High Noon

Mini DV to SD

34 min 01 sec

2002

Commissioned for Fabrications: New Art & Urban Memory in Manchester, CUBE, Manchester

Catalogue extract:

Mark Crinson, Natalie Rudd & Helen Hills Sarah Carne has looked to America to intensify her investigation of Manchester. For many years she has been interested in the pervading sense of dislocation of Third Avenue – one of a network of avenues arranged in an Americanised grid formation at the heart of Trafford Park industrial estate. In her video installation High Noon Carne has made the connection with the 1952 western movie of the same name, which similarly features a remote community struggling against its surroundings. Carne has worked with the people of Third Avenue to recreate the movie in their locality, thus highlighting the fictional Americanisation of the area. Carne’s High Noon depends upon the goodwill and cooperation of the public, but it also revolves around the artist’s own charismatic performance as a kind of stage manager, prompter and advocate. Carne’s film has the quality of a fly-on-the-wall documentary, one seemingly at odds with the high production values of the Hollywood original. This tension upsets conventional distinctions between reality and fiction, familiarity and detachment, the local and the universal.