On screen
A moving picture of a still subject
Films, documentaries and performance recordings where rope is the subject, not the prop. Rope is a slow subject and film is an impatient medium, which is why so much of what gets recorded looks worse than a single good photograph of the same evening. These pages read the form rather than the catalogue: what a camera can add to rope, what it removes without telling you, and why the pacing is where most of it comes apart.
Recorded performance
A stage piece put through a lens: what survives the transfer and what does not.
A recording is somebody else's evening
Every piece described here was a room with people in it before it was footage. Watching is the cheap seat, and the cheap seat is not where any of this actually happens.
Find the people