Hidden Hearts of Fish

Details: 1993, 2.5 mins, 16mm

Summary: About the inability and lack of desire to communicate.

Credits
Discussion
Festivals & distribution
Technique

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Credits

Made by Lucy Lee

Discussion

(written in 1993)
I will start with a description of the basic idea. The contrast of two methods of communication. There are two contrasting characters. One is represented by the voice on the sound track, I’ll call him (although it's actually a woman) “word” character. The other is represented by a visual representation of thoughts, “visual” character. "Word" wants to know what "visual" is thinking. She is thinking about deep sea fish. Unfortunately he needs her to explain in words, but she doesn’t know how. He then asks her to draw him something. She does, but he doesn’t know what the drawings are saying. They speak different languages. The drawings she does for him explain how certain fish hide parts of themselves (their hearts) away in the ocean bed so they will always be hidden from predators. This is where the title of the film comes from. It describes a similar thing in people. "Word" eventually gives up with "visual", who continues to think about deep sea fish.

(I guess now I think that the hiding activity is about the lack of desire to communicate. Because although she makes a very clear effort to communicate, niether characters can or bother to do the other half of communicating which is to try to understand the other. Basically there are many different forms of communication, each can describe their own unique things, and we need to be able to use them all, to an extent, to fully communicate.)

There are film makers well known for their use of the ‘direct method’; Len Lye, Oscar Fischinger, Norman Maclaren. But I do not feel that I was directly inspired by these because when I first painted on film I had no idea that such film makers existed. The film that inspired me was a scratched super-8 film that I saw when I was about 10. I’ve no idea who it was by or where I saw it, it was fairly basic – as you can imagine, scratches and occasional shapes scratched into black film at various depths for variations of colour, but to me it was the freshest, most exiting funniest thing I had ever seen. It was another example of film showing something that nothing else could, so I remembered it vividly.

Festivals & Distribution

1993
London Film Festival
Start - Plymouth
1994
BBC Wales ‘Shot in a Shoebox’
Feminale - Koln
2005
ROSHD International Film Festival, Tehran – Iran

(I didn’t know about film festivals in those days so I didn’t apply to any, but it was distributed by the London Film Makers Co-op, so it was shown a few times in programmes at the ICA and NFT in London and maybe some other places, I didn't know when or where)

Technique

Hand painted onto 16mm film, using various inks. Some animating elements were scratched directly onto the film stock. Bipacked on a 16mm Oxbury rostrum to include some more images and sand animation.

(Animation giude)