"The image no longer has space and movement as its primary characteristics but topology and time."  Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2 The Time Image

“…In Déjà vu, the technical aspects of Weir’s film are even more important in the overall creation of an ambiguous narrative that loops and confounds time, refusing the viewer any closure. There are, again, elements of portraiture but in a context that clearly suggests the ultimate enigma of the characters and their situation – a condition of becoming that is reflected in the film’s editing and the action’s perpetual recurrences. It is possible to see parallels between this film’s structure and Deleuze’s notions of the function of the edit and it’s relationship to thought: Something that’s interested me in cinema is the way the screen can work as a brain...Cinema doesn’t just operate by linking things through rational cuts, but by relinking them through irrational cuts too: this gives two different images of thought...This is all I’m saying: that there’s a hidden image of thought that, as it unfolds, branches out, and mutates, inspires a need to keep on creating new concepts, not through an external determinism but through a becoming that carries the problems themselves along with it.

Déjà vu, with its edits, slow motion and repeated actions demonstrates our relative perceptions of time and space - ‘linking things through irrational cuts.’ The film is roughly four minutes long in an acknowledgement of the sidereal day, which is that much shorter than the solar day. The science that informs the work remains deliberately low - key, however, embodied in everyday images such as the trajectory of a thrown stone. Déjà vu is an uneasy work for an audience in its refusal to resolve itself along linear narrative principles but it not the only work by Grace Weir that deliberately disorientates the viewer.”

Exerpt taken from Experimental Conversations by Francis McKee

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