Pink and White Terraces Film Screening

15 May 2007. Free entry.

Nova Paul's 16mm film Pink and White Terraces, reflects on the delicate construction of domestic environments and public places in the Tamaki Makaurau and Manukau cityscapes. Using an optical process technique 'three-colour separation', the film makes visible several moments simultaneously. In red, green and blue layers, colour-coded auras hold a record of time like a geological accretion. In and out of phase, actors and environment focus and fade, making palpable filmic time, and gently unfolding the politics and poetics of the sites explored.

Cities are living entities. The density of communal living in urban space necessitates acts of creativity to individualise and shape the environment to reflect you, your family, your network of friends, to make it home. Like water, people find a route through the most complex or oblique channels to lead a self-determined life. This can manifest in the way we decorate our homes, or where we choose to do business or spend our leisure time. Within a city, points of contact with others vary from the most fleeting of encounters to life-long friendships. How are these myriad of networks made tangible, how do they inform the way our cities look and change? How does the domestic influence the civic?

The film is comprised of a series of static shots where the same place or action has been recorded three times, making tangible that no location is static, people move through space, and qualities of light and weather change. From barren trees in winter afternoon light through to a hot summer day on a front porch with friends, washing dishes at night or getting dressed to go out, shopping at a busy Sunday market to popping in to the dairy. The soundtrack by Rachel Shearer uses atmospheric sound recorded during the shoot mixed with a palette of sounds derived from the colour presence on screen, a union of the abstract and the figurative. Pink and White Terraces traces little happenings, things we do without acknowledging them as 'significant', but which speak clearly about who we are individually and collectively.