Truck (excerpt) Single Channel video 3’20” (the original film runs up to 17 minutes

Truck borrows a film from a 2018 military recruitment advert This is Belonging 4 where a benign joke in a hostile and uncontrollable landscape works on the basis of trust and threat. The film plays on a narrative of hostile threat and the violence of exile that is performed as an innocent joke (fig 28). The scene starts with an ordinary tyre blow-out in a desert landscape. On fixing the wheel a soldier, Dan, tries to jump into the truck. At a critical moment it moves off, leaving him behind. A moment of gentle cruelty is resolved in the original thirty-second advert and with this a narrative of belonging is re-established and reinforced. I borrowed the film and extended the middle section through a blended process of repetition and continuity editing. My purpose was to open up the film’s violent trace elements that were suppressed by the narrative of playful teasing and unitary care in the original film. My intervention accentuates Dan’s magnanimity, performed through a small gestural shake of the head and the wave of the tyre iron. This becomes an exaggerated indicator of Dan's vulnerable predicament.