Burn, 2002 [Enlarge in New Window]

Patrick Jolley & Reynold Reynolds: Burn

Reynold Reynolds and Patrick Jolley have been collaborating on a trilogy of short films for the past four years -- even though they never set out to work together at all. Their latest film, Burn, follows in the footsteps of their shorts The Drowning Room (2000) and Seven Days Til Sunday (1998). Although the projects are, respectively, about fire, water, and air, Reynolds says they are not intended to have any thematic link. And although they share similar aesthetic concerns, they are not intended to be set together.

"They are not directly related, but there were very similar approaches and concepts," Reynolds explains. "But we never said we were going to work together on a bunch of projects. We have never actually gotten very far saying, 'Let's do another film.' It just seems like things come together. We come up with an idea and do some tests, filming some different things to see if they are possible. That has led to momentum to try more things." Those "things" have netted the duo numerous kudos in filmmaking quarters. Res magazine recently included Reynolds and Jolley in their "10 Filmmakers to Watch" line-up, and their films have been screened at the Sundance Film Festival.

Reynolds and Jolley met in 1995 in the graduate program of the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan. Reynolds, who was born in Alaska and lives in New York, was concentrating on filmmaking in the multidisciplinary program. Jolley, an Irishman who now splits his time between New York and London, was primarily interested in photography. Today they both continue to work on their own projects, which for Reynolds include short films and commercial productions, and for Jolley include gallery exhibitions of his photographs. Their decision to work together was somewhat haphazard; Jolley had taken some photographs of a mannequin falling, and they came up with the idea of a short video installation. Seven Days Til Sunday emerged as a three-part black-and-white loop of "bodies" falling off a building.

The Drowning Room grew out of Seven Days, when both became fascinated by the challenge of shooting under water. They transformed a truck container into a living room set and filled it with water, then filmed a series of sequences that would seem like normal domestic life -- having dinner, clearing the table-- if they weren't completely submerged.

Burn takes this concept and sets it on fire - literally. The film is a series of similar domestic sequences in a living room, bedroom, and kitchen, except the rooms are on fire, and then the people catch on fire, too. "The motion of the people is similar to The Drowning Room, in that they're not responding to the fire. They're on fire and the walls are on fire, but they're not reacting to it," says Reynolds. In terms of the stylistic similarities, he notes, "The Drowning Room was slow because it's hard for people to move fast under water. In Burn we shot it all in slow motion."

No people were hurt, nor furniture harmed in the production. The set was built out of sheet-rock in the middle of Reynolds's Brooklyn apartment, where the smoke wafted up through a skylight. A thin layer of flammable acetone was sprayed on all the surfaces, which in turn had been fireproofed, so it was only this coating that was burning.

These films sometimes rematerialize as gallery installations. When Reynolds and Jolley presented Burn at a Dublin gallery, they constructed a room and projected images of fire burning on all four walls. An installation at the Roebling Hall Gallery in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, consisted of 15 photographs and a loop version of the film.

Reynolds isn't one to read meaning into any of his work, but says that Jolley is more game. "Essentially it seems like Patrick is very interested in symbology," he says. "Patrick likes to say that he makes work that's so loaded with symbols that it has no meaning."

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THIS PROJECT'S CATEGORIES: Film / Video > Film / Video | Americana | New York | 2001