The Man Who Went Outside

This 10 minute video questions our commonplace acceptance of the rhetorical codes of the ‘authority voice’ as used in factual film narration, and the ‘reliability of the author’ [in this case ‘director’] in relation to the truth of what we are being shown, and the style in which we expect to see it.
A man (performed in improvisation by Richard Layzell) takes on the ticks and gestures of a tv ‘presenter’ against a green- screen of shifting colour. Footage of his physical puppet-like performance is punctuated by images that sometimes reliably represent, and sometimes contradict an oddly distorted voice – over, that instructs us about how to interpret what we are seeing. Using found images from the internet, this work deploys humour and repulsion to experientially explore issues of our understanding of truth and meaning in relation to context, and taste, and questions expectations of the veracity of certain representational tropes.