When you’ve lived somewhere for a while, for example for the duration of your degree, or even for most of your life, things can become a bit…normal. Same bus route, same places, same shops – the same routine. Your home town becomes a blur of familiarity. I think sometimes we all need to stop, step back, and have another look.
Jeri Perrin and Tara Atkinson, from Leeds College of Art and Design, announced their first film as revealing ‘a glimpse of the city not seen before’, an experiment in a sense, reminding the general public of the random events and scenes often ignored when you travel around a city such as Leeds. The Twelve Distractions.
The Twelve Distractions takes its name from the use of a clock, which begins each scene by indicating the time. The two young art students filmed 12 different points around Leeds, each for twelve hours, from 6am to 6pm, leaving their footage entirely to chance, with no prior planning. The Twelve Distractions is structured around twelve hours, from 6am to 12pm, each one revealing a scene, a character or a side of Leeds unobserved by many.
The film only lasted thirty minutes, but that was long enough – after thirty minutes the head reeled with the images placed before them, the footage that seemed so alien but so familiar too – yes, that’s Briggate, I walk down there all the time – but I’ve never actually watched the pigeons. Do pigeons actually do that? Hop about erratically, like frenzied acrobats?
The Twelve Distractions transformed Leeds from a northern capital to an enigma of people, places, animals, and chaos. From shots of a peaceful Leeds skyline, to ducks along the canal, a girl playing in a pile of autumn leaves and a woman sat in a stairwell, the film forced the audience in Hyde Park Cinema to question just how well they knew their own city, how they managed to miss so much – a view from an alleyway just off Briggate gave a creepy, Peeping Tom feel to the film for a few moments – reminding us just how hidden and secretive the city can be. Footage of people walking shot from ground level, displaying men, women, children, boots, high heels and trainers represented the diversity of the Leeds populus. The soundtrack ranges from sombre music, to a radio tuning in a taxi, to the shrieking, clanging racket of a train passing over the arches – noises that again, we take for granted and rarely recall, until made to hear them from a different perspective.
The film set out to show a ‘glimpse of the city not seen before’, and boy did it. Across twelve hours, and twelve locations from City Square to the Headrow, from the Calls to the Canal, Jeri Perrin and Tara Atkinson created a view of Leeds only possible through film, sound, reality – the footage reminded me just how little we pay attention to the world around us, how much we assume we know what goes on, what a street looks like – it reminded, absurdly, of how little time we dedicate to merely watching pigeons on Briggate and people streaming across City Square.
Do me a favour. The next you have an afternoon free, perhaps in Spring when it’s a tad warmer, sit outside a Starbucks, buy a hot, steaming mocha and just watch the world go by. Watch pigeons. Watch people. Take in the city you live in, from paving stone to roof tile, from business men, to students, to squirrels. When it comes to a city such as ours, let me assure you, you ain’t seen nothing yet.
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