Javier Lloret, trimester 2, 2012
Trimester 2, 2012
Description
I've been working in two projects. At the beginning of the trimester I was interested in exploring the moments where a feeling of the progression of weirdness is created in film sequences. There are several factors that could generate that feeling: framing, sound, facial expressions, timing... I re-watched a lot of film sequences that I remembered that produced that feeling on me analyzing their composition. On the practical side I started taking portrait pictures trying to create those moments where something is about to happen or change but we don't know what it is.
When I was working on that series of pictures I was inspired by my readings for "Reading, Writing & Research Methodologies". I was reading several books about contemporary art pieces that uses found footage material from films and also the modernity in cinema. I got inspired to make a video installation about the starting of modernity in cinema.
Some film theorists and directors like Jacques Rivette, Alain Bergala and Domènech Font consider the film Viaggio in Italia by Roberto Rossellini as the beginning of the modernity in film.
I decided then to use the last sequence of that film. In that sequence the married couple are trying to reach each other but there is a crowd of people between them. I split that video sequence in two, one for each one of the characters. I stretched the time, slowing down these two channels of video and looped them. Each one of them has a different duration so the installation shows continuously different moments where they are trying to reach each other. There are two channels of audio. Each one is connected to each one of the video streams. The intensity of them gets higher as the video streams get closer to their end.
In the film, at the end of that sequence the couple reach each other and after a short conversation where they decide to stay together the film ends. I decided to omit that end of the sequence to capture that moment before the film ends, which is, for some theorist, a symbolic point of inflection in the history of cinema.
Media
Photos
Essay