Jade Tyler
Canon Fodder Assignment 4:
Individual Reflection
Over the last four weeks as a part of the studio Canon Fodder, we were assigned a group to challenge ourselves in creating a short manifesto piece on our stance of the canon. Working on a project collectively will always have its challenges but it also comes with success. After all, we were carefully selected to work together based on our collective ideas on what we thought the canon would look like, or should look like. Together we came up with the consensus that the canon should thrive on authenticity and truth, and should not be created with the intention of commercial gain.
From there we workshopped how we wanted to present our manifesto, we liked the idea of creating and sharing a meaningful piece in a performative way. Of course we all had different ideas at the time and some of us like the idea of making a parody video, installation, live performative piece, or a mixed media showcase of leaflets or magazines. After some narrowing down we all agreed that a way of incorporating at least one of all of our ideas would be in a montage video, similar to a video essay but in a less boring and essay way. This way we could exhibit our manifesto in a performative way, but it can still have elements of parody in it. I would say that as a team we had quite a success when it came to brainstorming and workshopping our ideas of how we wanted our assignment to take shape.
We did of course also run into some problems when it came to working on the project as a collective, as some of the members of our group weren’t able to make it to our class time to work on the assignments. This made it particularly hard to move forward as a collective. Instead we tried to find ways of contributing equal loads of the work remotely, however this wasn’t 100% ideal either. We were able to present our group pitch without some of our members and they helped contribute their piece of the assignment remotely, but it felt from the feedback we received from the panel, that we needed to workshop our ideas further, and create a clear idea and structure of what it is exactly we are trying to achieve in our manifesto.
When it came to the critical thinking and project design of our production, we decided to split the work up. We all knew that we wanted to have some creative narration or manifesto that would either be used as text or audio narration over the montage of our video. Some of us then went out and collected found footage and images from canonised films, and found distinct similarities from other films. We wanted to create the distinction between original films and commercialised film, that simply copied and took from old works of art. We were particularly intrigued by the ‘vertigo effect’ first made famous in Hitchcock’s 1969 thriller Vertigo. We also had a creative idea of making a QR code that would be shared with an audience that could be scanned and it would showcase our video. However we did have some issues actually finalising the QR code and had trouble linking it to the canon.
We came to the conclusion that it would be best to just create a poetic montage video of our manifesto that contested the canon by establishing although the canon is old, at least it was full of authentic original creators and ideas compared to newer forms of commercialised film. Everything has already been created. What more is there to make without copying another person? We had some issues working collectively, and our group wasn’t that communicative, when splitting the workload up. We ended up having to submit our separate work on our manifesto, as 2 out of our 3 members were quite sick and weren’t able to make it to our class meetings to finish off our production.
From here I set out to finish the manifesto we started as a group, I chose an up beat satirical intense ‘blockbuster trailer’ as the opening of our manifesto, I had hoped to play on the satirical elements of parodying the canon as this intense thing that had been worked up. The first 30-40 seconds of the film, saw a montage of the top 100 ‘greatest’ directors off all time as contested by the 2012 Sight and Sound poll for ‘The 100 Greatest Films of all Time’. I wanted to bring back the focus to the first auters, the oldest creators of pure, authentic cinema. I believe that the canon should be celebrated for what it was, even if it wasn’t representative of all demographics, after all they were the first to create the ‘greatest films’.
When looking at the sight and sound poll for the 100 greatest films of all time, I found one thing that was common to each of the films exhibited, that was ingenuity and creativity to create a unique and authentic cinematic experience. Each of those films truthfully represented the canon in a way that had never been seen before. This got me thinking about the canon more broadly, and I started writing my position on the canon, that in order for a film to be canonised it should be authentic and stem from some form of originality. The ideas and stories told by these filmmakers are engenius ones that show credibility.
I feel that my final work engages its audience through upbeat fast paced music and fast cut editing. The montage of famous directors is somewhat comedic as it is juxtaposed against the intense soundtrack. This first part of the montage is supposed to feel quite intriguing yet funny, almost like an inspirational talk, or trailer for ‘highly important people’. My first stance on the canon, is that it is overhyped and overrated, just like the first section of my manifesto, however as the piece moves forwards, the audience sees just how dead our film industry has come as it has lost its “pure authentic merit and passion for art”. The text and narration of the montage of scenes and imagery of the film is also quite striking, I chose a bold white and red lettering that would stand out against the film scenes. I feel that this component is also quite visually engaging as it is quite powerful, and the words I chose to use were taken from the manifesto I wrote in regard to the canon.
If we had more time to work on our manifesto so that it could be screened at a film festival or event, I would have liked to finalise a few more aspects of our production. The first being it overall presentation of the assignment as a whole, I would have liked to up play our ides of a ‘mixed media’ manifesto production, that being I would have like to have create leaflets in the form of old manifestos and propaganda, presented in t the format of our manifesto, it would have written narration and typography as well as visual iconography from the canon and its directors. Secondly I would have liked to work further on fine tuning our narration and manifesto script, so that it felt like a proper manifesto like the ones from Cate Blanchets performance ‘Manifesto’.