Trims (working title) slates 19-147
Adam Roberts, 2016, 60 min

Introduced by the filmmaker

“In the past, film cameras shot rolls of negative, and from those negatives a print was made – which was then cut up and a few selected pieces joined at will, to produce the “cutting copy”, the desirable form of the film. What remained would be stored as reels of joined up discards, the ‘trims’. These were the rejected or unused takes, as well as the discarded tops and tails of the parts of shots that had been selected for the cutting copy. Here might be found the bad takes, the clapper boards used to identify shots, snatches of overheard director instructions, glimpses of crew, shots with microphones in view and so on. This is what cinema does not want, all that is worthless. But these trims are the mirror of the edited film, a negative cast of the perfection of the cutting copy. The one implies the other, necessarily so.

This project seeks to foreground the absent, the missing. From its cavities we might guess at the lost object. I offer this as a memorial to Chantal Akerman who is not now present, after her sudden death in 2015.” – Adam Roberts

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Screening as part of our Close-Up on Chantal Akerman programme