“Dead finks don’t talk”, 4’30”, 2002

I make films to investigate the uniqueness events; different states of awareness; coincidental failures of communication and the coexistence of conflict, violence and sexuality in human relations. I am interested in the criteria of truth, authenticity and the uncertainties of viewing and telling in order to establish terms of corroborating information.

My films are highly orchestrated and choreographed. I seek to examine the destruction, reduction and abstraction of events to unveil indirect elliptical narratives deprived of closure. Recent projects have been involved with thinking about types of behaviour in certain situations, suggesting patterns of organisation and choreographing scenes within a specific timescale. The linearity within my work is to do with action that creates and emphasizes anxiety, a consistent framework is the documentation of movement and the language of gesture displacing the movement and the action, a sense of gesture in the relationships between the figures.

In ‘Means without ends - notes on politics’, Agamben writes on the kind of loss of meaning in human movement and how people behave socially and come to terms with this loss; what happens historically when the meaning of gestures is lost, what gesture becomes when its embeddness is lost, it is to do with displacement and mechanisation, with a brechtian aspect. Perhaps then this socio-political function of gesture is a way to connect and link the two aspects of my work - films shot as live-action and films made with found footage.

Gina Tornatore