Akua Amankwah-Ayeh
“Tape head”
Short film
A tape head is the part of a cassette player that converts the fluctuations in the magnetic field generated across the surface of a tape into electrical waves. A tape head is also a person who collects and trades videotapes and cassette tapes.
This is a short narrative movie shot on a consumer-grade camcorder. I rely on the people and the environments directly around me: the actors are my roommates and the entirety of the movie is shot outdoors using natural light. It is a story about music, sound, and film taking control over a person. It makes her move and it changes objects in her environment.
The images are a combination of my own video and public domain footage. The soundtrack is made up of sounds from those videos and a song by The Space Lady Susan Dietrich, a street musician who wears a silver plastic space helmet and sings covers and originals accompanied by a Casiotone MT-40. It is not the presence of the music itself, but the bizarreness of it - uncanny lyrics performed in an unorthodox style with sparse instrumentation - that is the key of the movie.
Film stills:
