‘The Silent Form’ is a collaboration between the sculptor Dylan Lewis and filmmaker Simon Wood.
The film constitutes a creative refusal of the verbal. The artist, Dylan Lewis,expresses his incapacity to account for the meaning of his work. His answers are truncated or supplanted by physical gestures and actions. Exiled from explanation and meaning, Lewis’s sculpture morph into a mirror the filmmaker must observe and interpret. Wood creates obstructive silences, weaving abandoned farms, deserted towns, the vast Namibian desert and Africa’s treacherous shoreline littered with colonial shipwrecks. This tussle between the artist and the filmmaker with their competing visual grammars relentlessly drives the film forward.
The Silent Form forges the artist and the filmmaker together as a mode of conceptual modeling, occupying a space between art and documentary. Playing into the world of interpretations and reinterpretation, we witness a filmmaker visualising the sculptors work and in turn giving birth to a new creation: the film as a new form.
