Brickwall (1975)

Handling

“Being a bricklayer, this was one of my most important films. It represents eight hours of work...you start your early morning, you look at the work which is in front of you—then you get stuck into it—you have a morning tea, then you have lunch—and in the afternoon, of course, you knock off. I wanted to construct the 22 minutes of film very much like how I laid bricks in the physical sense—with a trowel and mortar. So I worked out a rhythm for the film—I had 3 frames, 6 frames, 12 frames, and 24 frames, and virtually all of it was done single-frame. For the soundtrack I used myself laying bricks in real time—you lay the trowel, you scrape it, you take off the ‘mud’, etc, and that continues right through the film. Some people refer to this as a ‘structural’ film…rather this is a film by a bricklayer who knows the material very well.” (Paull Winkler)