Abstract
The work of the Welsh experimental filmmaker Scott Barley (b. 1992) can be characterized by its obsession with the night and a sense for the cosmic. Watching one of his films is to be immersed into a world of landscapes, plants and animals shrouded in a deep, dark night or cold fog.
The presence of the medium used, be it film or digital, is very much part of the images. Here, landscapes are not the grounds on which people live.
Rather they are cosmic, they appear as a living force and not as the dead object of modern European cosmology. The images, which only rarely feature anything reminding the viewer of humans presence, are painterly.
They are materialist images, that is images where the materiality of the media involved do not disappear behind a seemingly transparent motion image. And that Scott Barley uses different camera technology and different representational strategies in every film, serves only to underline the non-representationality of his work.