The Hours of Our Lady
A film by Cathy Rogers, with sound design by Adam Collins and Sean Price
A trick of the light…
The Hours of Our Lady’ is an experimental film exploring the interaction between words, image and sound. It is a collaboration between artist/filmmaker, Cathy Rogers, and sound designers, Adam Collins and Sean Price. The film is a response to ‘The Hours of Our Lady’, an extended prose-poem by David Frankel. It has a strong emphasis on sound and voice. Performance artist, Sam Lou Talbot, created a series of spell-like readings from the text, and from this ‘incantation’, Collins and Price created an eerily beautiful sound piece, which, in turn, was used by Rogers as the inspiration for her abstract film — a collage of telecined handprinted 8mm and 16mm film. The processes used in creating the film broke down the images into abstraction, allowing a sense of pareidolia in the viewer, searching for images, faces, or figures in the broken, hypnotic flickering of black and white. It represents the idea of film as a ‘trick of the light’, which is where the ghost-like titular character of ‘The Hours of Our Lady’ resides. The text was written partly as a response to a ‘character’ in Thomas De Quincey’s 1845 book, ‘Suspiria de Profundis’ — Our Lady of Darkness. Rather than the creature of terror imagined by De Quincey, she is reimagined as a figure of both fear and protection; a Nemesis-like being who, to some, offers hope in dark times.
'The Hours of Our Lady' has been screened at: Analogue Ensemble (Kent, UK, 2024), Elevation Film Festival (Cornwall, UK, 2024), and Experimental Film Fest (North Carolina, USA, 2025)
‘The Hours of Our Lady’ is available from Salò Press
‘A brief, marvellous, haunting book, reminiscent of Sebald and Sinclair.' - David Swann
‘David Frankel’s sharp, alluring fragments read like reports from a disturbing world that, with gradual alarm, we realize is the same one we’re standing in.’ - Ashley Stokes
