Setting has reflected on “The Gurgle”, it is a reflection on how life within a city can make you feel, made by people who share these anxious, frantic feelings. My neighbour was a large inspiration to this film. He is a violent man who struggles with addiction and spends much of his time shouting on the street. I felt empathy towards him when a lot of people felt fear. He has spent time in mental health wards and in prisons but to me it feels like the system has failed him, like many other ex-prisoners he struggles with addiction problems and struggles looking for work. “Figures show around half of prisoners are addicted to drugs”. I did feel empathy towards him but at the same time he wasn’t a likeable character, he was often violent towards people and I would routinely see him covered in blood, I would also see him crying often. He was always very polite and respectful to the people who lived on our street, he behaved in two different ways, polite to the people he felt safe around and violent towards people who he did not.
He served as a muse for this project, I saw something in him that I also see in me and other people, yet it was more intense in him. Hiding behind a persona, a mask, to conceal how vulnerable he really is, I tried to convey these feelings of being separate within oneself in the film using dissonance. The word harmony comes from the Greek word “harmos” meaning joint, harmony is perceived as pleasing natural connections between things, in music it means the same thing, frequencies played together that sound nice, dissonance is the opposite, our brain struggles to process it . Near the end of the film there are some synthesised water sounds, to me this symbolises the mounting pressure on top of the character, a similar tool is used visually in “The Graduate” where a young man who is unsure of who he is, is often pictured underwater or surrounded by water.
Uk Gov, 2023