SOURCE: Barker, Clive. “Trance of Innocence.” Sight and Sound n.s. 5, no. 12 (December 1995): 59.

In the following essay, Barker recalls the feelings of purity with which he created two short films—Salomé and The Forbidden—early in his career.

Like a psychic's production of automatic writing, the work we create when we are young can be a powerful clue to what obsesses us. In a trance of innocence, without the demands of commerce or self-consciousness, we speak with a purity that is difficult to achieve in later work. Not that purity is necessarily a great artistic virtue—some of the most boring art I know values that quality far too highly—but in the scrawl of an unwitting mind there may be interesting codes to be broken.

I offer this observation in relation to the release on video of two short films I made some 20 years ago, Salomé and...