In Absentia

I have been refecting on how The Long and Winding Road connects with the themes of absence and presence. There is a sense of absence as loss. Absence as sadness. Absence as grief. The objects have become devoid of recognisable shape or function in a bid to objectify emotion. Absent of meaning. The car appears abandoned with no explanation of why or how it came to be there, in that colour with those contents. Absent of narrative. The film humanises the journey with the presence of a driver but there is no sense of his being present in the car. Only the detritus of the project so far - of places the car has been, the driver has seen. The car is an ark. An arc. An archive. A carchive. A cathartic icon. A secular relic. A vehicle for the baggage of loss. A memorial to someone's absence. A celebration of someone's presence. A eulogy for recovery. A souvenir of self-discovery. There is the sensation of presence when visitors take a seat in the car. Sucking a travel sweet amidst the mildew of two years of storage, their physical presence animates the objects wrapped up in brown paper and string. Their leafing through maps and diaries makes the journey tangible. Their listening to the songs and lists of items makes the details audible. Their flicking through photo albums makes the journey visible. Their view from the car parked at 27 Degrees North West pointing in the direction of Liverpool places them firmly on The Long and Winding Road. Only when the presence converges with the absence does the project begin to make sense.