WEEK 2

WORKSHOP

This week started off with the inspirational workshop where we were presented with lots of works from different artists. In this compilation of art projects, there was a big quantity of cinematographic works that really inspired me visually for the short film I’m planning to carry on. These was my responses:

From all the artists we were presented I decided to research deeply two of them. The first one is the film

“Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles” by Chantel Akerman in 1975.

This feminist film examines a single mother’s regimented schedule of cooking, cleaning, and mothering over three days. The mother, Jeanne Dielman has sex with male clients in her house each afternoon, for her and her son’s subsistence. Like her other activities, Jeanne’s sex work is part of the routine she performs every day by rote and is uneventful. It struck me because of the way that the artist has of representing the monotony of a woman’s role because of the role she has to take and occupy. I found her long and uneventful shots without editing of the action very interesting and it has really given me an insight into the importance I want to give to the editing side of my film and its rhythm in order to transmit what I want. It was also very inspirational to see that a 24-year old woman old had created this masterpiece and empowered me to think of my own capabilities even though I’m young.

• –  1975 drama film
• –  Belgian filmmaker Chantal
• –  It is a slice of life portrayal of the life of a housewife.
• –  Running time= 201 minutes
• –  Akerman also explained that she was able to make a female-centric film because “at that point, everybody was talking about women” and that it was “the right time
• –  Akerman called it “a love film for my mother. It gives recognition to that kind of woman”.
• –  The film depicts the life of Jeanne Dielman in real-time, which Akerman said “was the only way to shoot the film – to avoid cutting the action in a hundred places, to look carefully and to be respectful. The framing was meant to respect her space, her, and her gestures within it”.[7] The long static shots ensure that the viewer “always knows where I am.”
• –  Premiered at the Directors Fortnight at the 1975 Cannes Film Festival

Gabriel Orozco

• Mexican contemporary artist born in 1962 in Veracruz.
• He is a creative, playful and inventive artist which creates art in the streets, his apartment or wherever he is inspired, he is renowned for his endless experimentation with found objects, which he subtly alters.
• His sculptures, often made of everyday things that have interested him, reveal new ways of looking at something familiar. 
• In the exhibition at the Tate museum that we were shown in class Orozco’s photos are also on display, capturing the beauty of fleeting moments: water collecting in a punctured football, tins of cat food arranged on top of watermelons in a supermarket, or condensed breath disappearing from the surface of a piano.
• The artist shows an eye for simple but surprising and powerful images.

One my favourite photographs of his is Nubes de espuma. A photo of water with soap draining through a sewer. It is a very simple mundane image but it really evoques the sense of movement and of ephemerality of the moment in question, before the water soon disapears. This is just the kind of simple but provoking images that I want in my documentary.

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DEVELOPMENT OF PERSONAL PROJECT

This has been a very productive week for me creatively I would say. This weekend I went to Newcastle and on the 12 hour journey I decided to focus on the development of my film. There was something about the literal movement of the train that got my creative flow going in the most profound way. It felt like all the ideas and brainstormings that I had done around the idea and representation finally grounded down in my mind to a more niche visual project that I can now start recorded, as this week i also got the tripo and camera from the creative arts department so that I can start recording as soon as possible.

The idea of my documentary has ended up shifting to be a short film recordin a main character (who is going to be acted by Abidish) which with the start of just the discovery of a nut and being unable to open it discovers the richness and depth of reality, nature and the world that surrounds us. Trying to find out how to open it he starts paying close attention to it and starts a relationship with it (nature) of interviewer and interviewee trying to create that safe enviroment for it to open up that one achives by exposing himself rawly.

I decided that it was time to start passing all my ideas into a technological form as I had to start putting them into sequence and creating a clear structure fro the whole thing in order to start recording knowing exactly what shot to take, as that was a bit my problem with my last documentary, not preparing the sets and the shots well enough.

This week I’ve also watched the creative documentary “Bowling for Columbine “ by Michael Moore, which I’ve loved, and it has given me a big insight regarding how I aproach the video to transmit the message. From the documentary I’ve been struck by how he uses the combination of visuals with the voiceover together to create sarcastically political coments. After watching it I’ve been left we the uncertainty of wether I should create a voiceover for this film and therefore also write a script.

Another good example of the humoristic but intimate voice-over that I’m talking about would be the french film “Amélie” directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet