The omnipresent shadow of World War Two and Anne Frank wrote in her diary ‘Countless friends and acquaintances have gone to a terrible fate’ and so her family go into hiding.
Motion pictures include classics like ‘Casablanca’ the famous song played by Sam -‘As time goes by’ - and ‘Holiday Inn’ when ‘White Christmas’ is sung first on film by Bing Crosby. The animation ‘Bambi’ premieres and, I in the 1960s, a young child was taken out of the cinema howling with shock when his mother got shot. In Great Britain Winston Churchill gives a speech ‘’Now this is not the end…’. On radio ‘Desert Island Discs’ – still aired today- started with its famous intro music and holds the following years together.
Through all of this the number ‘42’ resonates like some numbers do, and further along the century it is the backbone of Douglas Adam’s radio series, then TV and later a Hollywood film ‘Life, the universe and everything’.
Somehow part of its script fits back to 1942 in textual echoes for me so I intertwined and put them into time’s distorting filter.
Those words mutate in arrangement and change, amplifying context and meaning. One out of the three visuals is by a war artist who was lost on a flight to Iceland, whilst the other images are fake future or advertisement promises or the battle that never was (Los Angeles).
So long ago yet the thread of continuity is us : for all our truths, failings and humanity.
“For old time’s sake Forsake
A kiss is just a kiss Kiss
Never out of date
Out never
Each and all join in the march of death
Join the march each
Now this is not the end
Now this end”
(back to century timeline)
