A sort of round-the-world in twenty minutes and back in time for tea film. With the sound together it may be that the tea is hot enough
to crack the pot.  It
is equally a film about the maker, who comes from a little landlocked country which differs from the rest of Europe only in the fact that it never had
an overseas empire. Nevertheless the attitudes of empires (and their successors) are still with us. It is a film about us and it is an invitation to
dance between paradigms and like all good travel stories, the memory lingers.
Traveller’s
Tales (2003) is minimalist in comparison. Instead of partially subverting tourist images it deals with the professional side of cultural
construction - documentary filmmaking. Christian Höller (2003) describes the video work:
“From the mobility of image-making to discursive images of mobility; Tim Sharp’s video work “Traveller’s Tales” does not only pursue
these movements thematically but demonstrates the transition in the form of complex acts of montage. |
 |
“Traveller’s Tales” weaves a dense discursive net around the connections between images,  travel,
migration and nomadism starting out from found footage loose ends. The latter consist of a total of one and a half minutes of “waste” from a German-language
documentary production probably from around the year 1970 with the working title “Tuareg.” From these out-takes, Sharp has extracted individual motifs,
mainly static shots of simple events or poses, looped and rearranged them. Just this extraction and re-working alone makes the constructive character
of documentary reality visible - for example, when a veiled Tuareg (or the person representing him) repeatedly loads his rifle or when another poses
with his weapon endlessly, as if time and the history of moving images had been completely suspended. This vivisection of ethnographic raw material
is supplemented by a constructed soundtrack which scatters traces exotic sound and shreds of music around whilst framing beginning and end with a clock
ticking or striking. |
