Asylum

Petit and Sinclair continue their adventures in digital video in this ravishing feast for the eyes and ears (and work for the brain). Digital artist Dave McKean and sound designer Bruce Gilbert fill the same roles they filled on The Falconer, an earlier Petit/Sinclair project. Both films feature real people and places in a fictional context. In this case, a virus having wiped out cultural memory, an operative, Kaporal, is brought out of retirement to re-evaluate recovered, devastated files. Kaporal engages a sound recordist, Agent Matthews (editor Emma Matthews), to refill the depleted memory banks. Among her duties she must record interviews with writers believed to be Illuminati - Michael Moorcock, Ed Dorn, James Sallis. American poet Dorn, tracked down on a visit to Margate ('where the kernel of twentieth-century consciousness split open'), gives Nato a hard time for its action against Serbia and later lays into Clinton over Iraq. Sallis strums guitar in his garden in Phoenix, Arizona, while waiting for the oranges to fall from his tree. Moorcock, said to embody a thousand years of London's literary history, is located in an unseasonably rainy Bastrop, Texas. Kaporal's condition, it seems, is his realisation that what he filmed in the past he cannot now see afresh, hence this film being his final commission. 'You don't disappear. You reappear, dead,' wrote Dorn, who died in 1999. The film is dedicated to his memory.