Leave Me on a Rainy Afternoon (2018)

what do we see when we look into clouds? this is a love letter to the dazed atmospherics of cloud systems, 1970s geography trips, the observation/notation of clouds, and their links to emotion and pathetic fallacy. includes dark sky footage from early meteorological archives, the U.S. national oceanic and aeronautical organisations, public domain pedagogical material, radio broadcasts, 16 and 35mm offcuts from expeditions, and animation; these are brought together in a weather-beaten reverie to nostalgia and lost loves. the musical composition is both a washed-out love song, and, at the same time, a dedication to sky-watchers and cloud-watchers of all stripes and eras and their different recording devices: geographers with notebooks; painters with cloud observations, scientists and natural philosophers of clouds, or anyone who looks yearningly at the skies. the film is split into two parts, travelling backwards from colour to black and white and the earliest analogue forms and intertitles for these atmospheres. the love-song-in-reverse creates an elegiac effect while also matching the time-lapse with a drenched, psych-folk loop, bringing out the mesmeric qualities of clouds. see