You capture something because you want it to live.

John Akomfrah, 2015. Why History Matters. TateShots

Whilst researching some elements to support my thoughts on a recent Turner Prize/Vertigo Sea visit I came across John Akomfrah talking about exactly the motivation for my Zero project. It is deeply difficult to consider own own mortality, but possibly even more so that of those that we love. When initial discussions about the Zero project came up my first instinct was to document my Grandparents relationship. I entertained other possibilities whilst considering if I could do them justice but the other possibilities did not have the emotional relevance for me. I was able to screen the two cuts of the film that I have made so far for some members of my family this weekend, it was my birthday, the family was together like in the film. This highlighted the importance of film as a way of preserving the subtle things that we would otherwise loose. On a personal level this is about sentimentality, as a film maker this is about humanity, and empathy, documentary films give us the power to spend time with others, widening our social circle not just to include those who are geographically far away, but those who are temporally distant as well.

The responsibility that I feel for this film I now feel is to present those moments most important to share and preserve.

I have been a little quiet on the development of my response to the Zero project which I regret as I am sure that I will now miss some of the details of the process.

Concept

I have been incredibly fortunate to have a hugely supportive and inspirational extended family and I want to use this documentary to document this important part of my life. I felt that a useful visual for this relationship would be a family meal prepared by my grandparents as this has been a regular fixture throughout my life. I chose my grandfather as the central participants I felt that I might also be able to explore his eye sight through the kino eye of the camera.

Process

I was already very familiar with the space were I would be filming and having help out in the kitchen with my grandparents on numerous occasions I felt that I would also be able to anticipate the order they would do things and how they would more around the space. As I wanted to capture the whole food preparation, cooking, and serving process and that it was a small space I decided that I needed a small and light recording setup.

Creative Technology

I chose to shoot on a Black Magic Pocket Cinema Camera because I thought that the lack of viewfinder or image stabilisation would allow be to explore the ethos of the zero project, going back to basics. I continued this with the selection of a fully manual SLR Magic 17mm Cine Prime lens.

As I would be working without a viewfinder after the initial setup of the camera I prepared for  the shoot using a street photography approach. I set the camera up so that I would be able to use an aperture of around T4. I felt that this combined with the focus scale on the lens barrel would give me the best chance of getting things in focus, but that it would also reflect in some way Denis’s challenges in preparing the meal with his eye sight artefacts.

Filming

Filming went better than I could have expected, everyone there seemed to enjoy the experience and seemed to forget that the camera was there fairly quickly. My grandfather, grandmother, wife and son was all there and continued to interact with each other in a very similar manner to normal. I had some challenges will the lack of view finder as I did not spot who I had knocked the aperture ring and over exposed a long sequence, but overall found that it was liberating being able to stay in the moment with the participant rather than becoming obsessed with the image I was capturing. This results in some very loose and unusual framing at times but I feel this works in the context of the relaxed setting of the family meal.

Edit

Having shot nearly 3 hours of material the edit was always going to be challenging. After an initial assembly it was clear that my initial idea to follow the whole creation of the meal would not work. I managed to get it down to 16 minutes but cutting it further than this changed the pacing too much and resulted in a film that felt rushed.

I also short some material after the meal when there was a conversation between Denis, my wife and son about Cox’s Orange Pippin apples. I felt that this interaction gave a summary of the relationships so I attempted to cut this to the 3 minute time length.

The phrase picture logic has been like a fly buzzing in front of my eyes for the last few weeks and linked interestingly to a Paris Report.

 

 

I was recently listening to Tim Goodman of The Hollywood reporter discussing the rise of directors in television and how show runner/writers were reacting against this.

Graham Yost (Justified, The Americans, Sneaky Pete, etc.) recalled first seeing that unique framing on Mr. Robot and thinking, “That’s interesting. Please don’t do that again.” (Goodman, 2018).

The rise of the auteur TV director. The point under discussion was how this visual style and weirdness often got in the way of the story.

But yeah, that description to a bunch of series writers didn’t go over very well for one simple notion that has been true forever: Television should be about the story, as written. (Goodman, 2018).

This argument reminded me of the kind of reaction that other art forms have experienced when the perceived wisdom and status quo were challenged.

At another point reference was specifically made to Twin Peaks “Twin Peaks was all about the freaky, not the story” (Goodman, 2018). David Lynch was the film maker that first cracked the door to alternative narrative structure for me, the cyclical structure and logic of Lost Highway was so strange, on first watch it was frustratingly opaque, I left the cinema angry. I’m sure Lynch would have been pleased at that.

I’m still not sure that I understand what Lynch wants to say with it but I can take a journey with it, a road movie that has no destination. For me the video tape, Noir genre elements, and actor/character switches begin to question image obsessed culture, and gender roles and values in a rapidly changing society.

There is more TV than ever, too much to watch, is this not precisely the moment when a plurality of voices and approaches to mass media should be allowed to question the role of screens, their power and our relationship with them. Picture logic rather than word logic. Links between the work of Lynch, Surrealism and Dada have been made regularly.   Lynch’s work is terrifying, irritating, funny and it breaks the formal rules of story telling and film-making. I once heard it joked (sorry I don’t remember were) that every art gallery in the world has a copy of Fountain by Marcel Duchamp (1917) but some of the have just put it in the wrong room . It might be argued that you don’t even need to see Fountain in a gallery to experience it, it is so ubiquitous that it reminds you of its existence in every bathroom. There are issues of gender in this statement, only male bathrooms have urinals, but there is still an interesting question made by Duchamp about the importance of materials, artefacts, and skill in the status of a work of art. Was it subversive because it was absurd and funny?

Fountain as a ready made can ask these questions to a wide audience, its message is accessible, a viewer does not need a significant amount of art education to understand that calling a toilet art asks some big questions about art, questions that a lot of casual art goers are probably asking anyway. Cinema and television are to me interesting art forms because of their popularity and reach, TVs sit in a large number of the homes on the planet, I see this as having a huge potential for distributing ideas, asking questions, but a viewer has to choose a show, not become disengaged or switch off from it. There is a fine balance between pleasure to the eye and pleasure to the brain. I would argue that that the combination weirdness and visual flourish in Auteur led TV, like Twin Peaks, could provide not only an interruption to the status quo but also double hit of eye-brain pleasure.

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.

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”.

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.