Sensory film-making

Posted on by MattPrentice

Last weeks sensory films sparked a curiosity. The Sensory Ethnography Lab displays a wide range of films that have been made under this movement.

Single Stream
Pawel Wojtasik, Toby Kim Lee, and Ernst Karel
2014, DCP CinemaScope and 5.1 audio, 23 min.

Blurring the line between observation and abstraction, SINGLE STREAM plunges the viewer into the steady flow of the plant and the waste it treats, examining the material consequences of our society’s culture of excess. The title refers to the method of recycling in which all types of recyclables are initially gathered together, and sorted later at a specialized facility. Inside a cavernous building, a vast machine complex runs like clock-work, sorting a steady stream of glass, metal, paper and plastic carried on conveyor belts criss-crossing the space, dotted with workers in neon vests. This complex ballet of man, machine and movement produces sounds and images that are overwhelming, but also beautiful, and revelatory.

http://sel.fas.harvard.edu/works.html

The section of this film available as a trailer gives a new perspective on this idea for me. A document of a process, a byproduct of people, rather than a person.

Who needs VR

Posted on by MattPrentice

Watching film can already be like a StarTrek holodeck, transporting us from a classroom in Coventry to another place, another time, even another body.

Each film today was a window onto another place in space and time. Man of Aran (Flaherty, 1934) might have issues of truth and realism but it still places us closer to Aran than not going at all. Questions of realism and truth appeared quickly in discussions of still and moving photographed images, Cinema Verite and other movements have developed to more and more deeply immerse the viewer in a realistic moment. There are ethical issues of voice and authorship involved in this process; why is the film-maker making the film? why are we watching? who benefits from the film? But the film can still be that time and space machine.

Today I was transported from a warm day in central England to an Irish island, the Atlantic and an institution for the criminally insane, 1930s, 1990s, 1960s. The immersive film-making of Leviathan (Castaing-Taylor and Paravel, 2012) was especially jarring, the visceral nature of action camera footage highlighting the physical jeopardy of the workers out at sea. I was safe in a classroom, I was not going to loose an arm, but they might, would/should the film-maker have included that?

Two other films created interesting juxtapositions with my own day.

Iron ministry (Sniadecki, 2014) allowed me time onboard a long distance train in China, it contrasted with my own train commute to university, different trains, different places but similarly packed with a cross section of the community they were traveling through. The long uninterrupted stretches between cuts in Iron ministry ask us to look more intently. I felt the film-maker questioning me to see what they saw, whispering in my ear, look, look. On the train home I looked up, trying to avoid the temptation to avoid looking around. Screens normally help me to avoid looking around. Observational film-making often forces me to question the power relationship of the subject to the film-maker, the one holding the camera and editing machine gets to control what we see; would the subject of that moment want us to see them like that? In the case of Iron Ministry I felt this less keenly, I had been on one of those trains, slept on one of those bunks, drank too much tea, bought buns through the window. Tourism is a privilege, invading someone else’s space to come and look for entertainment, but I have found sharing that time with others also builds bridges, highlights similarities rather than differences. As one of my peers noted film as “empathy machine”.

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Another film Majoor 9195 (Darji, Unreleased) transported me from the construction site that I had walked through to get to my class to a construction site in India. This time the similarity of dust and heavy machinery was even more starkly contrasted with the difference of labour practices, safety and workforce. I felt the film making technique here put the film-maker into the situation, at risk, like the women who were participating in the film. This sense of shared experience for me disarmed some of the questions that I had of Leviathan, I could watch, experience, and learn along with the film-maker; I could travel with them.

Bill Viola at St. Paul’s

Posted on by MattPrentice

Subdued, corporate, beautiful, agreeable.

Bill Viola has the reputation to make a piece of video art for installation in a historic space like St. Paul’s Cathedral. Both Martyrs and Mary fit the space, the iconography and imagery are appropriate. The steel construction that houses the screens adds weight, anchoring them in the space, the arrangement of three and four vertical screens references the towering height of the space and the windows.

The beautifully photographed imagery often has a painterly quality, especially in Martyrs, to me it looks like a painting that was already in the space has been given life.

By treading similar ground to other religious artworks that were already in St. Paul’s I was left wondering why they were necessary. St. Paul’s is already a beautiful, contemplative space, I’m not sure how these works enhanced that. This left me contemplating another aspect of the works instead, the corporate collaborations. On the information board about the work it is made clear that the steel structure housing the work was designed with Foster and Partners. Bill Viola, St. Paul’s Cathedral and Foster and Partners all have international reputations, it was the nature of how this collaboration came about that I spent my time with the work deliberating. This high production value made it difficult for me to not draw parallels with the worlds of advertising and music video, with moving billboards on bus stops and lifestyle videos in clothing shops.

TH:EC:LO:CK

Posted on by MattPrentice

After queuing there is a dark entrance way. It feels like a cinema, not like leaving an art gallery but like the institution of cinema has been moved into an art gallery.

TH:EC:LO:CK felt like a loving tribute to the history of cinema. Focusing on the clocks reminded me not of the seconds that were passing but of the reward for the seconds that I had spent in a cinema learning about the world and the way that others see it. To me, the power of cinema is its ability to reach out from galleries and the world of art to present ideas to more people, by putting ‘cinema’ into a gallery space it reminded me of this.

As well as affirming the power of cinema TH:EC:LO:CK seemed to foreground the aspect of filmmaking that is unique; the cut. Editing allows for the manipulation of space and time, obviously or invisibly juxtaposing images and sounds together. In a similar way to the use of jump cuts in Breathless my attention was drawn to how this was happening, just as I was being seduced by one narrative thread so that a change of place, colour or time would expose the structures that are used to create the illusion. In this way it was the joy of watching the artist have fun with the form that kept me glued to the screen rather than the power of the narrative that was playing out.

 

Something older

Posted on by MattPrentice

A music video that I shot last year for indie trio Cinema.

The lighting setup was a digital projector directly onto the band and two small LED spots at 90 degrees to give some definition. It was shot on a Black Magic Cinema Camera, to soften some of the very sharp images we used a wide angle converter that had been dropped and damaged.

The geometric shapes and segmented backdrops were selected to reflect the 60s stylings the band had chosen for their suits.