Cold opens
16mm B&W film, hand processed & digitised
before the opening credits used to set up the episode and catch the audience's attention.
Ingmar Bergman’s cold opening for Persona presents a catalogue of images that call attention
to both the motion picture apparatus and a montage of the different forms that cinematic expression
can take.
Distillation of information is inherent to the film and photographic medium. Visual information recorded with the camera is reduced and abstracted through the alchemical interaction of light, silver crystals and salt. Central to early film history is the notion of the special effect whereby minimum amount of mechanism was used to cause magical phenomenon evading explanation.
Cold Opens is a body of work emerging from research into the exploratory zeal of such diverse figures as photography pioneer Henry Fox Talbot, amateur meteorologist William ‘Snowflake’ Bentley (who through DIY photography techniques proved that no two snow crystals are identical) and typographer Adrian Frutiger. In his design work and writing Frutiger grapples with the conceptual slippage between what constitutes text and image. He explores the compositional tension between dark and light that constitutes the simple action of writing on a page. Cold Opens considers filmmaking as an act of writing, where writing is made from visual signs that became a language over time.