READING AND WRITING

I am reading at the moment: Documentary Transforms into Video Installation via the Processes of Intertextuality and Detournement.(Thesis) Caitilin de Bérigny Wall (onacloV) http://hyperrhiz.io/hyperrhiz03/essays/hijacking-documentary-into-video-installation-art.html

The movie that made a big impression on me: Wong Kar-Wai’s 2046 (2004). Not because of the strong plot but because of his use of cinematography. He can make the relationship between people tangible in one shot. There is a scene where a woman walks down the street after meeting her boyfriend. In quite a long shot you only see her skirt wave. The combination of the chosen frame, the music and the colour of the shot displays clearly that the relationship between the woman and het boyfriend is over. Another source of inspiration for a way of working, is the documentary Outliers vol. 1: Iceland (Anthony Ciannamea, 2011). In this film an audio technician, a documentary maker, a VJ and a musician go to Iceland. They collect images and sounds which they have casted into a documentary about their search for the real Iceland. What really impressed me is the part where the VJ mixes the images of the craters, lava flows and geysers onto music and that really makes you experience the magnificence of Iceland’s nature. In this film the VJ sequence is embed in the context of a larger film, so the audience already knows what the story is. At the Strand building in London I saw a work by Rachel Rose named Everything and more (2015). This work is about immortality, researched through the eyes of an astronaut. This work comes near to what I would like to make. A strong aesthetic visual sequence combined with the audio of an interview with an astronaut. The film was projected on a transparent screen that was put on a big window of the Strand building at the daytime and if you would watch through the screen you would see London city in the background. This is a nice example of video, audio and projection surface coming together. What I still find an inspiring documentary is the Dutch NIJNOK (Leo Wentink, 2004), which I would have liked to make myself. The strong camerawork with an eye for lines and repetition in the shot make it painfully clear where we get our rabbit from at Christmas time. Last year at the Kunstenfestivaldesarts Brussels I saw the video installation Etre et ne pas avoir (Younes Baba Ali, 2014) which contains a voice-over by a refugee who has to go over all kinds of paperwork combined with only shots of his kitchen table with cigarettes, coffee and all the paperwork exposed. At IDFA Doclab in 2017 I saw the interactive online documentary Drugsland Nederland- De Industrie (VPRO/Submarine, 2017) about the drug industry in the Netherlands. The stories of people who work in the drug industry are spread over a map of the Netherlands and you can search for the stories in your own neighbourhood. In this documentary the story and form come together very well and the spectator feels how big the problem with drugs in the Netherlands is. The interactive documentary could be also something I want to explore, working with sound, visuals and digital design.