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Video Pal
(Bailey Newington, 2025)

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DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT

In my experimental film VIDEO PAL, I aimed to depict a dystopian reality in which all media exists in a state of perpetual fragmentation: films devoid of human presence, television broadcasts disfigured by warped and stretched soundscapes, and narratives that distort upon broadcast. In this reality, the act of “completion” becomes mythologized, achievable only through a serendipitous encounter with the "Video Demon" - a metaphysical figure who acts as a techno-mediator, a gatekeeper to coherence (and, by extension, the truth of reality) - whose boundaries dissolve only when the individuals he visits fully grant him their total submission. VIDEO PAL was shot using a digital camera (Panasonic Lumix GH5) and then converted to an analogue signal to be processed. The processing was done with an analogue consumer grade video enhancer. I circuit bent the enhancer, a practice where electronics are re-wired to produce unknown artifacts in colour, line and form. With this idiosyncratic blending of analogue and digital, the film positions itself as a product of mediation also, where its state between the stable (it has been realised) and the disrupted (the film is inherently ‘broken’) suggests that a similar mediator to the Video Demon within our own infrastructures exists...where old and new systems perpetually coexist to constantly destabilize perception.


This film is produced as part of Experimental Cinema Module.