Haptic existence, dream time, animals, children, the weather, plant life – a series of sensory encounters / clips from interior life, this is a portrait of the interstices within a family
Snakes in the Grass is a lyrical and visually poetic piece filmed mostly on a smartphone. A visual and audio collage, from which an insubstantial and atmospheric narrative emerges. Moments in the kitchen, steam escaping, a reflected view in a saucepan, smoke, a dog shaped helium balloon floating skywards, driving through a snow storm, a barn on fire, a figure lying down in a swamp. The work alludes to the fissures under the surface of the idyll, undermining landscape’s insistence on pictorial beauty and exploring the idealisation of childhood.
Aknowledgements
Lower Hewood Farm Harvest Film Festival
Denman and Gould, Haydon Church, Somerset 2019
“We are really pleased to be able to screen Anna Best’s short ‘Snakes in the Grass’, with Arcadia . Shot over a period of ten years, Snakes in the Grass is a lyrical and visually poetic piece about landscape and motherhood“.
Archive
HD video, duration: 14’40”, 2017
password (Snakes)
“a provocative and poetic new film that explores our relationship to the land. Directed by BAFTA-winning director Paul Wright, Arcadia is a sensory journey into the beauty and brutality, magic and madness of our changing relationship with land and each other. The film combines over 100 years of archive film with a grand, expressive new score by Adrian Utley of Portishead and Will Gregory of Goldfrapp“.