Film credits
Performers: Gino Aiello, Lily Coates, Libby Little & Gavin Youngs
Cinematography: Clemens Habicht and Mel O'Callaghan
Curator: Juliana Engberg Commissioned by the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, 2012
MEL O’CALLAGHAN
The Fall 2004
Colour video with sound, 4 minutes 8 seconds (looped)
Courtesy of the artist; Galerie Allen, Paris; and Cassandra Bird, Sydney
O'Callaghan's first film, The Fall, sets the tone for the artist's enduring focus on locations present and haunted by water and the thresholds of human experience. The Fall is a sudden death played out via a slow-motion pictorial script: corporeal gestures, a sculptural billowing parachute, the dark swell of the ocean, a body plunging into the water, and, finally, a slow descent to the ocean floor. The film is set to an incongruous soundtrack that is part-vocal, part-instrumental and the fragmented narrative shifts attention between physical forms and interior psychological states. The Fall is the artist’s reflection of French oceanographer, filmmaker, and undersea explorer Jacques-Yves Cousteau’s ruminations on the visual fragmentation of deep-sea diving and the odd euphoria of submergence. The Fall displays O’Callaghan’s fierce insistence on going deeper, beneath the surface and beyond the physical, to experiment with frequencies of emotion and consciousness.
Film credits
Performer: Daniel Carlisle
Composer: Kim Moyes
Cinematographer: Benjamin Storrier
Editor: Mel O’Callaghan and Andrew van der Westhuyzen, Collider Films
Stunt coordinator: Brit Sooby
Producer: Clemens Habicht
MEL O’CALLAGHAN
The Fall 2004
Colour video with sound, 4 minutes 8 seconds (looped)
Courtesy of the artist; Galerie Allen, Paris; and Cassandra Bird, Sydney
O'Callaghan's first film, The Fall, sets the tone for the artist's enduring focus on locations present and haunted by water and the thresholds of human experience. The Fall is a sudden death played out via a slow-motion pictorial script: corporeal gestures, a sculptural billowing parachute, the dark swell of the ocean, a body plunging into the water, and, finally, a slow descent to the ocean floor. The film is set to an incongruous soundtrack that is part-vocal, part-instrumental and the fragmented narrative shifts attention between physical forms and interior psychological states. The Fall is the artist’s reflection of French oceanographer, filmmaker, and undersea explorer Jacques-Yves Cousteau’s ruminations on the visual fragmentation of deep-sea diving and the odd euphoria of submergence. The Fall displays O’Callaghan’s fierce insistence on going deeper, beneath the surface and beyond the physical, to experiment with frequencies of emotion and consciousness.
Film credits
Performer: Daniel Carlisle
Composer: Kim Moyes
Cinematographer: Benjamin Storrier
Editor: Mel O’Callaghan and Andrew van der Westhuyzen, Collider Films
Stunt coordinator: Brit Sooby
Producer: Clemens Habicht