IN [ TO, 2012 | PETER DOWNSBROUGH
Camera: Peter Peter Downsbrough | Editing: Karel Downsbrough
The silent, ultra-short black-and-white video IN [ TO is shorter than a video clip: it
clocks in at 2 minutes, 47 seconds. It was made with material shot exclusively for the
film, plus footage filmed ‘on the occasion’, while Downsbrough was working on other
projects. One sees images from (South) Chicago, Brussels and Kent respectively, but
since everything is filmed at night, only viewers who are familiar with the location
will easily identify the spots. Here, the purpose is not to be specific about a site, to
identify a place, or to document a certain location. Rather, Downsbrough gives an
overall feeling of some quasi-archetypical ‘city at night’. The city is shot both as
cityscape, from a distance, e.g. from outside the window of a Brussels apartment, or
from nearer-by: a zoom-in from inside of the same building.
IN [ TO contains many elements that define former Downsbrough films, both contentwise
– urbanism, cars, freeways and ring roads – and formally: clean, ‘structural’
framing, abstraction, the use of graphically inserted words. Here, as before, a phrase
or a word game, almost hidden, can be discerned – it might or might not be a key to
the film. First, there’s the title of course, IN [ TO. Only at the very end, when the
image is fading, the word TIME lights up, shortly. It seems like an indication of what
time does: fading out light. Into time, the light fades out.
A stream of cars passes by, only their head lights are visible. Everything else is dark,
except for the horizon, with the outlines of distant buildings and hundreds of lights
flickering: lit windows, neon publicity, street lights. At the film’s very end, a point of
view shot from inside a car shows a road at night: Kent – but it might be any city, or
in between cities. To the left, trees; to the right, light posts; in front, the beam of the
headlights, some other cars’ rear lights. Then the image fades. TIME. The image’s
gone. IN ] TO, with reversed bracket. Credits.
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