Experimental Film

Ellie's blog

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FINAL FILM

Here is the link to my final film. I have created something that I feel pulls together a lot of my recent research and puts emphasis on the sound construction. 

https://vimeo.com/418449999

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This is the first minute of my final piece, still with some work to be done on it. I have used the google translate poem and put it through a speech generator to get this audio alongside adding other sounds and a delay feature. I have made the audio quite busy yet rhythmic, like music, whereas the imagery is plain but not completely meaningless. It is interesting that whilst watching, we attempt to associate the imagery to the words being spoken.

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Burial's richly atmospheric music leaves you feeling slightly removed from the tangible world. His debut was clouded in pirate-radio crackle and cassette fuzz, the soundscapes dotted with the sound of rain, fire and distant voices. It became a word-of-mouth sensation far beyond the dubstep scene, appearing on the Guardian music site's "best of the best-ofs" list of albums, aggregated from all the other critics' end-of-year lists.

Guardian article

Andrew Kotting has commented on Burial’s work as making the fragmented and digital glitching work well in music and sound production.

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Now in his early sixties and still going strong, Perry is the maverick musician who not only put reggae on the world map but stretched its limits and capacities to embrace new sounds, rhythms and techniques.

Arkology: Lee Scratch Perry 1997, , New Internationalist.

Article on Lee Scratch Perry, who works with dubbing music and emphasises focus on the fragmented.

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Google translate rendition of O’ Solitude! by John Keats

O SOLITUDE! if I have to live with you, Don’t be among the piles of piles Problematic buildings; climbs with me steep, - Nature Observatory - hence the valley, Its flowering slopes, the crystal river of the river, This may seem like a yardstick; let me keep your watches “Mongst boughs Pavilion,” where a fast deer jumps Surprise the wild bee from the bell of the fox glove. But even if I'm happy to take those scenes with you, Yet the sweet conversation of the innocent mind, 1 Whose words are images of refined thoughts, Is the pleasure of my soul; and must be Almost the greatest praise to the human race, When two kindred spirits flee from your hiding places.

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Alexander Nikolayevich Sokurov - Tribute to "Mother and Son"

Sukorov has an interesting approach to slow cinema, some of his techniques have been highlighted in this segment from ‘Senses of Cinema’ essay.

“Replicating another feature of most of Sokurov’s films, Serra depicts scores of bystanders (courtesans, servants, doctors, etc.) watching as the central figure becomes an object of morbid fascination and angst rather than a protagonist with any real agency. This device yields at once a rich and layered discourse on voyeurism, performativity and basic human scopic impulses – allegorising the act of watching the film – and a highly personal poetics of space, articulated and disarticulated at one and the same time, as it were, through the multiple gazes of apparently secondary or insignificant characters.”

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Directors embraced earlier strategies of intellectual montage in order to critique the transition to free market capitalism[...] The term slow cinema was described as a sub-genre of art cinema that privileges mood over narrative...

Book- Post Communist Malaise:Cinematic Responses to European Integration  Zoran Samardzija (2020)

Though this book does not directly compare these two cinematic styles apart from their place in history, it is interesting to think about links between these two styles. I think it is definitely possible to have a slow cinema piece that contains intellectual montage. The idea of ‘mood over narrative’ is interesting in both cases as it can be seen that these two styles do just that. It is also a clear trait of experimental film that the focus is less on a narrative form but is more like art and leans towards creating feelings and emotions rather than attempting to tell a story.

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For art is always conflict: (I) according to its social mission, (2) according to its nature, (3) according to its methodology. According to its social mission because: It is art's task to make manifest the contradictions of Being. To form equitable views by stirring up contradictions within the spectator's mind, and to forge accurate intellectual concepts from the dynamic clash of opposing passions.

A Dialectic Approach to Film Form By Sergei Eisenstein Essay from “Film Form”; 1949; New York

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This is a potential mood board for some of the imagery in my film. I have gathered imagery from my surroundings that may spark ideas or questions in the mind of an audience, for example, what does a trolley full of cardboard symbolise, if anything? I have filmed pieces at work through the cctv screen which plays upon the reconstruction ideas and also some more aesthetically pleasing and neutral imagery like the fruit and veg which can symbolise a number of different things.

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In my final film I would like to use calming and abstract imagery to contrast with the sound distortion I plan to do as having both the imagery and sound as bold pieces would create too much of a clash in my opinion. Therefore I intend to use natural shots to plant new ideas in the audience's minds and also some out of focus shapes to draw the attention away from the visuals and to the audio. I like that this will play on our human nature to associate what we hear with what we see and so therefore will create an absurd and surrealist situation when it does not necessarily match up.

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Book

Poems of the Decade: An Anthology of the Forward Books of Poetry

I have looked in this anthology for inspiration for poems that I want to reassemble for my final film. I want to combine these with either slow cinema imagery or intellectual montage techniques.

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Language was an important tool for Conceptual artists in the 1960s. Many used language in place of more traditional materials like brushes and canvas, and words played a primary role in their emphasis on ideas over visual forms. Though text had been used in art long before this, artists like Joseph Kosuth were among the first to give words such a central role.

MoMA Learning page

This website text explores the ideas and links between art and words and how imagery can be perceived differently when combined with different words.

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The sick rose, re-imagined

I have found another way of reassembling words and sentences that can be used for sound distortion. I am working towards the sound that I want in my final film, and starting with rearranged poems seemed most useful. Here is a well known poem by William Blake:

O Rose thou art sick. The invisible worm, That flies in the night In the howling storm: Has found out thy bed Of crimson joy: And his dark secret love Does thy life destroy.

And here is the same poem, but once it has been put through google translate in several different languages. You can see how the words have been transformed and especially as some of the poem contains old english words, the grammar has been realigned.

Oh pink, you are sick. Invisible worm, He flies at night During the storm:

Discover your bed From the joy of dark red: And his dark secret love Is your life destroyed

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Quite apart from the value of the music itself, the most surprising thing about the Dub concept was its approach to the act of creation. I was used to the idea of music being built up, track by track, piece by piece, until the final mix was reached. Jamaican dub producers such as Lee Perry and King Tubby reversed this process. The final mix of a song became the starting point for experimentation.

Jeff Noon, Cobralingus

Noon talks about his process of creating experimental stories and how this relates to music being created in the same way.

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This is a continuation from my last piece but I have jumbled up both the video and audio. It looks like a mess and doesn’t really give the effect I thought it would. I think what would look better is having the distorted audio with contrasting, calmer imagery, perhaps something in the style of slow cinema. 

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This work feeds into earlier pieces I was creating with stop motion words and imagery. I have added my most recent sound experiment to this and attempted to align the words to the paper cut outs which has an odd result. It would be interesting to misalign these and make a video collage with both the sound and imagery, to distort them further.

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Visit Original Link

‘Happiness is a direction, not a place’

I have continued my work with splicing together different audios to form a sentence. I did this by first choosing a simple quote then finding the individual words either on freesound.org or by generating them using a text to speech generator. This creates quite an abstract effect that I am keen to pair with imagery that contrasts it.