On Location

HD video, 19:24, 2023

 

On Location centres on a mysterious piece of land known in the film only as The Site. The narrative unfolds as a staged performance-lecture—part history lesson, part elaborate ritual—delivered by a solemn member of The Society, a stuffy bureaucratic group obsessed with cataloguing every trace left behind, from the seasonal colour of the leaves to the varying dampness of discarded cigarette butts. With dry reverence, the speaker moves through various attempts to reconstruct and understand the history of The Site—but in reverse.

As the lecture moves backward through time, The Site is re-framed through a series of speculative historical “eras.” These aren’t factual reconstructions but carefully staged dioramas built from myth, hearsay, and cultural memory. The depiction of each era is presented with unwavering authority, despite its often surreal or contradictory details, exposing a deep desire to impose meaning on what is ultimately unknowable. Threading through these scenes is the mischievous, half-naked, figure of Pulcinella (known in the UK as mr Punch) whose clownish and often suicidal antics suggest a chaotic undercurrent beneath the superficially ordered history.

Gradually, the formal facade begins to slip. Props are reset mid-shot, sound cues misfire, and glitchy flickers of green screen reveal the production’s peripheries. These disruptions blur the line between illusion, documentation and performance, unraveling any stable sense of re-enactment or immersion.

Rather than searching for historical truth, On Location meditates on the impossibility of capturing it. History emerges not as a fixed time-line, but as a ever-shifting script—revised, re-staged, and retold by those with the power to do so. Through an inquiry into memory, myth, and institutional authority, the film asks: who decides what is remembered? What is lost in the process? And to what extent are our versions of the past just elaborate stage plays performed for ourselves?

 

 

Direction, Animation, Script, Editing and Sound Design

Rustan Söderling