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CLOCKWork Dig

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CLOCKWork Dig

CLOCKWork Dig

CLOCKWork Dig

(Last Updated On: March 16, 2018)

CLOCKWork Dig

Article by Visual Artist / Researcher  Khaled Hafez  2014

Inspired by several uprisings for a period of three years, “Clockwise” is a short film written, directed and produced by the Egyptian visual artist and filmmaker Sameh Al Tawil in 2014. Along the duration of the film, the artist poses several philosophical questions during 6 minutes, using a cinematic language that relies on corporal expressions and hard-cuts. With extreme shots taken from below the ground or from above his subjects, the viewer is entangled in shots that are much reminiscent of feature film classics that incorporated the narrative and the experimental, like Sergio Leone’s Spaghetti Westerns, Hitchcock’s Vertigo, and Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, especially those scenes that involved movement without dialogue. The artist’s choice for the use of Black and White accentuates the visual narrative and renders each scene as an exquisite photograph that tells its own story, with each frame possessing its own space and time. The outcome of this sublime visual research is an abstract narrative that transcends culture, language, dialogue and geography.

Clockwise, as the description suggests, represents movement is a very precise and specific direction. The clockwise movement throws resemblance to the religious circumambulatory movements practiced by pilgrims and Sufis in spiritual practices, except that all such practices are –actually—anti-clockwise. All movement in such case can be perceived as a sign of infinite confusion, and hence the artist also indirectly refers to the absolute obscurity through which political factions operate, moving round and round in void circles. Here, notions of the finite, the infinite, life, death and continuity are touched upon by choreography that displays repetition of movement, frame composition that explores open space and its inhabitants, color scheme that spans the challenging hues of shadow and light, and the brilliant mystic music score that weaves all scenes together.

 

‘ CLOCKWISE ’  Short film by Sameh Al Tawil

to premiere in Munich Fine Art Academy, Germany, 5-9 Feb. 2014

http://www.samehaltawil.com/portfolio/clockwise/

 

 

Credits

Staring: Muhammad Shafik
Alaa Shaban

D. O. P: Sharif al-Husseini
Camera: Ahmed Fekri
Editor: Mohamed Eid
Music / Sound: Esmat Wageeh
Extras: Cast of 18 extras

Khaled Hafez
Contemporary Art
Visual Artist / Researcher
Khaled Hafez is born in Cairo, Egypt in 1963 where he currently lives and works. He studied medicine and followed the evening classes of the Cairo fine arts in the eighties. After attaining a medical degree in 1987 and M.Sc. as a medical specialist in 1992, he gave up medical practices in the early nineties for a career in the arts. He later obtained an MFA in new media and digital arts from Transart Institute (New York, USA) and Danube University Krems (Austria). Hafez practice spans the mediums of painting, video, photography, installation and interdisciplinary approaches.
Cairo
EG
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