Roadside

[2008 & 2012 / 12:30 mins / Colour/B&W / HD Cam / 35MM / 4:3 format]

RoadSide is a veritable assault on the viewer, an audacious blurring of the boundaries between ugliness and beauty. Combining ‘found footage’ from Comerford’s personal archives and an unfinished short, Rough Touch, it concerns an encounter between a man on parole driving a stolen car back to prison and a woman hitchhiker. An edgy connection develops, alongside a vague hope that the strange attraction between the mutual outsiders might survive against the odds. The journey that comprises RoadSide is overlaid with sparse dialogue and sensuous sound, and visual abstractions replicating the man’s current memories and perceptions. RoadSide is bracketed by an unsettling prison-cell hanging scene, unbalancing the viewer, but giving way to miscommunication, and memory-default. Following test-screenings, Comerford developed RoadSide into an art-installation, The RoadSide Film Sculpture (2012), which he has described as ‘entering a space, to see a work that is extreme cinema, an attempt to suspend pain within beauty.’