The poet Lavinia Greenlaw has written and directed The Sea is an Edge and an Ending, a short film investigating what it means to lose your memory and disappear into the present tense. Its framework is a sequence she wrote about her father’s death from Alzheimer’s. The film focuses on what it means for your sense of self to come loose and for the past to float free. It carries echoes of Shakespeare’s Tempest in its study of a man under a kind of spell, whose child must observe his strange and terrifying liberation. The film moves from the shifting coastal landscape of the east of England, a geography central to Greenlaw’s life and work, to eroded interiors containing only the bare structures and reduced emblems of this man’s life. The Sea is an Edge and an Ending is Greenlaw’s first film and extends the practice she developed in her award-winning sound work, Audio Obscura.
The Sea is an Edge and an Ending
Lavinia Greenlaw
Single channel HD video, 20 minutes, 47 seconds, 2016
Project details
The Sea is an Edge and an Ending
Estuary 2016: Points of Departure
17 September 2016 - 30 September 2016
The Sea is an Edge and an Ending
Awake But Always Dreaming, Shoreditch Church, London
24 November 2016 - 21 December 2024
The Sea is an Edge and an Ending
Goldsmiths, University of London
18 October 2017 - 21 December 2024
Media
See morePress
The Guardian | 'The Saturday Poem: My Father Cannot Stop'
17 September 2016