Gary Hill calls himself a "creator of images". With Tale Enclosure he creates a poetic universe, built from elementary signs: parts of the body and poetry where the syllables are isolated. In the rapid succession of sequences, the sound and visual registers correspond to each other.
The process is first expressed by the word by word appearance of a text on the screen. When the first word fades away, the second word appears, and so on. An understanding of the whole can only be achieved by using memory to recompose and add together the sentences. The sound comes in during the appearance of "said". In the following sequences, a recording of the performance of the two poets Charles Stein and George Quasha, the voices can only be heard when a part of the face appears on screen (mouth or eyes). The song is chanted in a slow rhythm, so that the text is de-structured by this oral form. The singers' bodies can't be identified or even counted. This situation is expressed in the beginning of the song: "Once upon a time certain beings arose only as they spoke [...]" Like the title, the opening statement refers to the enclosed space of the literary form. This video shares the same work for the imaginary and a progress towards a solution, which is the visual identification of the bodies. 

The image responds to this whirling, chanted rhythm by camera manipulations. Close ups, framing fragmentation and blurring, with a subsequent lack of identification of the subject filmed, are used, as well as in and out of shot sequences that isolate parts of the body (an elbow, for example), and rapid left-right movements creating a dual relation with the eyes, for example. The song and the image, built of elementary fragments, are like a sign before combination in a language. If memory is a link structuring the meaning of the prologue, it doesn't allow the linking of all the sequences into meaning. Some of them are poetic fragments, like the hands fluttering like a butterfly's wings, or the heavier and denser elbow that astonishingly works the right side of the screen. Others have more to do with haziness - with blurred passages and fragments of faces and bodies which leave us very few clues to discover the number of participants or to distinguish their bodies. The elements are a white beard and a shorter red beard. As the prologue says, the two characters only reveal themselves at first, by their voices. Only the last image of the tape shows the two faces in a wide shot. The performers aren't identified until the end, in a reversal of the order of tales that present the characters first.

Thérèse Beyler