which suggests the possibility of a new Luciferian cinema. Too much of a moralist to be a spy but too unhinged to lay off the search for secrets, Mark Reeve has learned that psychosis has its plus points; wonders what fundamentally informs the false narrative of 24/7 mass-media; knows the UFO and its denizens is the antidote to the thread used to bind the confederacy of dunces and other sodalities.