Graduation proposal Daan Bunnik Description: My project will be twofold; a single screen narrative and a photograph series. The photographs will support the narrative of the film. They will entail one aspect of the film’s narrative, but the photographs will go more into depth of that subject than the film does. Together they will form a widely balanced view of the impact that leaving your home town has on an adolescent, who tries to find a new home in Rotterdam, where he is unable to settle down. Audience: I aim for a combination of visitors of arthouse cinema, visitors of photograph galleries and visitors of art galleries. The twofold construction of my project appeals to visitors from both film and photography). This construction should also make it accessible to art lovers who do not have an interest in one particular field. The audience will likely relate to my subject, since the idea of leaving your home town is a universal subject everybody can relate to, even if you never left your home town. Moreover I hope the audience will gain a deeper insight in my own personality and have a better understanding of the behaviour (or their own behaviour) of adolescents, especially students, that move to a new town. Body Subject matter: My project theme’s are: adolescents leaving their home town, transmission to adulthood and its disillusions, loneliness in a new city, linguistic constructions and alcohol usage. The first part, which is the main part of the project, will be a short film. The film will open with images of two young brothers playing badminton in a sunny camping ground. The parents sit in the background in front of their tent, but we cannot see them clearly, the images of them are blurred. Important is that we only hear the sound of the shuttle going back and forth between the two brothers. A new scene will open with an adolescent (beginning twenties) who, after a night out, visits his mother in the house where he grew up. He is very excited about yesterday night and the town he recently moved to. We then move back to last night and follow him through a journey in a wide, disharmonic city, Rotterdam. This is where we witness his clash with his new hometown. The second part will be an elaboration on the subject; the wide, disharmonic city. It shall consist of a photo series of beautiful, empty images. I mention this combination, because I see a certain aesthetic in the empty spaces inside Rotterdam and yet simultaneously a void of harmony in these aesthetic places. Each photograph will be extremely well framed with a few, one or no people in it. The persons remain unidentified, we cannot see their faces clearly, but they are an important part in their photograph. Together these two pieces will form a response to the period of my problems with leaving the nest as an adolescent and my response as a new inhabitant in Rotterdam. Content: The two pieces portray an image of an adolescent who still longs for the warmth and safety of his old home and thus struggles to fit in a new city which feels disharmonic and cold to him. The longing towards his youth in his home town is going to be visualised by two young brothers playing badminton. The camping ground, the sun, the blue sky; all stand in deep contrast with the images of Rotterdam’s night life. The conversation between the son and the mother will embody the changed relations. The mother itself is an embodiment of his home town. The son struggles to let his youth go and the mother pushes the son to find his way outside the safe, warm nest. The night life experience show the struggle of the protagonist to build op a life in his new city. He cannot connect to the people, to the infrastructure and especially to the disharmonic city centre. He feels there’s no real heart in the city centre as opposed to his home town. In this part as well will the disillusions of adulthood for the protagonist come to light, that growing up does not mean life will become easier, clarified and full of answers, instead more and more questions arise. The protagonist believes that adult people use a certain form of linguistics to keep a distance between each other and to live by the rules of how one should interact with each other. Therefore, in his discussions with the people he meets that night, he tries to play with language in the hope someone will react different, someone who understands his view on the linguistics, on the city, on the inhabitants. However the more alcohol he drinks, the more annoyingly he wants to persuade people of a view they might not even share. This is a self inflicted sympathy for himself, because he knows people will remain distant if he is drunk and annoying and therefore he will never find a new person who gives him a new sort of warmth he so desperately seeks. With this approach he keeps postponing his adulthood, keeps himself from accepting his new life in this city and he keeps rejecting himself to find peace he found in his old home. Relationship to relevant previous practice: Leaving your home tome is a subject which is still an issue for me. I visit my home town every week because I play football there, thus I feel I haven’t yet really stepped out of the nest. Around me I see a lot of different approaches towards the transformation from being part of a family towards standing on your own feet. Everyone undergoes it differently, but all my friends recognise the transformation. I think therefore it is a semi-universal subject, which I find enormously interesting. I still have not find a place where I feel as much at home as I used to feel when I was younger. I feel like a stranger in a new town and sometimes as an intruder in my old home. Dealing with the contrast between new town and home town, between the warmth secure feeling and the cold, disharmonic feeling, I become closer to my own interest than in previous practice. It is personal, in a way that it is close to my life, and also personal, because I take the role as observer and interpreter. In my first two projects I observed and interpreted new spaces that interested me. Now with the addition of a narrative I come closer to my own voice. The past year I have mainly dealt with finding my way of filmmaking. I have dealt with several subjects, but not yet with a subject as personal as this one. In this project I hope to combine my past projects styles into one. A combination of a narrative told via actors together with aesthetic shots that do serve as a contribution to the narrative. In the first two terms I made two films that create a strong atmosphere by focusing on the space it is shot in rather than by actors. Thus the space itself is the character of my film. I would like to embed this in my project by using cinematography in such a way that it creates of Rotterdam a character of his own. In the last term I made a more episodic, surrealist, narrative driven film. In this project I want the narrative to have an episodic progression, but with a strong surrealistic character. Relevant history: A catalyst for this project has been reading The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger. The book depicts the life of an adolescent in search of meaning and the disillusions he finds in adult life, extremely well. Although Holden already lived on the campus of his high school, his stroll through the New York city streets show his longing for a new home as my film intends to do. He tries to connect with several people, but is over and over disappointed and disillusioned by them. They are not as nice or as cool as he hoped and wanted them to be. What the book captures and what I hope to capture in my film is the search for a new warm place, which is halted by the fake personality of the people he meets, but also by his presumptions of how adult life, especially in a city as New York, would be. He finds out that even in New York a lot of people are conformist, that adult life doesn’t bring all the answers, that you still feel lost and in search of, the rest of your life. The combination of disillusion and not accepting how adult life is, will be an underlying theme in my film. The book Bright Lights, Big City by J. McInerney is a good illustration of how lonely one can feel in a big city with few reference points. The main character leaves with his wife for New York, to make it big. His wife was never interested to go, but he wants to become a major writer. Instead, his wife becomes a successful model and he becomes a fact checker for other writers. After a few years his wife leaves him and he has no good friends in town, no place to go to process this blow. Thus he wanders through the city night life to find comfort in drugs and alcohol to soothe the loneliness he feels inside. What is interesting is that in the end of the story he goes back to his parental home to visit his sick mother. When visiting his mother, he has finally someone to talk to, to process the divorce with. No one in the big city, in his new life, could help him as good as his comforting mother. The film Control (Anton Corbijn, 2007) serves as an example for this proposal in both its narrative and its cinematography. Control especially captures the life of the disillusioned, searching, never fulfilling adolescent. Corbijn with his photographers’ background created a film where narrative and aesthetics go hand in hand. The framing, the lighting, the black and white, all amplify the narrative. The cinematography of the film Elephant (Gus van Sant, 2003) also inspired me, it is strikingly beautiful. Again as in Control, the film’s narrative is amplified because of the strong, leading cinematography. Working methodology: In this project I’m trying the same design as done in the production of The Third Man (Carol Reed, 1949). I am currently writing the novel, which will be adopted into a screenplay. Besides this project I am writing a novel and I find it starting in this medium easier than starting to write a scenario from scratch. While in my last project I worked with a cinematographer, I am not sure if I want to shoot it myself this time or if I want to work with a cinematographer again. I have spoken with two people who are interested in helping me with the production and have made contact with an old friend to become my first A.D. My first step will be to ensure that the two production people stick to my project and in consultation with them arrange the rest of the cast & crew and other necessities. For the photograph series I need to take several additional classes from Liz, to enhance my skills. During the year I have to find out if I want a few, one or no people at all in the photo’s. My preference now goes to making photographs without actors. However, if this remains unsatisfactory, I might need to adjust this approach. Potential problems: I have almost no money of my own, therefore I hope to work with an unpaid cast & crew. I worked on several sets where this was the case, although it will be hard to arrange cast & crew and equipment. I have to take into account potential weather problems, if there is snow for two weeks in a row, when I planned shooting days, I will have to assess how this will affect the production process. I might make Rotterdam more romantic than I plan on showing. The photograph series is a whole new area to explore, it is exciting, yet it can also create unforeseen problems. I know I am not well trained technically; therefore I must make sure I will pay enough attention to this part of the project, instead of spending all my time on the film production. Summary/Conclusion: In this project I hope to create a deeper insight in the choices adolescents have to make when they leave their house and how their past homes influences them in their new cities. I wish to capture the disillusions of the adolescent when they grow up and find out adult life is not the Garden of Eden either. How the adolescent has trouble with accepting and using the appropriate forms of language and how this clash in combination with the usage of alcohol refrains him from taking the step out of his nest into a new world. Moreover, I hope to construct a personal view on this period and on the city Rotterdam. The way I experience the city as disharmonic, visualised in the film, and aesthetic and empty at the same time, visualised in the photographs. Supporting material Research background: My research will focus on literature/academic papers about family structures, adolescence, leaving the nest etcetera and on academic papers about The Catcher in the Rye, Control, Elephant etcetera. There are several articles that will be interesting to read about the transition to adulthood, that I will use as research material for my project. One of them: ‘Transition to adulthood’ by J.R. Walters delves into the new skills that need to be acquired when transforming to adulthood. I think this article will be a good comparison for my own work and for The Catcher in the Rye, because what I and Holden have problems with is that after acquiring these skills, life will not be more fulfilling, it becomes faker and less open. This causes a disillusion to the adolescent which develops into disappointment and depressed feelings, because you feel your environment has no problems at all with this new fakery. ‘Learning to Stand Alone: The Contemporary American Transition to Adulthood in Cultural and Historical Context’ by J.J. Arnett focuses on the American youth; how they deal with the transition towards accepting responsibility, dealing alone financially and how they obtain or not obtain individualistic character qualities. An interesting sociological article, which will be useful to read as well is: ‘Family structure and leaving the nest: A social resource perspective’ by B.A. Mitchell. It focuses on the role the family plays in the home leaving behaviour among youths. Mitchell uses data from the Canadian Youth Foundation to compare different family situations and how these determines home leaving behaviour. Although this is a sociological perspective; the findings do discuss the long term consequences for the adolescents. Learning more about the social part of the leaving the nest issue will be good to obtain a broader understanding of the theme. Many articles have been written about The Catcher in the Rye. The article ‘A Retrospective Look at The Catcher in the Rye’ presents a broad perspective on the book, on its impacts, on what has been written earlier and how to view the book in their present (1977). Because of this broad perspective it cites several other articles, thus I can extract the relevant ones that connect with my subject. The article ‘Familial influence and social expectations in Jay McInerney's Story of My Life and Bright Lights, Big City’ by A. Magnusson examines how familial estrangement and social expectations influences the life of the main characters in the books mentioned in the title of the article. It constructs that: ‘To be able to resurrect their lives the protagonist needs to relinquish the illusion of control and this implies a confrontation with superficial ideals as well as it involves the end of repression, as the main characters can no longer escape their unforgettable past.’ This conclusion in the abstract of the article delves deeper into the subject than I have done so far, thus it will be necessary to read. The Story of My Life will be essential to read then as well. ‘The (re)marketing of disability in pop: Ian Curtis and Joy Division’ is an article written by M. Waltz and M. James. In the article they examine the disability of the main characters (also abilities, but I am more interested in the disabilities) as a marketing device in pop culture. The article delves further into the way these disabilities are presented to the public. It will be good to read this article to understand what the public interests in characters as Ian Curtis and how this character is presented. As the title informs: ‘Control, Joe Strummer: The Future is unwritten, This is England’ is an article about these three films and the writer, M. Sinker, compares how each of them depict youth subcultures. The other two films will be interesting to watch as well. The article ‘Following in the steps: Gus Van Sant’s Gerry and Elephant in the American independent field of cultural production’, by G. King, considers both films mentioned in the title as manifestations of contemporary American independent cinema. It will be useful to read, because he explains how and why these films reach their niche audiences. King argues that the cinematography style of the two films make the films differ from mainstream cinema. Besides, it also explores the very long take, which I used in my second project. Gerry will be interesting to watch then as well. Workplan: Sep – Oct: Finish writing the story in novel form. Start with further research for project. Practise photography skills. Nov – Dec: Adopt story into scenario. Finish research project. Start with production product. Jan – Feb: Finish arranging production. Start shooting film. Start photograph series. Research the end production of the photograph series. Mar – Apr: Finish shooting film. Finish photograph series. Start editing film. Finish research end production photograph series. May – Jun: Edit and finish film. Choose and produce photographs. Write dissertation. Jul: Solve any problems or unfulfilled tasks from above. Budget: Production photographs: 1000,- (School budget). Travel expenses cast & crew: 200,- (Self funding). Renting extra equipment: 250,- (Self funding). Canon 5d + 24-70 + extra equipment: 3200,- (Self funding). Research costs (books, films): 50,- (Self funding). ----------------------------------------------------------- Total: 4700,- Bibliography: Literature: - McInerney, J. Bright Lights, Big City, 1984. - Salinger, J.D. The Catcher in the Rye, 1951. Films: - Control (Anton Corbijn, 2007). - Elephant (Gus van Sant, 2003).