I will not hope

I will not hope is a moving image work, and live event, about hope, contingency, and loss, where members of the public were invited to come and catch leaves falling from trees for an hour in autumn 2012. Although it is almost impossible to predict when leaves will fall, it is equally hard not to believe that, if you just wait long enough or look hard enough, you won’t eventually get one. It engaged participants in discussion and reflection about the complexity of uncertainty and their relationship to hope. It draws on film theorist Doane’s (2002) assertion that the single shot in film appears to point directly to the world, sharing, as I argue in the film’s related article ‘Editing I will not hope’ (2013), the dancing body’s alluring sense of immediacy. The film examines the ways in which edits can affect the sense of temporal unease created by the single shot by alternatively evoking and then negating a sense of directionality.