A little bit of unknown is a short film consisting of a conversation between the artist and a physicist - Paul Tod from Oxford. The artist asks him 5 questions about black holes; “What is a black hole?”, “If it’s black in the night sky, how would you find one?”etc. The film cuts during the questioning from the physicist’s study to a sequence of shots of the artist entering an observatory and setting a telescope in motion to look at the night sky. A long shot is seen through the lens of the telescope and out into the sky, into a constellation of stars. As blackness fills the screen the physicist concludes quoting  “…the only elements in the construction of black holes are our basic concepts of space and time, they are thus, almost by definition, the most perfect objects there are in the universe...” Black holes are one of the last unanswered questions in physics. The work shifts from a documentary and factual approach to a scene of abstraction and the sublime. To where a rational approach to the sharing of knowledge breaks down and a reflection on the beauty of the unquantifiable takes over.

“In his treatise on film, Sculpting in Time (1987), the Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky argues that ‘the rhythm of the movement of time is there within the frame, as the sole organising force…’ Weir’s films often adhere to this principle, relishing long shots, lingering on scenes beyond any narrative imperative, privileging the simple presence of the landscape or the real time duration of an action.

In A Little Bit of Unknown (2007) the film’s technique successfully employ precisely these kinds of shots within a larger, more orthodox documentary framework. As we might expect in a conventional film, the camera edits set up an encounter between Weir and physicist Paul Tod as if a student were arriving for a tutorial. Within that conventional framework, however, there are long observational shots of the sky, clouds skirting the sun as we hear of supernovas and black holes. There is a mimetic quality to the film work too. As we hear of searches for the black holes in night skies, the film traces a visit to a telescope at night, when the discussion turns to gases swirling into black holes we meditate on images of dark clouds and our familiar sky is rendered gaseous. Later, when a black hole is defined as ‘a region of space and time (space-time) from which you can’t escape’, we are caught within the ceiling dome of a closed observatory unable to see the world outside.

Tod has been offering his own simplified explanations of a black hole throughout this film but Weir offers a second, visual layer of interpretation that grounds the imagination in the world around us. This is something that goes to the heart of Grace Weir’s artistic practice and also harks back to the early roots of scientific experiment. In Leviathan and the Air-Pump (1985), Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer outline the foundations of experiment in the 17^th century. They focus on the work of Robert Boyle who insisted that experiments should have a public dimension, being witnessed by others and the facts thereby established being broadcast as far as possible. The emphasis on performance and witnessing is something that runs through Weir’s work. Her images, in the medium of time and light, often embody the scientific point being made in her films. Simultaneously, they offer a gloss on the phenomena being observed, reminding us of our human perspective as observers of these phenomena.”

Exerpt taken from Cherry Blossom Time by Francis McKee

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