that week 11 reflection I was supposed to do earlier

Things are finally coming together, which is a big relief because I have been very stressed about it. Last week we had a very productive meeting on Friday after still not having everything together on Wednesday when we were supposed to. But what we did have was a very productive meeting about our next steps and then when we met on Friday we spent time discussing the myth of the gargoyle, and about how the stories have changed over time. From there I edited down the audio to a ten minute track and then sent it back to see what the team thought.

Harry edited together some footage which ended up being really cool and now I’m playing with what he put together and the audio we made. Look it took a moment to actually put something together but at least we finally might get two video’s finished and that’s a big relief to the tiny breakdowns that I’ve been having the past two weeks.

Anyway they’ll be more in the next post

the implicit danger of crossing the road

So I love a metaphor, most writers do, I really don’t understand writers who don’t love a metaphor I mean how are you supposed to convey stuff to people if you can’t compare it to something else.

So, crossing the road. When you cross the road there are at least four problems to be aware of;

  1. the cars that might hit you
  2. the trams that might hit you
  3. your idiot friend who crosses like she has a death wish and if you don’t follow her you get left behind and if you do follow her your chances of being hit increase by 50%
  4. the crushing time pressure of existence

And making these films feels a bit like crossing the road at the moment. There’s so many variables that feel like they are about to hit me and I’ve got to make it to the other side unscathed. The other side being the finishing of the video. And it just feels all a lot uncertain right now.

My house-mate’s been forcing me to leave the house for half an hour each day. Which has solved at least one of my problems, in that I’ve been using those walks to collect footage for the films. Tree’s, churches, all the things that don’t exist inside a house.

And I’ve been writing my section of the essay film. Which feels a lot like I’m very good at the wax poetic thing and very bad at the creating substance thing. I’ve got a lot of words that don’t interconnect and at the end of the day don’t really mean anything anyway.

And I’ve been thinking a fair bit about how our essay film relates to phenomenology because I know that’s a requirement of the task and it’s gotta be the secret to unlocking the puzzle that is this essay film. And so during my four am spiral thoughts because I don’t sleep easy anymore I thought about what would happen if the segments that we split the film into would be if they were different versions of the same story? If they proved by virtue of their existence the different ways that stories can exist and change, and if they allowed for the meaning, the pleasure of the film to be created by the meaning in between them. By the meeting of the many. And then I wondered if something like that had to be tangible, or if it was enough to make it, say I know it’s there as the filmmaker but you as the viewer should take whatever you want from it. Is it enough?

So I know these updates should be like everything is going great, but things are going, great is fake and stress is real but I can see the other side of the road. It is possible to get there. That’ll do.

if the sharks eat me here’s what I didn’t get done

So things have kicked off. I feel like I’ve jumped into the deep end of the pool and then immediately forgotten how to swim, and oh by the way the swimming pool people imported sharks yesterday and I have ten minutes (or two weeks) until they eat me. So yeah, overwhelmed you might call it.

My group had a really good chat last week to nail down the details of each of our films which had been whimsical up until that point. But it left me realising how much work we have to do.

Here’s the list of things I was supposed to get done before tomorrow;

  • write a conspiracy concept for the essay film
  • film elements and play for the poem film
  • start drafting the written elements of the essay film and have segments that we can start filming
  • look at stock footage options for poem film
  • edit photos for essay film

Here’s the list of things I did do;

  • conspiracy concept (Harry wrote his before me and we’re using it because it’s way better then anything I was going to come up with)
  • film elements for poem film (some of them. all are bad. I’m glad I didn’t decide to become a filmmaker I’m not good at it)
  • I have a notebook page with thoughts about the essay film rhyme we wanna use – getting to the other stuff
  • cried (not just about this though my life is very dramatic and I put a lot of stress on myself)
  • promise myself that tonight I WILL do everything on the former list in the whole like 12 hours I have before class tomorrow (suffice it to say I am intimately acquainted with caffeine)
  • chat with Mon about who is going to do the written part

But progress is progress I guess and the faith that it will all come together because it has to is what is keeping me going right now. We took on a lot.

I did make these very cute Jabberwocky wings, as we decided that was the way the audience would be able to tell what was the Jabberwocky in our poem film, anyway the wings were for my cats (they hate them, and me now)

But they feel like the only thing I have really accomplished and I am proud of them so here they are. Yes I coloured them black myself.

Anyway, that’s the update for this week. A lot of things left to do, and a lot of hope that it’s all going to work out in the end.

an update?

So, I don’t know if we are supposed to do a blog post this week, but either way I find it weirdly relaxing so I’m doing one. It helps me untangle my thoughts. So the group project has been going well, or at least I think it has, I don’t know what my group members think, maybe they think it’s going awful. But anyway, we have concepts for our poem film and essay film, and we are interlinking them by making them both fantasy based which I’m really excited about. We are also translating my favourite poem of all time – Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll, for the poem film so I’m super keen for that. And the essay film idea is one that has been kicking around my mind for months now and so I’m so keen to see it realised.

Anyway, am I writing this post as procrastination on any of the twelve other things I’m supposed to be doing? Maybe. I guess I’m nervous about the pitch. I’m nervous about realising it, making it work as more then just an idea.

… And then I procrastinated writing this post and now the pitch is done and I guess it went okay? I mean it’s over that’s the best part. And I feel confident about out timeline and the direction that we are going in, and excited about it, the most important thing to be.

Okay, I don’t have anything else to say, I guess I’m done for now, things are progressing, okay feels good, update later.

the things that I actually learnt (assessment 2 reflection)

 

I think as artists we concentrate on perfection. On making a consumable, finished product, because we have to merchandise our skills to live in this capitalist world and so we learn to be better. We learn to be perfect.

 

But when you are creating nothing is perfect, you can always grow, always be better, and somewhere along the way I forgot that to get better you have to fail first, and that failure is the precursor of growth.

 

And so, it was liberating to be told to play, to fail, to experiment, to learn. As someone who grew up as a ‘gifted kid’, at some stage I grew out of being able to fail. It was always expected of me that I could do something, because I used to be good at it. It’s like the world grows up and leaves you behind. So, more than anything, these first six weeks have been a joyful experience of having back the pleasure of failing.

 

I have learnt to open up. I have posted work on my blog that I was incredibly proud of – my content warning film -, stuff that I have allowed myself to be incredibly vulnerable in, but also just my blog posting in general, I have let my heart spill open in those posts and trusted that the reveal of my process would cushion the fall. And I have created stuff that has just been bad – the poem film, though everyone was incredibly nice about it, but it’s okay I know it was bad. I had fun doing it and I’m learning that that’s way more important.

 

I feel like my work has gotten rougher over these six weeks. The first video I made for the longing poem was neatly edited and I spent time getting exactly the right angle and the essay film I just poured my heart out on some paper and recorded it and went, that’ll do. And this is a victory. Slowly I’m killing the perfectionist inside me. What I produce doesn’t have to be perfect, it doesn’t even have to be good. All it has to do it matter, to have meaning, that’s enough.

 

I found studying the concept of the in-between, the things that you cannot put into words, or understand in conventional form really freeing. I’ve enjoyed grasping and not being particularly sure what I am grasping at but clutching my fingers around it, nonetheless.

 

There’s something untenable about being a creative, a way of understanding the world that always seems to leave something missing, or maybe that’s just me. These theories presented a way to try and begin to understand it, or at least to create in tandem with it.

 

Perhaps that’s why I was so drawn to both Phenomenology and Affect. The focus on tactility really spoke to the place deep inside of me that feels everything, that experiences the world through pain, and an ache and a longing and the way I understand how the body can react so viscerally to something that isn’t technically there. There was something in those theories when they asked me to figure out what it was to be alive in the world, I realised that I yearned to find that out, and it’s not something you can say, not something you put words or meaning to. It’s a feeling. When you have it, you know. These theories drew me back to the fact that I started creating to feel alive and that’s the feeling I chase when finishing a novel or movie, and the feeling that I want to delve into and drown in.

 

It’s also been fascinating to see what everyone else has done, to have the opportunity to learn from my peers as well. Everyone in this course thinks so differently to me, and I’ve loved being able to see how they approached the tasks.

 

I feel like I was supposed to say that I learnt something about different ways of perceiving the world, of approaching film making, and writing, and in some aspects I did. I learnt to follow feeling when I started responding to the tasks. I learnt that for something to have a story it does not have to have an easily accessible narrative; if one exists at all.But I’ll be real, I’ve always liked to push boundaries, I said in a blog post that the box and I were mortal enemies and I stand by that. But what I have learnt is how to give myself permission to follow my gut. Wherever that takes me, even if it’s into disaster. Because sometimes disaster is exactly where you are supposed to be. And that’s the kind of energy that I’ll now be able to take into the rest of the semester, and hopefully beyond.

drowning.

I kept it simple this week. The concept of an essay film was one I struggled to grasp and to be honest I’m still not sure that I got it (I feel like I end up saying that a lot). This has been a bad week, so it makes sense that that was the vibe I latched onto for my essay film. Plus I love a good metaphor. I resonated with the personal aspect of the essay film and the idea of posing questions rather than an argument with concrete conclusions. But at the same time I feel as a creative I often how to curate a finished work that it’s hard to think of trying to create a work where the end point is still in motion, where you pull back the curtain and let the viewer see the process. In some ways the concept of an essay film feels like the behind the scenes extra on a dvd.

I also wanted to do the footage myself, and I’m kind of disappointed that I didn’t get to do the whole film from scratch, so I think I struggled with that. In some ways having the visual already was a good exercise, and the parameters were kind of nice, but in other ways because my understanding of the essay film was that you provided a very personal take, I struggled to implant that onto footage that I had not filmed myself or conceived of myself.

But I’ve managed to produce something. And I don’t hate it. I think I enjoy the mismatch between the visuals and the audio, I also hope that my audio puts doubt into the visuals, as poses questions about what one is watching unfold. Truth is a construct built differently by everyone and this time I offer you just the building blocks rather then the finished masterpiece. Build your own truth folks.

Sure this video means one thing to me, I had one intent. I offer you the idea that for this video we try for death of the author. I constructed one narrative, but it is not the only one, it’s not the only story that this tells.

 

tw: implied suicidal ideation

 

Prince: A poem film (maybe)

I always have to make things difficult for myself, apparently. Could have done the poem that I had a whole plan and ample resources for but no, had to go with the one that ‘spoke’ to me. So, the poem that I chose to transpose into a film was The Black Prince by John Ashbery. I think what drew me most to this particular poem was it’s content, the story that I felt it was telling in-between its words. So in making a film I tried to draw that narrative out of the poem. I composed my own narrative which I think thematically compliments the poem and composed a video which I wanted to feel a little bit like a fairytale, the way reading the poem did for me.

I’m in lockdown. I had limited supplies at my disposal and limited options for filming. So the answer; art from an artist who never progressed past lollipop trees (me) and an actor who was less then willing (my housemates cat), plus an actor who really had no say in the matter at all (a cat toy). From those building blocks I composed my masterpiece, and yes lets call this a masterpiece because it is a spectacular flop.

I don’t think this experiment worked at all. I hesitate to say that this might be the worst film I have ever made. It’s mostly that it’s a jumble, it doesn’t feel cohesive, still all over the place and I’m not sure it even fulfils any of the requirements of what a poem film should be, though to be honest I’m still a little confused about what those requirements are.

If I were to pose an argument about why it should be considered a poem film I would back myself with these points. One. It is a transposition, or translation of a poem into film form. I have directly taken my inspiration from a written poem and tried to carry it across. Two. All poems in one way or another are stories, stories have narratives even if they aren’t clearly defined. Therefore a story is just an extra complicated poem. Three. I’ve attempted to use my own stylised film elements that might recreate the feel of a poem being like I wanna be a story but to the left. These include what iMovie calls the “green screen” effect and I call “fading out my cat so he blends in but also kinda look like part of him is missing”. I also used a slow-motion shot at the start. I also purposely chose to include rhyme and repetition in my voice over to kind of mimic the flow of a poem, which I also feel fits in well with The Black Prince as that poem really does read a little more like a story then a poem, its what we call freeform.

Anyway at this point, it is what it is. So here it is.

Reflections on Phenomenology (assessment 1)

Before I gave my presentation I was definitely shaking. Anxiety washed over me as I went through phases of calm panic, and intense panic, I assure you the two are different. It’s not new, but I’m usually a confident presenter, I guess it was the content. Perhaps it was that it was too personal, perhaps I was afraid as I often am of being too out of the box. But I committed anyway because that’s kind of the entity I am.

Reflecting back on it, no matter how unsure I was, I’m proud of the work that I created, the exploration that I undertook, I’m not sure what I learnt other than how to convalesce something, though I’m also not sure what that something was. But it was something, I came out the other side with a kind of gut feeling, hard to describe. Perhaps the kind of feeling we seek to find when we create art that deals with the kinds of things that cannot be ascribed to words, yeah, I think I found that.

The presentation itself I could mention things like, I think I rambled, I don’t know that I got to all the content I wanted, and I definitely ran out of time. But I thought it was okay, in the heat of the moment you can never really tell y’know. But that doesn’t feel like the kind of reflection I am supposed to be doing.

I feel like watching everyone else’s presentations really solidified the theories for me, watching everyone’s different explorations and explanations provided more scope and context for the ways that the theories could manifest and be developed, and everything that everyone had to say was so insightful and different and I feel like I got a lot out of learning about what everyone else had done. I especially enjoyed the different angles that everyone came at the topics with and how even though there was a limited topic scope no one’s presentation was the same, everyone had their own takes.

The unfortunate matter is I’m still not sure what to reflect on. Let’s try; what have I learnt from Phenomenology? That things interact I guess? That touch is by necessity both a consensual and non- consensual experience. That while when we touch a body we consent to touch, but when a body touches us we do not always consent to the touch, or we might choose to revoke our consent if it becomes uncomfortable.

I also uncovered linking the concept of ‘life’ and the concept of ‘the body’ and I’m not finished in my exploration of the linkage because I’ve only just uncovered the thought but I feel like there’s something there, in broadening the way our body reacts to life, can explain the way our body reacts to other bodies. And is film in itself a kind of ‘life’? How does the film’s body react to the film’s life reacting too… It’s a causal change I’m on the precipice of understanding but I don’t have the words to do it right yet.

So to sum up, what did I learn? Where did I grow? There’s lots of edges and maybe’s and ledges and threads that I can’t quite grasp in that answer but there’s also something there, and I guess I’ll probably keep running towards the thing that I uncovered in this experimentation until I learn how to put to words what it is.

Content Warning: how film can violate the body

content warning: suicide, self-harm, gore (blood), wooziness inducing images, consent issues, sharp objects, screaming

 

Phenomenology considers that “tactility is a mode of perception and expression wherein all parts of the body commit themselves to or are drawn into, a relationship with the world that is at once a mutual and intimate relation of contact” (Baker, 2009, p. 3). It considers the world and at through the body and the moment where the film and the viewer intermingle and where that ‘touch’ of the two creates meaning.

However if it is a touch relationship between two bodies that Phenomenology seeks to explore what happens when one side violates that relationship? When the touching is non-consensual? In that consideration it flips the play between bodies into something more sinister.

In looking at Phenomenology I choose to examine how discomfort can be used to influence the body and how one can play on the body’s instinctual and empathetic reactions to elicit meaning making.

I drove inspiration for this experiment from Antonin Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty which could be described as a “struggle between art and work, experience and representation, impossibility and reality” (Gorelick, 2011, p. 274). The theatre was focused on physicality and on being able to represent an in-betweenness that could often not be described through language. It also required the audience to be an active participant as it played on shock value and disrupting and decivilising.

It also focused on the approach to showing “life” as it existed in all its cruelties, hence the name. Artaud was a man who spent sections of his life in mental faculties and was described to have madness (Gorelick, 2011). These create a person with a certain worldview and honestly I can relate. The idea of trying to show “life” and in life body, because I feel like the two are linked inextricably because the body as a moving, feeling vessel is therefore very much alive, but the dirty, uncomfortable, confronting side of life that must have been his reality (and it definitely is mine) was very appealing to me.

In bringing the two together I intended to explore uncomfortabllity and violation in the space where the touching of bodies and the audience creation of meaning occurs. Here I hope that what I created spurs bodily reactions, probably of revulsion in the viewer, but the point is that the reaction is not intellectual it is visceral, instinctual creation of subjectivity of the body to the film.

I would also presuppose that “life” is something that can only be experienced through the body therefore applying Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty applies a certain kind of experience between the two bodies, but the point is that it IS an experience. It is not something that can be intellectualised but something that exists between two moments, two bodies, an intangible something. That concept of “life” is interesting because life is something that must be lived and the way that we live in through our body.

Not all experiences are pleasant so in my usual devils advocate go for the weirdest option possible I choose to investigate what it looks like when the experiences that are created in those spaces are uncomfortable, confronting and force the viewers body to react in unpleasant ways. I explored different ways that this relationship could be exploited in both the visual of body horror and the sensory aspects intended to upset the viewer (for example it starts with a very loud scream). There are places where gore is the main element, and others where the implications are much subtler, such as a sequence where I tilted the city skyline back and forth, and put an ocean sound over the top intending to simulate something akin to sea sickness. I also relied on rhythm, particularly the rhythm of the body as there is a heartbeat line that runs throughout most of the piece. I also relied on a ticking rhythm, but with no climax, such sounds usually promote anxiety in people hearing them as we expect sounds to come to an end somewhere, or reach a natural climax and this one doesn’t.

Furthermore as primarily a writer I chose to use words at the beginning of my film to explore the way (contrary to Artaud’s thoughts) language could become part of this liminal space, reaching out and creating part of the equation where the language itself was intrusive and touching the viewer in a sense that it required an instinctual reaction.

I definitely discovered a lot in the process of trying to make something to fit in with the theory given that the finished product is simultaneously not what I intended to create and exactly what I hoped to create. I was not aware of the darkness that I was going into when I started, just hedging my bets on what sounded compelling and challenging for me to create. Now I think I ended up with more questions and with a deeper understanding of the insanity required to create this kind of work and think oh that seems fun.

I guess applying it to my own practice it’s about coming at things from a different angle rather then plot and narrative but about considering how do you want the viewer to engage and react to the work. It also relates to my own practice because it allowed me to explore much darker themes in a more visceral way then I have had permission to explore them in before and in a slightly different medium and from the angle of looking at how the bodies (both of film and of the viewer) would respond to each other, and allowing that to create the meaning.

I don’t quite know if it worked, if the exploration that I created allows for meaning to be inscribed in the places where the touching of two bodies is being violated, and how a certain kind of meaning can come from being disturbed and confronted, how that expands an understanding of the world, of life, of how the body interacts with it. I suppose the if it woks depends on the viewer. There will certainly be those who it’s too much shock value for, those who don’t understand, those who hate it, but I guess on the flip side the instinctual reaction of any of those means it worked. As long as there was some kind of reaction, some kind of meaning ascribed, and some kind of bodily response, then I guess that that was the point.

references: 

Barker, J 2009, The Tactile Eye: touch and the cinematic experience, University of California Press, Los Angles, USA

Chamarette, J 2012, Phenomenology and the future of film: rethinking subjectivity beyond French cinema, Palgrave Macmillan, London, UK

Gorelick, N 2011, ‘Life in Excess: Insurrection and Expenditure in Antonin Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty’, The Meaning of Life, Vol 33, no. 2, Wayne State University Press, pp. 263-279

 

Non-Representational Theory (and failing better)

This photo engages both with representational and non-representational theory. If I was to consider this image in representational terms it is simply a blurry photo of someone’s silhouette walking along the beach. But it is non-representational terms where the image really shines. In fact I would argue that the non-representational reading of this image attacks the suggestion in Phillip Vannini’s Non-Representational Research Methodologies Introduction, that non-representational work is “boosting aliveness” (Vannini, 2015, p. 6). My reading would predicate on feelings of deathless, veil between worlds, getting stolen away at the witching hour, seeing something in the corner of your eye and then it being gone, loneliness, haunting, lapping, fear, not belonging, and a whole host of other seminal moments between fears and dreams. Though this is just my reading and as non-representational theory suggests the idea would be to refuse any one reading or understanding of a text.

For me where it touches non-representational theory most is that it riots against the idea that photography needs to produce the ‘real’. This photo as a non-representational reading is more about what is not there than what is.

And of course I think we should all consider the possibility that I may have read the theory wrong. I’ll be honest my mind boggled around this one. A theory that seemed to reject that notion that it could be analysed or sit comfortably in any status quo, makes it hard to look at a work and consider with any certainty how it fits into the theory.

Though I will say that what stood out to me most from the reading was the suggestion that “in the end our job as non-representationalists is simply to fail better” (Vannini, 2015, p. 7). I’ll take that in stride because I have really almost no clue what is going on here. So I’m just going to steamroll ahead with a restlessness and disenchantment with reality and acceptance of what is in front of me, and if I fail spectacularly then I’ll have achieved something too.

references: Vannini, P 2015, Non-Representational Research Methodologies, Taylor and Francis Group, pp. 1-18