"Absorbed into a screen"

James Lingwood on Fishtank, May 2002

Fishtank was Artangel's first commission for television. It was developed with television as a particular physical and psychological space within people's houses in mind.

Even though it has been seen as a film and has been screened at film festivals, the scale, the subject matter and pacing of it - even the kind of quasi-documentary / anthropological forms it played with - related to different kinds of television film, to natural history programmes and domestic dramas. Screens keep appearing throughout the film - the idea of being absorbed into a screen as a form of escapism is quite strong, whether that screen is a Playstation or a television.

Richard had been making this video material of his family over the course of time. There was a huge amount of material to work from, and there was a lot of extremely interesting footage which stayed on the cutting-room floor. It was a big challenge for Richard to work out how that material could be edited into a form which might both inhabit but also somehow break out of the documentary mode of TV.

Early on, I showed some of Richard's material to Adam Curtis. It was important to have someone involved who had made exceptionally distinctive television films but who didn't come from an arts TV viewpoint. We didn't particularly want Fishtank to be seen simply as an artist's film.