Phillip Warnell

Outlandish: Étranges Corps Étrangers

35mm film, 20mins, 2009.

Watch Outlandish online, see below.

"I was really struck by Outlandish, by the misture of missing figures and excess fingers, the ghostly commentaries of Nancy, and the octopus that seems all too corporeal. I really love this work, am already haunted by it, by the way it moves between spectrality and materiality, but with a strange, even uneasy, ease."

Akira Lippit

Author of 'Atomic Light (shadow optics) and The Electric Animal

Outlandish's camera eye translates the swirling atmospheres of the ocean into a fluid subject, a foreign skin, an interzone of sorts in which to theorize the body and its relation to the 'outside' unknown...it is a fundamentally sensorial experience."

Erik Morse
Frieze online (Jan 2011)

French (with English subtitles)

_____________

Directed & Produced by Phillip Warnell
Director of Photography: Samuel Dravet
Sound Composition: Vladimir Nikolaev
Female vocalist: Valentina Ponomareva
Editor: Anne Lacour
Camera Assistant: Baptiste Chesney
Underwater Film crew: Cinemarine, Toulon
Sound Recordists: Pierre Armand, Andrew James
Production: Molly Rogers, Cindy le Templier, Amine Merabet, Alisa Terekhova
Strange Foreign Bodies text by Jean-Luc Nancy, commissioned by Phillip Warnell
English translation: Daniela Hurezanu
Adapted for screen by: Elisabeth Ritter
Special thanks: Jean-Luc Nancy, Christine Irizarry, Michel Gaillot, Robert Higgins

Shot on location in Strasbourg and Marseille.

Film’s development supported by The Wellcome Trust, UK.

Philosopher and heart transplant recipient Jean-Luc Nancy meditates on the history and integrity of bodies: their secrets, their touching, their annihilation and strangeness, in Phillip Warnell’s short film, Outlandish: Strange Foreign Bodies (19mins, 35mm). The film presents a number of visual and literary passages, each exploring the correlate between a textual narrative by Jean-Luc Nancy, his on screen presence, a surgical organ in search of a body and an unaccounted for, displaced invertebrate at sea.

Eight episodes detail a Mediterranean odyssey, in which the eight-limbed cephalopod - housed in an aquarium on the deck of the Galion – acts as a spirit level, monitoring the surrounding horizon line. Telepathically piloting an otherwise uninhabited ghost ship (powered by optical lens flares), the octopus and its vessel emit coded transmissions and voices of the siren in the form of a haunting soundtrack by composer Vladimir Nikolaev.

In the surgical act we witness an inter-subjective process – a harvested organ - procured and sutured in preparation for the purposes of grafting; reminiscent of the more extensive, ancient and elusive search for the soul.

Supported by a commissioned text by Jean-Luc Nancy, the film explores territories, migration and the thresholds maintained between each of us. Outlandish: Strange Foreign Bodies is a journey between shores and shared environments, the configuration and proximity of bodies, the vanishing and (re) appearance of crew, permutations and dimensions of form and above all – our relations with strange foreign bodies.

	Outlandish Strange foreign bodies Outlandish: Étranges Corps Étrangers 35mm film, 20mins, 2009. Watch Outlandish online, see below. ~ "I was really struck by Outlandish, by the misture of missing figures and excess fingers, the ghostly commentaries of Nancy, and the octopus that seems all too corporeal. I really love this work, am already haunted by it, by the way it moves between spectrality and materiality, but with a strange, even uneasy, ease." Akira Lippit Author of 'Atomic Light (shadow optics) and The Electric Animal Outlandish's camera eye translates the swirling atmospheres of the ocean into a fluid subject, a foreign skin, an interzone of sorts in which to theorize the body and its relation to the 'outside' unknown...it is a fundamentally sensorial experience." Erik Morse Frieze online (Jan 2011) French (with English subtitles) _____________ Directed & Produced by Phillip Warnell Director of Photography: Samuel Dravet Sound Composition: Vladimir Nikolaev Female vocalist: Valentina Ponomareva Editor: Anne Lacour Camera Assistant: Baptiste Chesney Underwater Film crew: Cinemarine, Toulon Sound Recordists: Pierre Armand, Andrew James Production: Molly Rogers, Cindy le Templier, Amine Merabet, Alisa Terekhova Strange Foreign Bodies text by Jean-Luc Nancy, commissioned by Phillip Warnell English translation: Daniela Hurezanu Adapted for screen by: Elisabeth Ritter Special thanks: Jean-Luc Nancy, Christine Irizarry, Michel Gaillot, Robert Higgins Shot on location in Strasbourg and Marseille. Film’s development supported by The Wellcome Trust, UK. Philosopher and heart transplant recipient Jean-Luc Nancy meditates on the history and integrity of bodies: their secrets, their touching, their annihilation and strangeness, in Phillip Warnell’s short film, Outlandish: Strange Foreign Bodies (19mins, 35mm). The film presents a number of visual and literary passages, each exploring the correlate between a textual narrative by Jean-Luc Nancy, his on screen presence, a surgical organ in search of a body and an unaccounted for, displaced invertebrate at sea. Eight episodes detail a Mediterranean odyssey, in which the eight-limbed cephalopod - housed in an aquarium on the deck of the Galion – acts as a spirit level, monitoring the surrounding horizon line. Telepathically piloting an otherwise uninhabited ghost ship (powered by optical lens flares), the octopus and its vessel emit coded transmissions and voices of the siren in the form of a haunting soundtrack by composer Vladimir Nikolaev. In the surgical act we witness an inter-subjective process – a harvested organ - procured and sutured in preparation for the purposes of grafting; reminiscent of the more extensive, ancient and elusive search for the soul. Supported by a commissioned text by Jean-Luc Nancy, the film explores territories, migration and the thresholds maintained between each of us. Outlandish: Strange Foreign Bodies is a journey between shores and shared environments, the configuration and proximity of bodies, the vanishing and (re) appearance of crew, permutations and dimensions of form and above all – our relations with strange foreign bodies.		What is manifested in the expression “a foreign body” is the substance specific to the outsider - the foreigner. It isn’t only his difference, but also, and even especially, the fact that this difference is the reality of a body—and thus, this word acquires all the significance of its resisting concreteness, of its autonomous hardness contained in a self-sufficiency that can only prove, sooner or later, hostile to any other body. Strange Foreign Bodies - JL Nancy