Andrew James Paterson

Roman Spring Leakage, 7:00 minutes 2011

Roman Spring Leakage is a response or retort to seminal Fluxist films such as James Riddle's 9 minutes or George Macunias' 10 Ft. 23 Sec. Roman Spring Leakage is entirely composed with non-camera images and it is edited to an original musical composition referencing both classical baroque and contemporary electronica. Images and image sources include colour bars, coloured gels, and language text.

The title Roman Spring Leakage refers to the twenty-four letter Roman alphabet and its two missing letters - j and u. In the second half of this videotape, these two letters are isolated against the body of twenty-four letters and then processed into abstraction upon abstraction. "Roman Spring" has a pleasantly classical flavour, but "leakage" refers to more than just the two dangling letters. It refers to excess that cannot be contained within rigorously formalist systems. Language is itself a ghost, as the alphabet's letters are themselves non-communicative images and sources for abstraction.

Roman Spring Leakage should play in the context of experimental film and it also could play in the context of musical film or video, as it combines music and images and plays hide and seek with language. It can play in both film festival and art gallery settings.