Point X Stuart Croft 1998 6 mins Colour Hi-8/Digibeta Gallery Loop

A small-town murder investigation is fused with a corporate video for a stress management centre.

An actor is seen re-tracing the final movements of murder victim Stephen Moss through an idyllic rural landscape. The man's journey is interrupted and displaced by a second film, gradually dissolving through the first. This second film is a cheap promo tape for a company that operates in the same area, and is run by Stephen Moss's father. The father is implicated in the crime, and as he walks a virtually identical route to his son, the two literally cross paths, whilst each is trapped in his own filmic space.

Point X proposes an implicit narrative by adopting the editing device of the dissolve, expanding the form to interlock two cheap filmic genres. Both formats draw on the realm of found footage and the ready-made, but are entirely fake. At the same time, Point X represents a father-son relationship that is loaded with classic components of noir suspense: murder, mystery, money and revenge.