The Rules of the Game

A meditation on time, perception and the moving image fashioned from two seemingly disconnected narrative sources. Half enunciated words and phrases from Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper – a cautionary tale on the perils and extravagances of seeing and being seen – qualify extracts from the filmmaker’s own correspondence on film and photography with American artist Elaine Smollin that forms the auditory foreground to this film. Gilman’s short story was published at the start of photography’s ascendancy and just three years before the arrival of the first moving image made for projection.