John Barlow
2021From Markov to Skripal
John Barlow
The attempted assassination of former spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in the sleepy English town of Salisbury in 2018 captured the attention of the world. It was just one of a string of deaths and attempted murders in Southern England with reported links to Russia. Beginning in the Cold War, this pattern has recently intensified, situating many otherwise mundane locations at the centre of an international geopolitical power struggle. The experimental short, From Markov to Skripal, visits and traces a chronological path through all seventeen of these locations, from Waterloo Bridge 1978 to Salisbury 2018, revealing the dark events which took place there.
From Markov to Skripal
Slate
John Barlow
A tightly regimented series of views from around the town of Bethesda and the nearby abandoned Dinorwic slate quarry in North Wales, portraying the scars of this historic local industry as a ghostly, oppressive presence in the landscape. Short clips shot on DS8mm are arranged in a tiled, grid-like structure that evokes the stacks of roofing slates once produced in the old quarry. The distorted drone and clattering slates of the soundtrack heighten the sense of a surreal and overbearing atmosphere.
Slate
