Desert Islands

Desert Islands is a short film takes a few liberties, in length, text and in music. It’s ironic to think, as I did, that this was something new when, on reflection, this is a model of video making I’ve been using over the years and that probably stretches all the way back to Super 8 projects in the 1980s. Like those early films, Desert Islands uses a text as the basic driver of the video, in this case extracts from Giles Deleuze’s 1954 essay on what constitutes ‘desertedness’, and very specific music to create a mood, here vintage Italian library music composed by Egisto Macchi. Although the production method remains, the points of reference are different this time, recalling those mid century French quasi-docs that married philosophy with a European sense of the exotic, made all the more acute by the use of black and white imagery. I was thinking a lot of Chris Marker, Alain Robb-Grillet and ‘Society of the Spectacle’ documentary. Kind of a weird thing to make in 2024, but nostalgia takes many forms.