UNKNOWABLE – Zane Giernatowski

My experimental short film ‘UNKNOWABLE’ is about the flow and perception of Entropy. A contrast between the human perception of our universe, with the chaos and pain we eventually crumble into. With analogous themes and imagery of Heaven, Hell, and Limbo used in the structure and juxtaposition of these perspectives. It’s a reflection of how I see the world currently in twenty-twenty. It is my Cosmic Horror.

I investigated into what I now call ‘Reiteration Artists’ for my chosen research topic. I decided on this because a lot of my work is comprised of old stock footage, from which I take and distort into something new, usually evolving into cosmological inspired visuals. I developed this style in my first project, taking a heavy focus on the visuals. But for the research topic I wanted to find a way to create meaning behind this aesthetic choice. I define a Reiteration Artist as someone who takes objects, films, other art (anything they can use really), and transforms it. This often injects new meaning into these things, and also enhances the depth of whatever the original meaning of the base material. I didn’t restrict myself to just and audio-visual medium, I wanted to try and find art from other fields. This was to try and alter the way I think about what I’m creating, and think out of the box with the creation of the video. My favourite artwork that I discovered was the ‘Spiral Jetty’. It is an artwork located in the Utah Great Salt Lake, created by Robert Smithson. It falls into the Medium of ‘Land Art’, a field long practiced by modern day humans for millennia (Nazca Lines, Peru). It’s just a jetty made of rocks, forming a spiral, but it transforms the space. Injecting meaning to somewhere barren and devoid of anything, even life. I just love it. A message I identified throughout the various works was that they were only possible as a direct result of over industrialisation in society, and rapid consumerism. Therefore, taking on an unintentional critique of these very concepts. I wanted to incorporate this critique into my project.

For the creation of the video I wanted to scale it back with the visuals. I feel it is too easy to create something overly noisy and energetic, especially with Horror. I think true horror comes out in the slowness of a scene. Because of this I wanted to focus more on the sound design and structure of the edit. I decided on four parts, Earth, Universe, Man, Hell. This would allow me to portray the themes I wanted and structure it in a way similar to a sine wave. I did something I’ve never done before too, I created the soundscape first. I believed that if I could create it well enough, the visuals would come to me in my mind. Which was the case and how I decided on the sections above. This allowed the scenes to feel more connected and flow into each other much more fluently than my last project. Ikept the high contrast visual style, and it fit perfectly to the themes. The video ends with art work from the ‘Divine Comedy’ illustrated by Gustave Doré, with an edited recital of ‘Ozymandias of Egypt’ by Percy Bysshe Shelley. I think the two juxtapose nicely into the nihilistic note I wanted to finish on, of ruin and torment.

Scaling back and focusing more on the editing structure of Screen Project two, in combination with the abstract cosmic style I’m developing, really helped me push past a barrier I feel I have been stuck at for a while. I think it has really opened up a lot of creative avenues that I would never considered if not for working on my style over the course of this semester. The research into Reiteration Artists has also allowed me to discover new ways I can add more meaning and depth to my work, without it being so obvious, and also igniting a keener interest into other mediums of art. I think to summarise, I have become more confident not only as a filmmaker, but an artist as well. So much so that I am about to begin pre-production on my next project, a third chapter to these videos. Except this time, I will be making my own footage with Super8mm. Creating a project using all I have learnt in the studio lectures, the work of my peers, and in my own personal development and research.

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