Private Project

Passage Of Sound

Passage of Sound eschews narrative, establishing instead co-ordinates which are principally those of modernist poetic cinema; long takes sometimes in slowed motion, fixed camera positions with the figure moving through space in ‘real’ time, no sense of a contextualised narrative, no character motivation, no causality, and no dialogue. The soundtrack establishes an evocative register that connects the Irish viewer with the saliences of a memorialised past and a memorialised landscape.
The four elements make their alliances, earth, fire, air and water. He is islanded in a way that dramatizes his exceptional humanity and emphasises his desire to deliver to the world the decoded essence of the other world in a plaintive air. He is prepared to tolerate privation in order to receive the discrete music of the world.
One of the most interesting aspects of the film is the viewer’s received sense of a multi-layered or tangential reality. It feels like a version of the Proustian definition of what is constant in both the past and the present, worlds which are ‘real without being actual, ideal without being abstract.’ The realities are contingent on the subject who is both in passage through time and space while sensing the sublime co-ordinates that interleave the manifest world. The film also seems to reference Deluze and his concept of non-spatio temporal reality, a virtual construct which is not apparent though real. The figure in the film seems to be in a state of co-temporal elision, he exists within his own frame of time, a contained minor vibration.

  • Shelagh Honan
    Director
  • Shelagh Honan
    Producer
  • Aleksandra Rydzkowska
    Colour Correction
  • John Greenwood
    Sound Design
  • Shelagh Honan
    Cinamatographer
  • Shelagh Honan
    Visual Editor
  • Shelagh Honan
    Director
  • Project Type:
    Experimental
  • Runtime:
    21 minutes 3 seconds
  • Completion Date:
    September 21, 2017
  • Production Budget:
    12,000 EUR
  • Country of Origin:
    Ireland
  • Country of Filming:
    Ireland
  • Shooting Format:
    4K
  • Aspect Ratio:
    16.9
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    No
  • Student Project:
    No
Director Biography - Shelagh Honan, Shelagh Honan

Shelagh Honan is a visual artist based in the west of Ireland. Working predominantly in experimental video, sound, photography, projection and installation.
Her practice concerns the development of new strategies to present narrative through video, sound and projective environments.
Between 2019 and 2020 she exhibited in the wom@rts series of lens based media exhibitions, opening in Maribor, Slovenia,  Vilnius (Lithuania), Santiago de Compostela (Spain) and Rijeka (Croatia). Two further events will take place in Angoulême (France) and in Limerick (Ireland).
 2018 Her work 'Passage of Sound' was selected for Blow Up International Film festival in Chicago, and several other film festivals in Ireland. 
In 2017 she was commissioned by Clare County Council to create Passage of Sound an outdoor video installation which ran for the duration of the festival.
In 2016 she was director and cinematographer for ‘Seomra 1916’, a 30-minute documentary that was part of the Galway Fringe Festival and Feile an Phobail in Belfast.Her short video piece ‘The Diving Bell’ (Passage) was also part of the Galway Fringe Festival and the Ennis Street Arts Festival. In 2014 she exhibited in the USA and completed a solo exhibition at The Courthouse Gallery in Ennistymon. She has curated many multi-media group exhibitions throughout Ireland including an event for ‘The Photography Ireland Festival’ in Faber Studios in Limerick. She has also been the recipient of many arts council grants in relation to the exhibition of her own work and curating group shows. She was a founding member of Ennis Arts Initiative.
She is a full time lecturer at Limerick School of Art and Design lecturing in B/A Program in Photography Film Video.
She received her Masters Degree in Interactive Media from The University of Limerick 2010 and her primary degree in Fine Art Sculpture from Limerick School of Art and Design 1994.

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Director Statement

Artist Statement
I am intrigued by the capacity of the landscape to reflect our own world, our values, our histories, our culture our experiences and even our future. The human condition, has always been an undercurrent in my work and this is reflected in my most recent works, through the treatment of the landscape in film and sound.
My work is landscape based; the landscape acts as a vehicle that allows me to express something other, something intangible like identity, memory, presence, absence, loss and trepidation.
These works and their associated narratives both real and imagined, are shaped from the geographies and the fabric of the place itself, touching on the stories, and the histories that are embedded within.

Her films establish an evocative register that connects the viewer with the saliences of a memorialised past and a memorialised landscape.