ARCHIVIST cleaving among the houses from John Sturgeon on Vimeo.

produced and directed by: John Sturgeon, 2010
21:30 mins., HD 720p, 5.1 Dolby surround (or stereo)

An experimental poetic work spun from a train-rush of collective imprints of war and idiosyncratic archiving as memory, “Archivist’s” multi-stream image collages scroll or overlap within the larger frame, as a poetic thread fuses with acoustic compositions. Arching from the collective to the personal – themes of war and sanctioned abuse move through touchstone-images of grizzly conflict to ancient texts. These mix with more subterranean themes and finally trundle towards a meditation on personal cargo and mortality. “Archivist” is as much about the act or urge of archiving as antiwar piece or memento mori. As the subtitle’s contrasting meanings for ‘cleaving’ suggest, our attempts to categorize often are inherently unstable, double edged and can become blind and useless.