Strontium 2021

Directed by Malcolm Le Grice

The travelogue footage that appears here – the landscape rushing by, fragments of cityscapes, figures in cafes, forests, and beaches – is reminiscent of other videos made by Le Grice since the 1990s. The sense of foreboding is unique though. It comes across in the colours of the superimposed imagery: principally cold blues, a furnace-like orange and acid tones. The sound is similarly evocative. One might hear it as a rushing waterfall, a storm, or perhaps the sound of nuclear fallout as suggested by the title. The sublime, which Le Grice has often courted in his video work, is an apocalyptic variant in Strontium.