The Cornish knitting pattern film series

This thesis comprises of a critical commentary and an accompanying series of 16mm landscape films that use a single-frame production technique and a unique editing system to translate Cornish guernsey knitting patterns. The films have been shot and edited on location in the Cornish fishing villages from where the patterns derive. The production of the films creates a structural relationship between a stitch of knitted textile fabric and a frame of film. In this methodology, gesture, landscape and film are ‘knitted together’ as a material object, re-embedding the knitting patterns into the location that inspired them. The location of Cornwall has been selected due to its rich knitting heritage, and the specific nature of the guernsey knitting patterns. The use of knitting patterns to structure films is an original mode of filmmaking that involves a dialectal relationship between the camera, filmmaker and subject. The processes of translation and film production have involved preproduction film charts, two camera positions that equate to knit and purl stitches, a single-frame shooting technique that creates a self-instigated time-lapse mode, and a systems-based editing mode that is conducted on location and privileges the act of filmmaking in the landscape. The films build on the legacy of single-frame modes of filmmaking in the context of experimental cinema, and produce new visual phenomena and motion effects. The thesis accounts for these and also examines how instructional methods associated with filmmaking and knitting can produce templates for iterative processes of production that are unique and premised on the role of individual practitioners. The films and thesis also explore the historical, cultural and social functions of the knitting patterns. Employing them on location speaks directly to their heritage and contemporary value, creating new visual representations of women’s work and the Cornish landscape.