We have spent sometime looking at experimental moving image pieces that you have possibly not seen before. Your reactions to them may be varied depending on your own thoughts about what is valid about media pieces that you yourself spend time looking at listening to or watching.
Your reaction to these experimental pieces in a sense is not important whether you like them or loath them is not the main issue. What is important is the range of references that you draw upon, expose yourself to and reflect upon. If you love or hate the pieces interrogate yourself as to why you have a particular reaction. It is not enough in your research or your own practise to say well I just kinda like it or I just kinda hate it.
Often when you encounter an unusual piece it is useful to think about and step back from your immediate reaction and try and ask why? What are my expectations of a piece of media work? What are these expectations, why are these my starting points? Might I not begin from other expectations or might my expectations be fluid over time rather than static or fixed in a particular mode.
This is your last short piece on the theme memory. It is often useful to look at the work you are producing together either in one place or one viewing. When you see your work before you that has been produced over a concentrated period of time you often notice similarities, recurring themes, repeated techniques. Things about your own approach and starting points that unless your work is together can remain hidden even from your own view. Before beginning to think about the direction of your final project look at your work together and try to notice how you go about its construction. What things keep cropping up? Why? Are they constructive or limiting?
Media producers, filmmakers, visual artists, animators, photographers, all develop from influences, interests, obsessions, particular starting points. They don’t produce in a vacuum but within particular contexts within a set of particular conditions. The best reflect, steal, remake, transform and revisit the work of others in their own and often oblique but associative fields.
This approach should be starting to become evident in your own research and your own work. As an example of the above and the importance of influences, a wide breadth of experience of your field of interest and past makers within it I want you to have a look at some of Tarkovsky’s work and how it has influenced the work of two contemporary experimental artists Jane and Louise Wilson.
In 1972, he completed Solaris, an adaptation of the novel Solaris by Stanisław Lem. He had worked on this together with screenwriter Fridrikh Gorenshtein, as early as 1968. The film was presented at the Cannes Film Festival and won the Grand Prix Spécial du Jury and the FIPRESCI prize and was nominated for the Palme d’Or. From 1973 to 1974, he shot the film The Mirror, a highly autobiographical film drawing on his childhood and incorporating some of his father’s poems. Tarkovsky had worked on the screenplay for this film since 1967, under the consecutive titles Confession, White day and A white, white day. From the beginning the film was not well received by Soviet authorities due to its content and its perceived elitist nature.
From the clip below you can immediately see that the film is not following an obvious narrative and it is also evident that the range of influences on Tarkovsky are both poetic and painterly. Pieter Breughel’s Winter painting and Dylan Thomas’s poem Fern Hill were both influences. In this way, as with many of the other experimental pieces we have seen the piece is not set out as a straightforward narrative but is much more something that evokes responses, strong feelings in the viewer. These responses and feelings felt are often at the edge of the viewers and the filmmakers own understanding.
When faced with a non obvious structure that doesn’t conform in telling a simple story the question what does it mean is often expressed as the first one that comes to mind. Perhaps this is the wrong starting point?
When we listen to music, itself a predominantly non narrative form, or poetry likewise, we would view it almost as a category mistake to ask what does this music mean? As is obvious with music it doesn’t mean any one thing, its a dumb question to ask of music. Why should it always be a good question to ask of visual material?
I would like you to dwell on this issue when responding to work that you are not familiar with. What do you think of this point in relation to experimental work? Use your blog to construct and share your own response.
Solaris 1
Solaris 2
Tarkovsky Sequence (No Special Effects)
Similarities in poetic and visual approach can also be seen between Tarkovsky and Kubrick. The similarity in obsession and visuals are referred to by both Jane and Louise Wilson in their own work. Particularly Stasi City and Space City and directly in the Aryan Papers.
Their work is shown as multi screen installations within galleries and is difficult to access online. Luckily they gave a lecture at The London Consortium recently and their talk about their work (just over an hour) contains some extended clips from their work which like Tarkovsky, Kubrick and themselves directly addresses memory and revisiting events and others work the second time. Their work often involves re visiting real spaces where significant events have happened and that have traces of the past marked in their structure or spatial organisation.
It is worth watching the whole thing if you do nothing else this week do this and then watch Solaris by Tarkovsky.
Louise and Jane Wilsons Lecture at the London Consortium and Architectural Association
An article on the Aryan Papers
A simple but very effective piece by Sam Fuller on Vimeo “Flying”
Flying from Sam Fuller on Vimeo.
Next Week we will be starting to focus on your own developments of realistic, realiseable and creative approaches to your final project piece that runs into and after the Christmas break.