Silk

Silk is not for arachnophobes. Silently tracking across The Oxford Silk Group's greenhouse-turned arachnarium, Silk shows us the weavings of the Golden Orb Spider.

It starts with the sun, shadows, drifting shapes, flies on decomposing fruit. A dead spider hangs in the corner from a thread. Almost invisible is the web, the titular silk, among the rust and the vegetation. Then on a black cloth the stage is set. A single spider, pinioned, a wonder for a moment of dissection, and then that alien twitch, hydraulic, exoskeletal, and from its spinnarets the silk is drawn.

Cronenburg would be proud. The reel, implacable, turns, drawing from the spider golden glowing silk, woven round and around the octagonal drum until it becomes a rippled prism, and still it turns. Squirming, the spider gives yet more silk, until the discomfort is not that of confrontation with spiders but fear for it, a sense of exploitation, and underneath it wonder.

Shown at Edinburgh's 2010 Film Festival as part of the Great And Small selection, Naheed Raza's film is hypnotic. A study in part of the material itself, it never discusses the extravagant tensile properties, merely illustrates them. Raza's notes for the film use words like 'extrusion' and 'lair', and in that juxtaposition of wonder and terror nests the spider. Shot on 16mm, the film is silent, dream-like, slow shots of dangling spiders mixing uncomfortably with the anonymous hands of the extruder. It could almost be drawn from mythology; indeed, Raza's notes mention the folkoric strength of the webs, but it is the glint of the strand across a blank, black space, taken up by reel, that compels. The twitching spider, the glistening prism, it could be the loom of fate.

Raza's eye is keen, unsurprising given her pedigree as an artist. The film's focus on materiality puts it in good company with another EIFF2010 short, Skip 11. In a cinematic context Silk feels a little unusual, but Black Box programmes have often featured works that might best sit in an installation. That's no complaint, however - on a big screen, the quality of silk is evident.