Jamie Shovlin
Rough Cut

2013

Producer | artist feature film
Producer | exhibition (Hiker Meat)

A co-commission between Cornerhouse Artist Film and TIFF: Toronto International Film Festival

All images copyright Jamie Shovlin

Rough Cut, the debut feature from artist Jamie Shovlin, explores the remaking of an exploitation film that never was. At its dark heart is Hiker Meat, an archetypal – and entirely imaginary – 1970s slasher movie complete with hitchhiking heroine, charismatic commune leader and a group of teens who disappear one by one.

This tantalising film-within-a-film serves to both deconstruct and pay affectionate homage to the often-maligned exploitation era of film production.

Shovlin collaborated with writer Mike Harte and composer Euan Rodger to produce a full screenplay and soundtrack for the film. He then made a prototype cut-and-paste feature by collaging over 1500 found clips from existing exploitation films.

The intensive shoot in England’s Lake District, standing in for the Italian countryside - itself a Spaghetti Western-like replica for the landscape of an American genre - involved two alternate casts (one for live action, the other for dubbed sequences), a fleet of vintage American vehicles, a pop-up Summer camp and a puppeteer controlled, B-movie monster.

The result was both a feature-length faux documentary, Rough Cut, and resulting exhibition, Hiker Meat.

“… this mismatch of theory and practice, of self-conscious interviews and absurd accidents… gives the film its piquant comedy”
The Guardian

Jamie Shovlin studied at the Royal College of Art, London, and is interested in the tension between truth and fiction, reality and invention, history and memory. Through his projects he questions how information becomes authoritative and explores the way that we map and classify the world in order to understand it.