User:Astrid van Nimwegen/draft proposal

[What]

’Collecting total absurdism’ will be an online image bank, which forms the basis for my research for a short film. This research will thus be visible in the form of a website. By clicking on the images/video’s you will find out more about its content and historical background and how these images are related to the overlapping theme ‘absurdism’. (?This will be a resource for researching images for a film?) The central images in the film include a landscape with a tree, a dead reindeer, a violin player in a red dress, an old man fishing in a bucket and a couple of hunters with guns. For instance: the red dress has been used as a metaphor during the whole history of art. The project will gather examples of the red dress in paintings, photographs and video art, theatre and dance; a list of artists/writers which the film is connected to in its content; it also will question the boundary between film and theatre and between registration and performance.

[how]

For the project I need professional guidance with making the site.

[why]

The project is set up to explore where the images in the film are referring to and intense research seems necessary to connect works and artist out of the same working field. The atmosphere of the short film is quite raw and has close connections with performance art, dance and theatre. The images and its content are inspired by the work of Pina Bausch, Bas Jan Ader and Alex van Warmerdam. A whole range of artist but also writers (think of Dostoyevsky/Kafka) seems to be working with this same content. The meaning (-less) of life, the pain but also the beauty of our existence and the use of absurdism are reoccurring themes in my work. The form of the short film will be a registration of a performance but then registered in a filmic way. The idea is to look at film as a stage and examine the boundary between film and theatre. (The webpage of the research can also be seen as a stage itself.)