And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,   

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

[From “The Second Coming”]

Time is neither fixed nor purely linear. An innately fragile and immaterial entity, temporality unfolds through the discursive modes of repetition and rupture. W.B. Yeats’, in his 1920 poem The Second Coming, draws on the image of the ‘widening gyre’ to elucidate this. History spiralises; looping round and round rather than urging itself forwards, moving through recurrent cycles of crisis and renewal. This conception of temporality as fraught, abrasive even, draws on William Blake’s assertion that ‘without contraries’ there can be no progression. It is these tensions between binary entities that serve as the engines of historical movement.

The Channel Project: Round and Round We Go seeks to build on this spiralising poetic model. Filmic and cinematic temporalities operate, according to Deleuze, within the same perceptual boundaries as the majority of our lived experience. Though a scene might cut away from an action before it is complete, the viewer necessarily presupposes the termination of such an action. However, where this compulsion to closure was examined by the likes of Andrei Tarkovsky and his ‘long take’, this programme seeks instead to explore the minutiae;be it spatial or perspectival. The enlargement of a singular aesthetic concern into an expanse of its own, distinct temporality sets in motion the ‘widening gyre’ to which Yeats refers.

Sound and image, throughout the films interact asynchronously, collapsing temporal distance; with the dialectic between echo and response corresponding to Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of relational meaning: that epistemologies can never be forged in isolation. The films range in their use of diegetic to non-diegetic sound, with this interplay between the sonic and the visual informing the representation of time as both abstract and material.

Round and Round We Go approaches time not as a neutral repository, but as an unstable structure which is spatialised, recursive, and charged with historical residue. Here, recurrence is not repetition alone, but the condition through which meaning emerges.