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| In this text I am focusing on describing the project that I am currently working on, as well as annotating various essays 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, and even more so when adding a realistic soundtrack to accompany the visuals. 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 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. During our small group critiques Liz recommended me 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 people decide to capture and focus their attention on in an industrial setting.
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| Andrew Dudley 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.” (Dudley, 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.” (Dudley, 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.” (Dudley, 2010, p.xviii) Indeed, but it does not prevent us from researching and repeating the past in interesting ways from our own perspective. 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 has been highly affected by the rise of new technology, leading the public to question the reliability and authenticity of the genre in a digital form.
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| Bibliography
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| Dudley, A. (2010) What Cinema Is? Bazin's Quest and its Charge UK, Wiley-Blackwell
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