‘self-closing door’ is an essay film about how one chooses to believe in love after bearing a trauma for too long. The film is metaphor-heavy and reveals my own perception and experience while finding love.
First challenge in making this film, it was not an easy path to lead to the ‘self-closing door’ and ‘open without knock’ door, which are the key metaphor of the film. Using metaphorical and expressive images and objects to tell story was my initial purpose, but it was not until the beginning or week 6 that I found the self-closing door and have a basic view of how my film would look like. A silent door, always closed, may not been used, or used for very few occasions, lying in a dark alley in the middle of the busy city, such a beautiful and accurate representation of not only me but so many others that have been closing their heart due to the pain in the past. After this, Elizabeth (my tutor) suggested looking for another object as a metaphor to end the film with. It sure was another struggle to look around me to find the ‘open without knock’ door in the State Library. A door surrounded with books, with knowledge, or may I say, with preparation, ready for someone to slam it open, to step in the light and love it dearly. Such a grand finale for the doors.
Of course, there are other metaphors within the film, so following up was to find archival footages from Internet Archives. It took quite a while to find ones that fit the script as there are tons to choose from, and sometimes there are valuable shots or images that is hiding in a 20-minute-long home movie. I had to constantly and mindfully watch and look for meaning or associate the image in front of me with a message or a feeling I want to deliver, therefore it was such a long and time-consuming period. As Alexander Kluge said you should show context ‘without direct link, without grammatical connection’, and Ross Gibson said film should ‘opens the other world that ‘hovers around the ordinary world’, these home movies placed next to my own archives may not make sense at first, but if spectators notice its pattern and position, these sounds and how it rings annoyingly in your ears, then link them to own world, then the experience of this film would be integral.
Lastly, it is to face my own trauma on every step of making this film. The trauma that is represented with the metal cutlery box and its sound has been with me since primary school, and it is so far the only thing that I cannot forget/remember from childhood. I have been masking it, the adults tried not to talk about it, but I just felt like it’s about time to tell them and let them talk to me, and then tell that story to viewers. Fortunately, one thing I got from this are emotions. I feel like tears came more easily at the beginning of the film, which enhance the happiness and the hope that I planted at the end.
What I learn from those challenges are:
- Time management: Though I did not have to film anyone, gathering archives will never get any easier. I must still be patient with each video while figuring how to download them, figuring how to put them together, so for timing-wise I do this step much earlier.
- Open your eyes: My source of materials also came from my own archives. The main metaphors that made the film are a result of not putting shut myself in my own world but look around and listen to the actual resonation of my surroundings.
- Be honest to your emotion: As filmmakers, I reckon we exploit most from our own feelings. The story and be about me or others’, but we still make the film ourselves with our own perceptions.
As I stated in my previous blogs, I am inspired by The Illustrated Auschwitz by Jackie Farkas and Ozu: Passageways by Kogonada. ‘self-closing door’ resembles Farkas’s film visually, such as the VHS aesthetic (applied via the home movies and the scale of the frame throughout the film), the subtle emotion within the conversation conveyed by metaphoric images, and finally the opening of a trauma. In addition is the repetitive sound of metal cutlery to create a pattern, a rhythm, or a loop of false experience, which enhance the trauma portrayed by the images.
Later, when I came across Ross Gibson’s head_phone_film_poem, the vision for my film was then completely shaped, or furthermore encourage. It’s more like ‘yes, I can do that, and I did that too’ kind of feeling when I watch ‘ASIO_Dream-mixes’. These mixes recontextualized ASIO surveillance footage, putting them in a new light, a new narrative by adding the running text below. For example, Capertee_Retreat had 6 footages screening all at once, just like how they put lots of monitors together in the security room, and then added a poem to it, romanticize it, giving the subjects much more meaning and life. I took this solution to use for my self-closing door sequence, which provides spectators more perspectives about this door: it stands alone in an alley, there is an old painting of a kid next to it, near there is a drain with a cigarette end at the bottom. All this information will add more depth to the metaphor which tells more without directly saying it. Also, as I need to show text on the screen but have no idea how to make it more engaging, I also copied Gibson’s approach of running text below the image. It looks like a news or a report of danger, so it either makes the content feels lighter or heavier.
I also took inspiration from Stefan Zweig’s Moonbeam Alley, putting the last paragraph into the ending sequence of my film. Moonbeam Alley is a monologue by a man whose wife ran away from him several times because of how he spent money. But he loved her so much he kept looking for her for four years until he found her working at a bar. This time he said he would give her all the money he had and refused to leave without her, even if he had to kill her. Moonbeam Alley has an open end, but either he gives her everything he has or kill her, he is still waiting outside that bar because he loves her. That is also the message I wanted to deliver in the ending: even if we don’t want love, I still make this film you are still here watching until the end, so just let it be.
‘All thought, like all feeling, is a relationship between one human being and another human being or certain objects which form part of his universe. It is by clarifying these relationships, by making a tangible allusion, that the cinema can really make itself the vehicle of thought’ – Alexandre Astruc on ‘L’Écran française’ 30 March 1948.
Another point is that the process of making this film is my own journey of finding purpose of love as I look at footages of others. The ending is a positive, a happy one, but the fact that I had to borrow memories of others to convince myself to believe in love again makes a sad undertone for the film. Basically, I am trying to make connect my world and others, to deliver my thoughts and my desire, which hopefully will resonate some sympathy or empathy in spectators. So, for viewers watching ‘self-closing door’, maybe I am looking at your life to define happiness, therefore I hope you are always content with what you have.
If I must create an essay film again, I will want to experiment with something less abstract, less personal so that it is more straightforward and approachable. As I said in blog post 1, I want people to find beauty, meaning, or purpose in even a piece of dust, so even an essay film about dust would worth the challenge. I may step away from memory and focus more on experience of the moment, explore the emotions within a split second, and not just give a general idea like ‘self-closing door’.
Overall, I would want to focus on is sound design after this process. It was pretty frustrating not knowing how to mess with the VoiceOver (which I gave up at the end), as I wanted to make it sounds like floating (also I already cut the VoiceOver into its place, that means that I may have to adjust each one). There are similar sounds on different sequence, too, therefore I had to go over each sequence to unify the volume of those sounds. Therefore better planning/work flow is needed.
- Bentley S (2021), head_phone_film_poems: interview with Ross Gibson, ACMI, 5 July, viewed 25 May 2022, <https://www.acmi.net.au/stories-and-ideas/head_phone_film_poems-interview-with-ross-gibson/>
- Thomas J (2016), ‘Alexander Kluge interviewed by Jonathan Thomas’,The Third Rail, 24 October, viewed 25 May 2022, <http://thirdrailquarterly.org/alexander-kluge/>
- Astruc A (1948), ‘The Birth of a New Avant-Garde: La Camera-Stylo’, L’Écran française via newwavefilm.com, 30 March, viewed 25 May 2022, <http://www.newwavefilm.com/about/camera-stylo-astruc.shtml>