The Blue Summer

Ambitious intellectual work about art, media and politics, but also a film that puts its own ambitions into perspective. For instance the maker argues that his film is really a failed attempt to get a grip on Post-Modernism through English contemporary art, landscape and media. Originality is questioned, as is the distinction between fact and fiction.The film is a collage of very diverse genres and technical media. In order to fuse all the images together, a narrative takes the audience along on a journey through the memory of the writer Bill, whose texts were apparently chanced upon in a deserted caravan on the edge of a wood.A significant part of the film is an investigation into the confusion that occurred after the demise of the ideological certainties of the sixties and seventies. In addition, themaker is interested in what he calls 'digital weather': the alchemist and chance processes within massive data files, such as the never-ending stream of TV pictures. Apart from the digital weather, real weather is also emphatically present in the film. Texts and 'pictures within pictures' make the complexity of the film so great that the hermetic impression gradually makes way for a poetic one. In this way Sergeant succeeds in introducing an original link between landscape observations, theoretical reflections, poetic musings and archive footage.