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| In this essay I am focusing on describing the project that I am currently working on, as well as referencing and annotating various texts that I am reading at the moment, relating to my practice - incorporating these two components into one text.
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| I am working on a short video project about post-industrial spaces - visually documenting the urban decay in older industrial buildings and their surroundings close to the city in the Port of Rotterdam. As it will be a visual piece, it is the aesthetics of these places that I am the most interested in, the main elements of interest being the shape, texture, color, type of material, symmetry, simplicity, complexity and so on. The different color variations and decay forms that some buildings possess never cease to amaze me. The buildings and their walls - suffering from urban decay - can evoke moods such as melancholia and nostalgia in the viewers. I have been out weekly scouting for locations and shooting in various places around the docks area. Fast-changing, different weather conditions and variations in light can prevent capturing subjects in their best form. After all, visual continuity is essential in a work that shows new images one after another. My focus for the content has evolved from shooting exterior building walls in a quite minimalistic, flat way to a more abstract, fragmented view of close-ups and medium shots of subjects in the surroundings, keeping it in the context of the theme.
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| During our small group critiques I was recommended to look at the work from the following photographers: Minor White, Aaron Siskind and Bernd and Hilla Becher, as they all shot in industrial locations as part of their work and it is indeed interesting to see what different minds decide to capture and focus their attention on in an industrial setting. What is unique in the work of the Bechers is their way of organizing the final series of photographs of physical characteristics found in industrial buildings and sites often in the form of grids. Aaron Siskind's photographical work focused on presenting various details in architecture and nature as flat surfaces. Minor White is known for his subject matter, often considered mundane - barns, doorways, water and the sky – and remembered for his ideas about spirituality in photography. In addition, the Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky is known for his large-format photography of industrial landscapes, factories, mines and oil fields shot in different parts of the world.
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| Dudley Andrew begins his quest to find out and define what cinema is and could be in the future by investigating whether a camera is at all essential in the world of filmmaking and lens-based images. In his point of view, throughout the classical ”studio system, the strongest alternative ideas of cinema, aside from animation, survived in nonnarrative modes: the documentary, the avant-garde, the short subject, as well as in the educational, industrial, and amateur film. All these modes, and the expansive ideas concerning cinema's uses and powers that they put in play, force a comprehensive view of the medium, as they stake out territory we can plot in concentric circles at varying distances from the bull's-eye of the feature.” (Andrew, 2010, p.xvi) He mentions the early techniques used by Emile Reynaud, Man Ray and Stan Brakhage that bypassed the camera and goes on to compare the early stages of making moving images to the ultramodern way of making them now - by compositing, not composing. Still, according to him the ”magic still exists - this is what draws millions to the theater - but its source is no longer on the set and in the moment when the camera registered something unrepeatable. The magic has migrated to the computer, where soundtracks are additive concoctions of scores of tracks, and pictures are composited, not composed.” (Andrew, 2010, p.6) Also, in his view, films ”have a mission quite other than lying or agitating: they aim to discover, to encounter, to confront, and to reveal. If anything is endangered by the newly digitalized audiovisual culture, it is a taste for the encounters such voyages of discovery can bring about. Apparently, many today feel that the world and the humans who inhabit it have been sufficiently discovered, that no new revelations await, at least not in a medium dominated by entertainment and advertising.” (Andrew, 2010, p.xviii) Indeed, but it does not prevent us from researching and repeating the past in interesting ways from new perspectives as times are constantly changing. He argues that with the rise of the digital technology, moving images can be manipulated at will, which of course is quite true, and interestingly mentions Sean Cubitt declaring all cinema to be a version of animation and not the other way around. Especially the documentary genre has been highly affected by the rise of new technology, leading the public to question the reliability, authenticity and the future of the genre in a digital form.
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| Since the beginning, being more focused on the aesthetics itself, I have wanted to avoid forming a narrative in this project, and to leave it open for the viewers to experience it as it is and as they see it. ”Though the effects of editing are based on perceptual phenomena, it is clear that the order of the editing, indeed the editing itself, demonstrates an obvious intentionality which puts it in the realm of aesthetics. Editing is always the product of a sequence of scenes organized in such a way that their development becomes integrated into a formal narrative. Thus our perceptual expectation must be frustrated by the filmmaker in order that the element of surprise may constantly keep us at the alert as an audience.” (Mitry, 2000, p.163) I have gathered all the fixed shots together that I want to use in the final video and placed them on the sequence timeline. The color correction is taking place and I am working on the soundtrack. I am interested in creating a quite monochromatic look as it lets me eliminate and get rid of various colors in the individual video clips that I consider unnecessary. But I am still leaving in at least shades of one or more colors in the final work as I feel that a plain black and white look for the work would not provide as satisfying outcome as a slightly more colorful look. In terms of authenticity, decay on various surfaces can bring up quite a few interesting color variations on different textures. When speaking of continuity in moving images, ”it is all too apparent that the editing of a series of fixed shots establishes a feeling of continuity but is unable, unlike moving shots, to create the sensation of the continuous, since this sensation is reconstructed intellectually and not perceived as such – which means that reality appears as though it were an idea or a memory; or, to put it another way, it appears restructured. Whence the impression of a ready-made reality, a kind of presentification rather than a present taking place and therefore of a world transcending the immediate experience. On the other hand, the moving camera provides, as we shall see further on, the feeling of a present in action, giving us the feeling that we might be able to have an effect on the world or, at least, play a part in altering its potentiality. Of course, continuity in film cannot be created in the audience's mind except by direct appeal to its memory faculty (without which it would not be possible for it to have any perception whatever – not even of the simplest movement). We know that vision in the cinema (moving pictures) can be explained only by the persistence of images on the retina or, more exactly, the persistence of visual impressions on the cortex of the brain, a kind of short circuit (called the phi phenomenon) involving our immediate memory.” (Mitry, 2000, p.162-163) I like how Mitry distinguishes the mode of continuity - between fixed and moving shots - in editing a series of moving images together into a sequence. Of course, not all of them need to achieve the sensation of the continuous in the end, especially in the alternative ideas of cinema that I quoted Andrew earlier on. It is also an interesting view that the use of a moving camera would give us – as the viewers – the feeling that we might be able to have an effect on the world in one way or another. After all, new perspectives can, and often do, create new interpretations. It can prove out to be of great help to have these kind of ideas in mind when shooting for a project, allowing for stronger storytelling via moving images in the best case scenario.
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| For the soundtrack I am using various industrial and ambient audio recordings/sound effects and experimental, distantly melodic music to build up the mood and atmosphere aurally as a companion to the visuals. ”Not only does sound overlapping effect a fluidity in transition through space or time, it yields a sense of propulsion that accentuates the rhythm of cinema. Overlap became especially important in North American cinema after filmmakers and editors had been influenced, by the jump cutting of the French New Wave in the 1950s, to reduce their dependency on dissolves, which had a built-in visual smoothness. The sound overlap works in editing whether or not there is visual or narrative discontinuity between the images in a cut, simply by masking over the change from one shot to another. But when there is in fact a profound visual or narrative discontinuity, a sound overlap can effect a stunning visual metaphor, bridging seamlessly between two elements that might seem unconnectable otherwise.” (Pomerance, 2008, p.141) Indeed, there are various ways, techniques and tools to affect the rhythm and visual smoothness of a work in the editing stage, one of them being the addition of a soundtrack to the background, which can enhance the visual aspect and qualities, but without duplicating them by any means.
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| As a conclusion, the final cut ended up being an experimental short video of two and a half minutes of duration, comprising of thirteen fixed shots, each of them around ten seconds in length, accompanied by a stereo soundtrack. I think an appropriate way to end this text is a quote by Gilles Deleuze from his February, 1986 interview, originally published in Cahiers du cinéma 380, and translated from French to English by Marie Therese Guirgis: ”A work of art always entails the creation of new spaces and times (it's not a question of recounting a story in a well-determined space and time; rather, it is the rhythms, the lighting, and the space-times themselves that must become the true characters). A work should bring forth the problems and questions that concern us rather than provide answers. A work of art is a new syntax, one that is much more important than vocabulary and that excavates a foreign language in language. Syntax in cinema amounts to the linkages and relinkages of images, but also the relation between sound and the visual image.” (Flaxman, 2000, p.370)
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| Bibliography
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| Andrew, D. (2010) What Cinema Is? Bazin's Quest and its Charge UK, Wiley-Blackwell
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| Flaxman, G. (2000) The Brain Is the Screen: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cinema USA, University of Minnesota Press
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| Mitry, J. (2000) The Aesthetics and Psychology of the Cinema USA, Indiana University Press
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| Pomerance, M. (2008) The Horse Who Drank the Sky: Film Experience Beyond Narrative and Theory USA, Rutgers University Press
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