EPHEMERAL LOVE

Salise Hughes creates new forms from recycled film footage, if only for a moment

By Leone Fogle

When film artist Salise Hughes looks at old film footage as raw material for a new film, she turns the sound down so she’s not “sucked in by the plot.” She lets her mind wander and waits for something to “just strike” her. At the beginning she feels like everything is possible. Then she goes through an uncomfortable period of time during which she’s “dangling by a thread.” She says, “I’ll be in the middle of the film and I feel like it’s going nowhere. Then I come to the end—and it works—and it feels like it’s a miracle.”

There is much about Hughes’ work that is enigmatic besides her creative process. Her films are essentially collages of old movie clips transformed by erasure and layering, with images that flicker and figures that float in vibrating negative space. The clips are so transfigured from the original footage that they no longer resemble it or the intentions of the original writers and directors who years ago attempted to realize their visions.

Hughes started as a visual artist; her work has followed a path from labor-intensive drawings in different mediums, into film. The films are time consuming: the rendering on Photoshop takes approximately 5-15 minutes for one second of her film.

“One of the differences between visual art and film is how long something should be—it’s pacing. In painting, everything is there the whole time; it sits with you. In film, things unfold.”

Some time after she taught life drawing classes at Cornish College of the Arts in the early 90s, Hughes became aware of the paradox of trying to capture a moment of the model’s life.

“When we draw, we are holding on to something that no longer exists,” she says. One of her films, How to Draw Clouds, is about the impossibility of holding on to that which is transitory. The effort of drawing clouds before they morph inspires a flurry of sketches on the screen. The clouds, because they cannot be fixed, disappear from the sky and leave only an outline rendering. Then the rendering disappears, too.

In her new film, Shiny Things, the theme is desire. For Hughes, human desire is a constant, but the “object of desire is ephemeral.” She knew early on in the creative process that she wanted footage of a heist.

“Desire is about the feeling that is inspired by an object, but it’s not about the object itself,” she says. “Money itself is not pretty to look at. But the desire is connected to what the money stands for, freedom, comfort… anything you want to attach to it. It works for a while, and then you need more of it.”

Shiny Things incorporates clips from two old films, Violent Saturday and Pete Kelly’s Blues, providing footage of a robbery and of a nightclub singer performing. The three robbers—one is Lee Marvin—hold up a bank while a female vocalist sings Neil Young’s “Heart of Gold.” The film is mostly in black and white, but Hughes uses blue—“an ethereal color”—to highlight the bags of money and the singer who is desirous of finding love. The blue bags are lost or dropped as the robbers engage in a gunfight.

Hughes says she deliberately kept the hero out of the film. “The gun fire comes from out of nowhere. I didn’t want the film to be about good versus bad. I am a little sympathetic towards the misplaced ideals of the thieves.”

As they are hit and spin to the ground, the thieves’ bodies turn black and their desires are “voided out.” The blue female singer sings on to the strains of music played by indifferent musicians. A curtain of twinkling blue beads, recycled from footage of the chandelier from Krzysztof Kieslowski’s film Blue, appears near the beginning and end of the film and is a stand-in for the object of desire that the thieves never attain.

Hughes wants the singer to serve more than one role in the film; she is a “torch singer expressing her own desires, as well as an ethereal being giving commentary.” But she would like her female singer’s motivations to remain unclear.

“We don’t know what she means by searching for ‘a heart of gold’— maybe she’s searching for a heart that’s made of gold.”

Salise Hughes

CREW BOX
Creator: Salise Hughes
Music: Jason Staczek and Alicia Dara