An Unkindness of Ravens, a new moving image installation by Gabrielle Amodeo, deals with the performance of the objects of pause. This intriguing subject is worked through by protagonists in action, paralysed by time.

In filmmaking or drama a script and a recording bookend a performance: two points of stillness that open and close an act, and everything at play. The script’s iteration fulfills its intention, but it is an inherently passive object; it waits to be acted. A recording, on the other hand, documents the act and waits to be seen. The script sits poised ahead of speech and the recording recollects.

Amodeo exhibits both bookends in the Film Archive’s Wellington mediagallery space. Here our gallery and activity - the collection of film histories - complete the construction of a triangle between the two works and our institution.

The recorded work is based on the penultimate gunfight from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966). Amodeo takes the protagonists of this dusty Spaghetti Western and forces them to perpetually continue their standoff, quietly, yet disquietingly, staring at each other across the space.

The other work exhibited is a personal take on pause, a moment in family history frozen by time and represented by a document – the script.

“After his death, when clearing out his house, Mum found Uncle Roger’s furled script from a 1960 school production of Wind in the Willows in which he starred as Toad,” Amodeo recalls. “Illicitly unreturned and then kept by him for fifty-one years, this script is a record of breath expended, words spoken, lines acted.”

Detached from its original use, the script’s fragile pages reveal the lines, notes and drawings of its now-absent actor.


The exhibition will run from 15 February until 13 April 2013.