Walking Out
Year of release: 2000
Original format: 16mm colour negative
Running time: 10 minutes
Screening format: digital screening versions available
Credits: A film by Kayla Parker
Director/producer/animator: Kayla Parker
Cinematography: Stuart Moore
Performers: Derek Frood and Fiona Murdock
Editing: Stuart Moore and Kayla Parker
Sound design: Stuart Moore and Kayla Parker
Dubbing Mixer: Paul Roberts
Thanks: Lewis Hardy, Ann Hedley, Judith Higginbottom, and Gary Thomas
Production: Sundog Media
Funded by the Arts Council of England, Artists’ Film and Video Production Award; and the South West Arts Film and Video Production Award
Distribution and sales: Sundog Media sundogmedia@gmail.com and LUX Distribution

Description
The film explores subjectivity through a woman's journey within an interior landscape and describes the interior frames of reference that are constructed to make sense of the experience of sexual abuse. In an attempt to reclaim the past and reframe the unspeakable, the artist has personalised the recorded film images by cutting into and re-dyeing the emulsion.
Production notes
Walking Out is the third in a series of 16mm films in which the form of the non/narrative and the depiction of an ‘other’ reality was driven by the dreams experienced during the process of making of the film. The first film in the trilogy is Unknown Woman, which originated in dreams of a crow/woman; the second is Cage of Flame which follows dreams experienced just before and during menstruation.

The form of the work develops organically, intuitively, and through dreams. The pattern emerges step by step, frame by frame. A journey through the psychological landscape of sexual abuse, the film explores the interior frames of reference which are constructed to make sense of, and to defend against, abuse: to come to terms with the unspeakable, an enclosed world of the imaginary is created within.

I chose to make my unconscious the director of these 16mm films, all of which capture in celluloid and sound a subjective view of female psychological landscape and follow a ‘feminine’ model of creative process.

I look through the keyhole and see the past, locked in silence; haunted by the green man, sexual predator of my childhood dreams. I unlock time and return to the formal gardens and man-made wilderness of Mount Edgcumbe in Cornwall. There are bushes hung with exotic purple pods, a pool of newts and a fountain made from giant shells. Fungal growths, the screech of the jungle, and far-away voices heard on a distant television set.

I follow the path as the pair walk the maze of desire and entrapment: acting out the steps. The woman is the fairy tale heroine from childhood, with bleach-blonde hair and a Mona Lisa smile. She is stalked, lured, captured, confined, and silenced. No one comes to her rescue. In my dreams the man always had skin the colour of green poison. Years pass in secret.

I dream of a leaf in the palm of my hand: time to make a move, take a definite step, wake up, walk out. She grows up, grows bigger and stronger. I retrace her steps. She leads the man in vengeance to the heart of the maze, sleepwalks beyond her boundaries, and tricks him.

The filmed sequences are personalised by engraving and re-dyeing the emulsion: I project my memories onto the frames of the film, retracing history, what has been recorded, and assimilate the past. Leaf skeletons are bleached across skin. There are wastes of ice and snow captured in stop-motion, photographic sequences of facial movement: frozen moments of transformation. The wolves, monkeys and lizards are set free.
Publication and comments
‘Walking Out: Green Man’ enlarged 16mm film frame in Experiments in moving image (2004) Jackie Hatfield and Stephen Littman (eds. and curators) [Exhibition catalogue] Margate: Thanet ISBN 1-902458-06-0
DNet information (2000) published to co-incide with the DNet: Distribution Networks Event at the Lux Centre 19 to 21 October 2000. London: Arts Council of England, the Lux Centre and DNet
The encyclopaedia of animation techniques (1996) Richard Taylor. ‘Walking Out: Green Wolf’ enlarged 16mm film frame in Drawing on Film section: “Scratching the coating of the film is the best way of getting a line drawing onto the frames of film.” (Image caption). London: Quarto ISBN 0-240-51488-2 pp. 64 and 65 and front cover image

Exhibition
2010
The Measure of It 16mm film-drawing performance, and screening with artist’s talk, Studio One at Plymouth Arts Centre, UK (28 April 2010, 6pm to 8.30pm)

2008
Moving Out Roland Levinsky Building, Plymouth University. Part of the Locate group exhibition. Screening from looped DVD on large monitor in Southside café opposite the Resubjection 16mm film-drawing performance (5 March 2008)

2004
Experiments in Moving Image exhibition organised by Dr Jackie Hatfield and Stephen Littman: "a retrospective of experimental moving image including multi-screened and expanded works from the late 1960’s to date." Held at the original Lumiere Cinema, University of Westminster, London, UK. Screening from DVD (26 January to 1 February 2004)

2001
Animation: synaesthesia in the experimental animated film curated by Suzie Hanna to mark the FAN International Animation Festival. Film projected from looped DVD onto the window of the gallery so that it was visible from the street outside from dusk through the night. The Norwich Gallery, Norwich, UK. Exhibition with Oskar Fischinger, Jeff Keen, Len Lye, Norman McLaren and Clive Walley (17 October to 10 November 2001)

2000
D-Net: New British Work 2 Lux Centre, London, UK. Cinema screening from BetaSP (19 October 2000)

1997
Portrait exhibition, Brewhouse Theatre and Arts Centre, Taunton, UK. Man in Leaves, large framed photographic print from Walking Out 16mm film frame (7 to 25 July 1997)