Niles Atallah · Film experiments
Burials
Film buried in the earth, left to time, then brought back into the light.
I work with images made on 8mm, 16mm and 35mm film. The material is buried for weeks, months or years, then unearthed, precariously restored and scanned. Soil and time transform the emulsion. What returns is both a surviving image and a record of its disappearance.
Why bury an image?
“There is a strange thrill to burying film, an intuition that something precious is being lost. It is simultaneously an act of destruction and an act of faith.”
Burying film is a way of letting go of something I have made, while leaving open the possibility of finding it again. Unused fragments of earlier films enter the earth together. Their images can disappear, mingle or return in a form I could not have planned.
The act has a physical impulse as well as an emotional one: digging, handling the film, working with my hands outside. In the director’s statement for Burial: Subterranean Light, I describe the process as alchemical—a movement from the chemical to the spiritual. The images carry traces of that encounter.
Burial, excavation, restoration
The diary follows individual burials and excavations, alongside chemical tests, experimental film transfers and attempts to restore the damaged material. Entries date from May 2011 to July 2014.
Related work
Unearthed
A series of short films conceived as a satellite project of Rey. The decay of the film becomes a way into the imaginary memories and dreams of the King of Araucania and Patagonia. The figure of the king acts as a mask: a vehicle through which an inner world takes material form.
The images evoke deteriorated memories, archaeological ruins and forgotten dreams. Unearthing: Dreams of the Kingdom is the first film in the series.
Related work
Burial: Subterranean Light
The synopsis follows film buried in a forest in southern Chile and unearthed ten years later. Figures from Lucia and Rey return through the decaying celluloid, looking back at the spectators who watch them.
The excavation becomes an encounter with fragments of an earlier life. The projected images are familiar and estranged at once—ghosts appearing through layers of lost time.
“The film is a secret code written by the earth itself.”
