Excerpt from The Wind, Lenka Clayton and Phillip Andrew Lewis, 2024
The Wind
2024 / 1 hour 17min / Single Channel Video with Sound / Commissioned by The Pittsburgh Cultural Trust / Sound mix and master by Simon Keep
“The Wind”, a feature-length film meticulously constructed from over 1,000 clips featuring wind taken from hundreds of other movies–from romcoms to westerns, spy dramas and horror movies. These films were all commercially produced, and come from countries all around the world, creating a sense of a shared force that we can observe as it travels around the globe.
Wind footage in films is usually a b-list presence, used to foreshadow imminent, often ominous change, and provide an emotional or temporal cut. These overlooked scenes are amassed in The Wind in increasing intensity according to the Beaufort Wind Scale from plants that almost imperceptibly quiver, to a tornado that tears a building from its foundations.
Each clip of wind has its original sound. Sometimes this is the wind itself, but more often it carries fragments of tone, dialogue, music, or the edge of dramatic action from its previous context. We look at a cherry orchard through falling blossoms and hear a blood curdling scream. We see an uninhabited farmhouse and hear a car door slam behind us. These seemingly random audio concrete poetry is connected by the repeated visual of the wind that increases in force as the film develops.
Excerpt from The Wind, Lenka Clayton and Phillip Andrew Lewis, 2024