Aged Feet in a Carpet Hall

Sad, quiet but also formally inventive and compelling in its absence of a clear narrative, Aged Feet is an unassuming, understated mini-masterpiece of sorts. David Channell uses pitch darkness to circle or repeatedly track a lone window, returning us to the unresolved domestic scene within, a woman waiting or doing something, occasionally peering out from the frame as we look in at her. It is one of three films by Channell supported by the BFI Experimental Film Fund; the restrained folk music from Michael Mills is darkly beautiful.

The film highlights spectatorship and uses the absence of light to break cause and effect and seamlessly collide spaces. The internal mic-ing of the room as we view from the outside also causes the film to further resist conventional spatial readings. It is sparse and dark and the closing credit of Maura O’Toole as ‘women’ plural suggests the train which we hear is circulating around her multiple, different possible lives. The setting is a far cry from the epic grand narrative of 2001: A Space Odyssey which we see advertised at the train station towards the very end. This is a much smaller film than Kubrick’s celebrated 70mm undertaking and it is hard to imagine what the original treatment would have been like when its success lies so much in its execution, and when the film itself is based more on what is not seen, than what is.