Requiem for an Ice Baby

The fleeting memories of a melting infant – live action, animation and re-photography (through ice).

Bookended by moments of kitsch, the main section of ‘RFAIB’ - which makes up 3/4 of the film’s running time - suddenly takes a decidedly more experimental tack. Here’s how and why… 

Having read in Visionary Film how Ken Jacobs went around his apartment projecting a 16mm print of Joseph Cornell’s Rose Hobart.

‘on the ceiling, in mirrors, bouncing it all over the room, in corners, in focus, out of focus… backwards’

I became intrigued about the possibilities of repurposing material through re-photography. It was then a short journey to constructing a densely edited 30 foot Super 8 film loop and then re-filming it through a handheld sheet of ice, altering frame rate and the position of the ice (it was cold, melting and pretty slippery) along the way.

The Ice Baby bits were added soon afterwards, as a new micro cinema had opened in my area and I wanted to make sure to e-a-s-e folk gently into and out of my more esoteric avant garde antics…