Trapline

“Trapline” represents a new way of considering film as a vehicle of projected movement… The film is composed entirely of static camera shots. “Ellie Epp’s ‘Trapline’ (1976) maps another way out of structural film toward a cinema of delicate implication.” – Bart Testa, Canadian Encyclopedia “Several filmmakers continue to explore space and landscape on film…. Ellie Epp’s ‘Trapline’ (1976) is the most cooly beautiful of all: filmed in the Silchester Road Public Baths, London, it sets a sequence of geometrically organized shots, outwardly but gently alive with light changes, ripples and reflections, within the continuous, distantly reverberant sound space of the entire building.” – Tony Reif, Self Portrait: Essays on the Canadian and Quebec Cinemas “Filmed in a London swimming pool, ‘Trapline’ is a painterly film conveying a state of limbo – the still pool with the light reflection on the water, the grid of the high glass roof, three figures sitting under the shower, with the torn curtain, voices echoing from the pool walls always slightly out of range, giving one the feeling of being trapped between the unconscious and consciousness.” – Tina Keane for “Readings,” 1977