Non - Specific Treat (2004)

Our desire to recognize and scrutinize the face of evil is framed by our experience of how different governments and the media have historically represented and continue to define the terrorist. Such attempts to locate and understand a threat or an enemy necessitate the creation of a character who is beyond reason, outside of civilized society and who becomes known to us as a fusion of real and fictional figures.
The figure is a young man with a shaved head wearing a black open-neck shirt, denim jacket, and silver chain around his neck. He is presented as a "non-specific threat," a gangster in a very lonely, someone who would seem or might be perceived to have no scruples about clearing the way for himself.



Willie Doherty moves the camera in a circular tracking shot around a tough looking baldheaded man with a gold chain around his neck and a denim jacket. As the camera tracks slowly around this threatening presence a male voiceover, disembodied from the central figure, makes a series of cryptic statements punctuated by pregnant pauses and he expresses explicit and veiled threats and attempts to describe the nature of his relationship to the viewer.
A group of large-scale photographs depict a young man in a variety of nondescript urban settings by day and by night. He emerges from dark alleyways and stands defiantly at street corners. The camera circles around the figure in a continuous pan so that we see every aspect of his head and shoulders front to back, back to front, and the background changes.

1 comment:

xlpharmacy said...

since Willian Doherty witnessed the massacre of so many people by soldiers in Ireland, could this be a soldier, feeling the guilt, and the voices of the people he killed?