Time Regained (2012)

Looking through old tapes in search of something else entirely, I discovered this footage, filmed while Lucy and I were staying at the house in which I grew up. She was not however (as perhaps might be interpreted) the family cat.

In the intervening years I have forgotten the details of the abandoned project. I recall vaguely an exploration of time and space, or perhaps extrapolate a coherence formerly lacking in recurring shots of doors and clocks(?). The footage of Lucy wandering around the house of which I have no recollection filming, was presumably a spontaneous digression, inspired by the rather picturesque quality of my companion, relatively recently acquired on a sudden whim when her previous owner expressed to my dismay no desire to retain (to my presumably then unbiased eyes) the most beautiful feline I'd encountered. She is the only cat I have ever regarded my own and we shared a number of years and homes together. (The couch surfers who appear here and elsewhere tumbled in the backdoor).

Unusually I had rewound the tape and recorded over the footage at the window, the remaining shots appearing like a ghost, fragmented and deteriorated, to witness an idiosyncratic, neo-structuralist, Proustian home movie examining the fracturing of time, locality and visual memory.


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