Vintage Vacuum - Series of short films.
A perfectly made up woman in 1930s to 50s vintage fashion & styling uses a vacuum cleaner from the same period in derelict or unusual surroundings. The main theme is the startling contrast between the perfection of the vintage model and the run-down, chaotic surroundings. The use of the vacuum cleaner seems like a desperate attempt to create order in this chaos. The question if everything was simpler and better in the ‘Old Days’ springs to mind. This clean-up operation of the derelict surroundings can be seen as a symbolic act - but is it not ultimately futile? Why try and keep up appearances when the world around us is in turmoil and falling down? Stereotypes and established social roles are questioned: Whereas 1930s society saw a woman’s place mainly in the home and cleaning how out-of-place does this seem today? Yet aren’t women still the ones forced to clean up the mess men leave behind: Wars, the banking crisis, environmental disasters?
A wide shot establishes the setting, the vacuum cleaning woman enters the scene from one side with the typical, slow, backwards-forwards motion of hoovering. It is an almost religious, meditative, ritualistic repetitive movement. The woman slowly hoovers through the shot and exits on the other side, the camera lingers on the empty scene.
This routine is repeated a various different locations: On a run-down council estate, inside a derelict building, amongst the chaos of a busy train station, in a disused quarry, on a rubbish dump, on an oil-contaminated beach, on a scrapyard with burnt-out cars, etc.
(c) knuk 2011
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