Following on from the poetics of the house, I really wanted to investigate this idea further, of how human inhabitants and human involvement affect our perceptions of a piece of media. It’s a simple experiment, but I cut it to try and find out if the presence of a human subject affects our viewing of a piece.

Now, obviously, it does, but I wanted to consider and explore, even briefly, how the mind processes this and why this is the case. Indeed, it briefly touches on my ideas of media distortion and destruction. If we have a human subject, and then remove it from the piece of filmmaking. What does this invoke? How does it affect the feeling of the narrative?

Immediately, I was struck by how different the two pieces felt. (ignoring of course that I had to chop a lot to upload it. The human footage had better cuts to begin with.) But as for the differences, this may seem obvious, but it’s something we shouldn’t overlook. Using a human subject invokes narrative discourses. Character is meaning, I’ve spent years learning about ‘wants’ and ‘needs’, about arcs, flaws, traits and conflict. Drama and conflict are two of the core disciplines we learn in film school, and everything we apply to filmmaking is usually based around the idea of human subjects. Documentary, comedy, drama. Humans happen to the art.

Firstly, this is obvious, as films are made for people, about people, and by people. The use of humans is part of the exploration of the human condition. However, how many of our industrial discourses are constructed around techniques that assume the human? How many of our storytelling techniques, lighting, directing and writing approaches are predicated on this one assumption?

Indeed, if we remove the human, what remains? Is it an absence? Do we seek to impose them upon the frame and find where they have gone? Do we impose our own humanity and meaning onto a piece? Indeed, is this how we find meaning in abstraction, and is this the line of truth that remains after we remove the human meaning?

Following on from my reflections on simulation and simulacra, is this the line of truth and meaning that I need to break down and distort? It’s not just that I have to break apart what remains in order to find out how it’s built, it’s that the very nature of the human is built into the language of cinema. Perhaps I need a new language or a rosetta stone onto a larger reality. Trying to use the tools of modern filmmaking to break apart modern filmmaking and find where meaning is constructed feels like a fools errand given what I possess at the current time. It might work, but if I had a second, more pure language, like a maths or a science to juxtapose my work against, then, I might find a deeper truth.