Art critic and curator Sacha Craddock reflects on Turner's FLAMIN-funded work..

Sarah Turners 'Perestroika' starts with a whispery voice, sea mist, birds, the beginning of the day, even the beginning of life. The voice, which stays throughout, hints at reconstruction, rediscovery, a journey experienced - a journey and an accident. The narrative that is proffered, presented: 'of course I had been drinking' offers the quality of a personal story, yet the promise of comprehension is interwoven with decidedly formal lyrical filmmaking. The complex and layered changes in pace and structure, that cover a gamut of technique, achieve a film that manages to be thoroughly clear about confusion. Through a very distinct use of time and sound Turner also allows us to stay within the real as we take a train to Siberia.

The promise, expectation, all unimaginable, is about loss, politics, change and landscape, an accident and a death foretold. The use of sound really does lead; the click, click of a film shutter, for instance, is able to project a consistent form of surveillance. The narration, is handed out as we pass through this thing together. It is as if we are making the journey ourselves, and the confusion, the lack of knowledge, the difficulty of grasping moment is all there. Individual moment is framed by film from the train window while the sound of the friends inside the carriage is counteracted by the differently paced rhythms of frozen, cold, existence outside. Desperately trying to hold on to past detail, the narrator also gives details of current moment.

One of the most important aspects of Perestroika is that it appears as a record of the impossibility, when travelling, to feel and see the same things at exactly the same time. Turner manages to convey the fact that the actual experience of seeing a view, for instance, does not necessarily coincide with a conscious understanding of that moment. This three day railway journey is the single thin motif, the only simple thread to grasp on to as the verbal and filmic account ranges back and forth, in and out, of a confused brain.

The gap between seeing and remembering never closes as the film gives us passing fields, bushes, cities, moments, and houses. Snow, orchards, fields, trees unfurl like so many Eastern European landscape paintings of the turn of the last century. But then there is the darkness, the peering out, looking into windows which frame other individual moments.The narrator and her friends are going back to a site of death, of loss, in an attempt to understand and recover the truth of a particular incident. In an attempt to hold on to detail and fact, there is anger too, for those friends. Carriages follow carriages, whole trains are parked and pass by. There is constant suffocating heat inside and extreme cold outside. The somewhat annoying but convincingly honest voice seems that of a real person telling a story, while the recording of friends' observations, their rules and methods for filming, is also interwoven, and carried in and out. The friends sometimes comment on what is being seen at the same time as we see it.  Trains seen from the window in the dark, and then the light, then the stations, come in and out of focus in the same way as we remember random details, forever, from a journey.

There had been an accident and the narrator who is ill, brain damaged even, is trying to hold on to physical understanding and reason, whilst taking pills for pain. Her account veers backwards and forwards between experienced moment and generality. Yet the camera mechanically holds on, takes the pictures anyway and the noise of the digital material being gathered is constant. Turner uses layers of vision to break the surface with editing so complex that repeated sounds mirror the landscape and the rhythm of horizon is broken by reflection. The particular comfort of extended personal time in transit is seriously counteracted by the loss of memory, the loss of actuality. A woman takes air, the film repeats this over and over, back and forth, and we slow down here to attend to the kind of arbitrary detail and moment that stays in the brain long after more apparently significant moments have faded. Crane after crane, a smoking factory chimney, someone else's journey, snow on the roads, empty buildings and the continuous body of an enormous country.

The woman filmed, unknowing, as she stands at the door of another train to take air is held on to and considered while the confusion about rules and cheating and artistic rationale continues throughout. The metaphor of a journey is excellently mapped out in apparent real time, and carries on in the head long after the train has stopped and started.

Copyright Sacha Craddock August 2010