RACHEL GARFIELD

In this film we aim to draw out the juxtaposition and tension between the beauty and banality of everyday air travel with the high drama that is often played in the cinematic representation of airports and flight, such as melodramatic farewells and/or fatal accidents and disasters. This drama is often represented in popular films where an airport scene represents a moment of import, often at the beginning or end of a film, a famous example being Casablanca.

Over and Out shows airplanes emerging from the sky, shot from a high vantage-point at Heathrow during rush hour. The camera is trained on the exact point of the flight path from which the planes emerge. The frame is filled with the sky and the camera at the limit of its focus, giving a form of pixilation, out of which the planes come into view (and focus), flying straight into the camera, filling the frame and then leaving. This is repeated with the regularity of a metronome. The soundtrack consists of a collage that shifts through the film from found documentary movies that heralded the beginning of a new age of flight, through to the high drama of disaster movies taken from found sound also, as a deflationary device and a metaphor. Using sound from a range of sources, the film tracks the shifting vision of what air travel represents in the past and now in the popular imaginary, from a utopian vision to the agent of climate disaster.