The video - Once Upon a Time, Long Ago and Far Away: The Pale Horse of Death
text by Su-Wen Leong
Following successful previous film screenings (2019 & 2023) at the Golden Age Cinema & Bar, multidisciplinary artist Fiona Davies has returned with the newest work in this series - Once Upon a Time, Long Ago and Far Away: The Pale Horse of Death, to be screened on Wednesday 11 September.
Influenced by three extraordinary films, The Seventh Seal (1957) directed by Ingmar Bergman; The Color of Pomegranates (1969) directed by Sergei Parajanov; and Testament of Orpheus or Do not ask me why (1960) directed by Jean Cocteau- the artist has drawn upon the idea of death challenging the patient to a contest of some sort; the format of visual and spoken word brevity; and the horse as part-costume/part-independent/part-assisted by a human to form shape.
The short film ‘Pale Horse of Death’ is situated in a delirious state of high impact gaming. A patient in ICU meets Death and is challenged to a contest. The prize is unknown. In this beautiful, emotional rendition of the interplay between panic and boredom, we see the power of mythology interacting with the sterility of the contemporary ICU. This is an obstacle race, a game on horseback. It is a study of loss.
“The Pale Horse of Death wants to win. It is fed up with being the last to come on after the three other horses of the apocalypse.” SCRIPT EXCERPT
With reference to the riders and horses of the apocalypse ‘Pale Horse of Death’ also makes use of religious metaphors such as the parable and is laden with the horses own societal connotations.
This short film is a development from a previous work shown at Cementa 2022 that responded to the 2019/2020 bushfires and the relationships between people and horses particularly in times of extreme danger, emotion and competence. In that iteration, the artist wanted to capture the strength of emotion that blurred the boundaries between horse and owner overlaid by the grief and mourning that came from the loss of so many animals. Davies made works that could be seen as theatrical costumes, fancy dress outfits, or rumbustious carnival costumes that combined the head and shoulders of a horse with a cape that either covered an absent two legged body or when the dandified stallions wore their capes theatrically swept back over their shoulders, they exposed to view a two legged body wearing evening gloves of satin and beading on their front limbs. The mares and foals seemed to wear their capes for warmth and protection and eschewed satin and beading for ease of movement and escape. The horses were hung from the oval steel rail by a meat hook through the top of their heads. Also hanging on the rail that referenced the merry-go-round, the racetrack, and the abattoir (all sites where the power of the horse is subjugated) was a delicately embroidered blouse that the artist’s mother used to wear. Very small dark blue horses still pranced with enjoyment down the front placket of the blouse.
Driven by the narrated script delivered in an intentionally dead-pan manner, the short film consists of footage of a patient in ICU bleeding out internally, hospital interior images, horses in movement and large-scale marionettes. The film is not a direct visual translation of the narrated story. The viewer is left and is afforded space to come to their own interpretations of whether what they hear and see is humourous or disturbing, and arrives at their own understanding of this study of loss. The artist is enlisting the drama of the cinematic experience – being alone and yet being in a group all in the dark. The audience is not shown anything shocking, rather the artist is looking to build up layers of apparently conflicting emotional responses. The seesaw between panic and boredom and dread.
The video is set in an ICU but there is no overt presence of the medical. Rather the film could be seen to only exist or be set in the minds of the patient/death and us.
Employing the character ‘we’, ‘Pale Horse of Death’ is an attempt to disrupt the separation between the character of the patient and the viewer sitting in the cinema. ‘We’ are all complicit. ‘We’ are all involved.