UNMUTE
LAST HOURS OF ANCIENT SUNLIGHT
2009
16mm
colour
sound
7.09
min

‘Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight’ encapsulates how ancient mythology foreshadows and shapes modern society. A frieze of Roman marble serves as the inspiration for a staged play: a choreographed sequence involving five actors. The film stages the collision of ancient myth and modern dance through a split screen. One side of the screen slowly roves over a Roman frieze depicting the myth of Medea, while running parallel on the adjacent side, actors perform an avant-garde-inspired dance, directly responding to the gestures and actions depicted in the frieze. These simultaneous streams of film create a synchronicity between past and present, overlapping different temporalities and causing them to converge. As they mingle, move, and merge, the bodies of the actors become conduits through which myth and history are viscerally articulated in the present. Current interpretations of the past and past projections of the future intermingle, reconfiguring each other. Caught within each other’s mutually looping gravitational pull, they become inflected with the influence of the other. ‘Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight’ thus fractures the traditional linearity of history and film, allowing new connections and narratives to emerge. The collusion between the bound identities of film and fictionalized history reinforces the artificial space of cinema, amplifying the self-reflexive construction and disruptive chronology of structural filmmaking.

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Cast
Manuela Ruggiero, Emile Clarke, Marc-Alexander, Morelli, Jamie de Spirito, Irene Cioni
Directors of Photography
Belinda Parsons, Margaret Salmon
Producer
Ioanna Karavela
Editors
Ursula Mayer, Konrad Welz, Michelle Deignan
Dance Choreography
Manuela Ruggiero
Sound Design
Konrad Welz
Costume Stylist
Margaret Andrew
Make-up
Fiona Tanner
Gaffer
Frank Usher
Props
Martin Fletcher
Lighting Assistants
Gareth Brough, Mark Bayley
Special Thanks
Monitor Rome, Giorgio Angella