Each version represented a distinct mode of explaining the world, and the three versions together intercut the scholarly with the folkloric and mythic, each presentation discrete and separate, with the versions only interacting with each other at the very end of the performance. Stevenson’s stated intention was to explore the ways in which the mode of retelling a story changes its meaning, even when the basic facts remain fixed across all the variations. The resulting film montage conveyed the performance clearly enough, but hadn’t (as yet) begun to effect what Stevenson hoped would become a decisive transformation as further iterations were edited in, and their textures in turn complicated by new versions, changed characters and scripts, and yet more approaches to the material.

Stevenson has talked about his intentions in relation to Rashomon (both Kurosawa‘s 1950 film, and the original story by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa), and The Project Eigg Lectures shares a format in which one narrative is re-told from various perspectives, each time radically changed by the shifted viewpoint and narrative style. In his various reworkings of this material, there are similar ideas about truth as an elusive (even impossible) outcome of any statement about events in the real world. There’s also an intention to fabricate a kind of perpetually unfolding oral tradition within his own body of work: at the conclusion of his discussion of the film Stevenson noted that he hoped at some point the original would become lost and the material escape his control altogether.

The storyteller’s sections, with their bizarre quests to restore the manhood of castrated rams with elaborate horned head-dresses, their accounts of a trickster figure known as ‘the Guiser’ and their immersions in secret drinking subcultures, certainly imply both the prosaic origins of heroic tales like Cú Chulainn and The Mabinogion, while also suggesting that even the most meaningless actions in the present might (one day) find themselves retold in similarly heroic terms. It’s a long game of Chinese Whispers that Stevenson seems intent on playing, and his intention to continually mutate his footage ensures that The Project Eigg Lectures is a work that will never circulate long enough in any one form to attain the permanence that might undermine its objectives.

A review of the very first Eigg Lecture, following a video presentation and discussion at Nottingham Contemporary, Wane Burrows 2011.