Rachel Maclean: Once Upon an Apocalypse

On the wall of Rachel Maclean's Dennistoun studio, a still of Rudolph Valentino and Agnes Ayres in the 1921 film The Sheik is given the same pride of place as a Vermeer. These are the visual inspirations for A Whole New World, the work Maclean has made as winner of the Margaret Tait Award for this year's Glasgow Film Festival: a left-field take on the upcoming independence vote, fusing narratives of St George and the Dragon with Avatar and Disney’s Tarzan. There's also a screenshot from The Lord of the Rings. Not otherwise a fan, Maclean is nevertheless impressed by "its aesthetic amalgam of Caspar David Friedrich and Art Nouveau."

Making reference to these fantasy blockbusters and conscious that the film will be shown in the cinema (Glasgow Film Theatre), A Whole New World will be presented in surround sound, "something that'll be noticeable; it's not typical in art house cinema." Despite this technical difference, as in Maclean’s previous works, all of the audio is found, pulled from the internet. "That's the most fun bit, when I start getting ideas, piecing it together into a structure." Above her walls’ meticulous rows of rich visuals, and with tantalising casualness there's a handsome handmade pink lion's head balanced on the wardrobe in the corner.

A lot of the idiosyncratic appeal of Maclean's energetic, off-kilter and highly colourful video work is founded on these sumptuous, handmade costumes and props. So it's a bit surprising when she mentions that this is the quickest part of her process. "But that's still a month," she adds, immediately giving a sense of the labour- and time-intensive post-production that underpins her skilfully edited, carefully produced video work.

With the work still in progress, Maclean has not made life any easier for herself by taking influence from the lush backgrounds of big budget videogames like the Prince of Persia. She tells me she is "keen on a strong source of light: dramatic, painterly chiaroscuro. Though it's different from the pop and neon of the older work it seemed appropriate as the film’s set in a Victorian or Scottish country manor in the ruins of a vast empire. There’s a low sun rising or setting on a hot dying planet.”

Right away there's a strange sense of dreamy introversion as every character in a post-apocalyptic setting is played by Maclean, as in all her work. With her typical slippage between high and low culture, she responds to the weighty subject of respective British and Scottish identities through a narrator inspired by Arabian Nights, where "figures are turned to stone and back to life again." Opening the film following a rip-off of the Universal Studios intro, the narrator is a statue of a Britannia Goddess, played by Maclean miming to a male voice.

As much time as Maclean spends rendering the sophisticated finish of her work, there’s still potential for happy accidents. This latest work features a blue Avatar/Disney-inspired princess character. "The nose didn't work, she looks like a beautiful Disney princess but with a horrible nose." And since the whole film will be shown in HD, Maclean jokes that it might be more hideous still "if the make-up and glue's really obvious."

Though not quite enthusiastic about it, she's not averse to this grotesque deformity. Closing the interview, it’s clear that Maclean’s imagination is already onto the next work. "Every time you do something you see the possibility for the next thing. I teach myself more." Maclean’s impressive brazen impulse to rubbish anything comfortable and experiment without promise of success makes GFF's screening of A Whole New World a white-hot ticket.