E: Of Camera explores the abortive attempts of two people to be together in the same space. Their situation is a disagreement fuelled by technical difference: the woman exists on video and the man on celluloid film. Events replay out of story sequence as the two realise they are incompatible, that they are being filmed and that there is an audience watching them. The film describes a dread, a noir(ish) situation - that of becoming aware that one is in a frame, is cast inside a narrative which is in the control of others. The differing textures and attributes of video and film become a metaphor for differing traits in people. This is an examination of dissimilarity and the nature of a moving image.

When speaking of film we often refer to filmic space - diegetic space - which accepts that the fourth wall (the camera) will be reinstated in the reverse shot. Shot/reverse shot is now one of the fundamental principles of film process. We as viewers have learned to suspend this space - we know that only eyes or camera have the means to see what we are shown but we have let go of the logic that what we have seen needed eyes or camera to see. In short, when we cut to the reverse, we are not surprised that we don't see the camera that filmed the angle from which we have just cut. The space is completed. We accept this even if the room projected is an empty room, where there are no character eyes to see and show us what they see. When we watch, we are of camera. We have allowed a synthesis between our minds and the process before us. And if this process collapses (crossing the line, a boom appearing in shot, lapses in narrative continuity) we break that contract; that synthesis is lost.
 
 

E: For me, both films speak of a "possible space" between the film text and the film construction (ie, between the diegesis of the internal film world and the respective "real" of the edit suite or the film theatre). Each character exists in this possible space, caught between worlds. They are operating on a cusp between what is possible to them as characters or protagonists and what is possible to us as viewers or makers. They are able to comment on the film system they are sliding along.

Ideally, in The End, Ava would spend hours - an eternity even - sat with those titles, until we as viewers would become forced to exit the film and it's text. Even more ideally, in I Make Things Happen Jo would manage to transcend the text (comparisons with Allen's The Purple Rose of Cairo notwithstanding) and by clicking her fingers change the film as it was occurring. These films propose a curious synthesis between film possibility (technical), film possibility (narrative) and the possibilities of the real.