The Moving Still

Eloise Coveny

The Moving Still frames itself as a existential phenomenological philosophical enquiry that is brought to the fields of film and photography via the uncanny. The uncanny has its legacy in psychoanalysis (which I draw on) and here is further developed into the realm of phenomenological encounter. There is something about the uncanny’s un-predetermined temporality that poses a crucial site for philosophically questioning our existence in relation to the moving still mediums. The Moving Still takes the house as its “subject”, a profound locale for accessing the uncanny, in terms of histories; both fleeting and monumental. The house in this project becomes a dislocated existent, uprooted from its original intended locale and moved to a relocations yard. The project aims to reveal notions of dislocation and enframing through questioning what is proper to a house, history and filmic disclosure. Through a process of recording relocated houses via the archiving mediums of still photography, moving image and sound, I have re-created a series of histories through unconventional means although drawing upon the history of filmic conventions. The paradoxic of our temporal existence is again activated in historic regions across both the monumental or fleeting (collective or singular). These histories rely on archived or recorded information, to register as being true and known, lost or forgotten.