Image credit: Michal Durink

I was beginning to see finally that they were a beginning – that the artistry of the film might be to draw lines of action, like a grid of activity, which showed places that pulsated with life – like the dance-floors, or the toilets – ones that seemed to be a way station from one activity to another, like the bar – and ones where everything seemed to disappear into entropy.

Maybe this was like an allegory of life, the macrocosm hidden in the microcosm, or something equally profound. The cycles of life, played out on a smaller stage, a nightclub at night, form following function, people unknowingly repeating the larger patterns which were the inevitability of their life, then death, then nothingness.

Perhaps over the centuries human consciousness had evolved only to be repetitive and functional. Perhaps the crowning achievement of humankind knowing itself was to be bored with itself and to just not care enough to do anything different. It would be an interesting conclusion to reach, although a depressing one I suppose. But perhaps we’d crawled out of the primordial sludge and knew ourselves only to not really care.

Or we really are like robots, limited by our programming, conscious only in relation to what we can knowingly experience and see. There could be something in that, given what I found, but then, I found it. So doesn’t that mean something more is possible? Or is self delusion part of the programming also?

In any case, I wasn’t thinking that deeply about it at the time. Finding the other, the strangeness elevates your philosophical musings I find, but at the time I was just searching for a pattern that was remotely interesting and informative. And with this realization I was thinking maybe there was something there. Maybe a combination of night energy, physical longing and exertion, drugs and alcohol, and the social instinct, make us replay the essential pathways of our lives without us even realizing we are doing so. Perhaps at night we know our own mortality better in the reptilian areas of our brains.

Or perhaps it was just an idea I had, an artistic tableau, a structure within which I could place the rhythm of this project.

I imagined coloured lines of light creating the patterns – I saw them like one might on some computer game. The moment the idea came to me it was like a revelation, the way through. The lines danced before me. I saw them, even in their actual absence. And the patterns started to emerge, leading always towards and away from the bar, like some source of more than alcohol, some source of life and light and animation.

The bar – my eyes kept returning to the bar. And it was then, as I began to isolate my attention to that set of films from a range of nights, just in at the bar, that the real mystery struck me.

I may not have noticed if she hadn’t been gorgeous. But hey, George wouldn’t have employed her if she wasn’t. Strange though, I didn’t know who she was. She clearly worked the bar for him, but he’d never mentioned her. George generally talked about everyone he employed, particularly the women – and on this topic his descriptions were not well phrased but very intense on certain aspects (I need not, I think, give you an example? I am sure you have the idea by now about George…).

So it was odd. I first thought, well, who is she? And that got me watching her.

And that was when I realized. She was very, very strange.

(c) Helen M Valentina 2015, All Rights Reserved