‘Dust defying gravity’ consists of a single 4 minute long shot that traces through the rooms at Dunsink Observatory, documenting the aging telescopes and measuring instruments arrayed throughout the building. As the camera passes over a mechanical model of the solar system, the dust in the air of the room becomes visible, floating and scintillating like a field of stars.

“…In Dust defying gravity Weir presents a silent inventory of the instruments that amplified the human senses in the past, augmenting our awareness of worlds previously invisible to us. At the same time, her focus on dust undermines any of the authority or pride that this might bring. The moment in which the motes becomes visible in Dust defying gravity also expose the camera as an instrument, an optical device with its own limits of perception. Such moments occur in almost all of her films and constitute a critical appraisal of film through the actual making of film. In this, Weir accepts the view of Gilles Deleuze in his ground-breaking volumes Cinema I and II in which he argues that ‘philosophers haven’t taken much notice of cinema, even though they go to cinemas.’ Deleuze argues that a philosophy of film must grow from concepts specific to cinema and not from other disciplines such as linguistics.

Movement and time are two of the most important concepts that he identifies in his analysis stating, for instance, that ‘cinema does not give us an image to which movement is added, it immediately gives us a movement-image.’ This emphasis on motion leads Deleuze to a formulation of film as another example of ‘becoming’ - the image cannot be separated from its motion and has, therefore, a constantly evolving meaning that remains open, never resolved. Image and thought are united in this vision of cinema and thought then is expressed through the technical choices of each film-maker. ‘A tracking shot,’ for instance, ‘sometimes even stops tracing out a space and plunges into time.’ Applied to the tracking shots of Weir’s Dust defying gravity it is possible to see how this transition could be made. The constant motion of the camera in its inventory of instruments used to measure time and space creates a flowing meditation on these very subjects. The moment when the dust becomes visible only intensifies this process, multiplying references to time as the film moves beyond the tracing of space and takes Deleuze’s plunge ‘into time’…”

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Dust defying gravity

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