Scott Barley (born 11 November 1992) is a Welsh filmmaker, artist, drone musician, and writer.[1][2][3]

This article may have been created or edited in return for undisclosed payments, a violation of Wikipedia's terms of use. It may require cleanup to comply with Wikipedia's content policies, particularly neutral point of view. (November 2022)

His films have been associated with experimental cinema, remodernist film, slow cinema, and ecocriticism. Often difficult to categorise, the same films have been described as fiction, documentary, docu-fiction, cosmic horror, and ambient cinema. [4][5][6]

Common traits in his films include painterly compositions of elemental landscapes and wild animals, nightfall, spectral imagery, the majesty, horror and chaos of nature, the absence of people, the unknown, static or near static long takes interspersed with much shorter takes with frenetic camera movement, repetition, a focus on mood and atmosphere over plot, superimpositions, defocus aberration and extreme use of underexposure.[1][5][7]

Since early 2015, Barley has almost exclusively shot his films on iPhone. He is most well-known for the 2017 experimental film, Sleep Has Her House.

Influences and style

Barley's imagery and focus on natural landscape has been likened to the romantic tradition of The Sublime within a modernist and digital context. Critics and academics have drawn parallels with Sleep Has Her House and the work of Caspar David Friedrich, J. M. W. Turner, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Wagner's Götterdämmerung and the ideas of Immanuel Kant, among others.[8][9][10]

His approach to filmmaking has been compared to David Lynch, Stan Brakhage, Philippe Grandrieux, Béla Tarr, Andrei Tarkovsky, Alexander Sokurov, Maya Deren and Jean Epstein.[11][12][13][14]

Barley's approach to filmmaking is similar to that of some other solo avant-garde filmmakers, Stan Brakhage, Jonas Mekas, Nathaniel Dorsky and Peter Hutton, but the post-production process is unique to both mainstream and avant-garde filmmaking practices.[15][16] The sequences in his films are often composed of many layers of iPhone footage, shot in various locations over a long period. During a lengthy post-production, various footage, drawings and paintings are layered and combined together into a single shot, in a similar process to collage. Unlike collage however, the various footage is combined to appear as if the final result is only a single piece of footage.[17]

"I always begin a film almost like one would keep a diary. I have no idea, or agenda to make a film. I simply document. I shoot what attracts me, random things, animals, variances in light, the water, the stars; simply what draws me in on different days, different nights, in different places. Once I have built up a body of footage, I start to see connections. These pieces of footage could be taken months or even years apart – and miles apart too. [I] then invisibly stitch [the different shots] together into one larger shot or sequence. But these connections between different pieces of footage all happen organically. I never force these connections. I never force a film when it doesn’t come. The films find me – not the other way round [...] All my films have been made this way. Some happen quicker than others. Once these connections are established, a narrative - through images - begins to germinate." — Scott Barley

Filmography

Music

References

External links

• Scott Barley at IMDb
• Official website

This article needs additional or more specific categories. (October 2022)