senior thesis 11/18
Increasingly over the past few weeks I have found it hard for me to communicate my film to the people I work with. I am constrained by the limitations of words to communicate these ideas, so I will do it as best as I can here in writing, which is easier than speaking for me.
1. Because the film doesn't have a traditional story, yet follows these characters through their journey.
2. Because the film is told in a nontraditional way using multiple viewing screens.
3. Because the film is not a film at all yet I have no other term to call it, and using the words "cinematic installation" is much more accurate but much more unknown.
These are my responses:
The film has a sequence of moments, of memories if you will, that are strung together like a narrative and ultimately directs the flow of the images on the screens. There IS a way to view the entire film as a story, but just as in life, these moments/ scenes you experience are not part of a means to an end, but are simply happenings that you give meaning to. The characters are simply placeholders, or allegorical symbols who experience these happenings.
The characters, as in all creative works, are us. We are both of these people. We are the man struggling to break out of routine, endlessly searching for something missing. We are the girl who tries to make the world beautiful around us but becomes jaded by her surroundings, falling from innocence. We are the man looking to God for answers, we are the woman, nostalgic and bleary-eyed, unable to get out of bed in the morning.
This film is installed into five screens which provides the entire skeletal frame for the film. As the viewer you must walk around the space to see what is going on on all the screens, you must physically move yourself around these large projection screens, hanging close to the ground like walls, to see the work. I am building a physical space in which you as the viewer must choose the way you view these lifetimes. You can stand in the corner of the room and see all the screens at once, like a painting. Or you can stand in the middle of the room, which is where you will gravitate, and you will be swarmed by images and you'll be searching for what is happening next, what the meaning is, what to look at, but ultimately you will start to see that this is something you just have to stop and experience, and that the images that you do see is what makes up your individual experience.
This physical experience informs this film. That is why it is an installation in five screens because you as the viewer go on a search, looking at different scenes and objects and trying to piece it all together. Just as we do with our lives- we look for patterns, we look for signs, we look for meaning. The only catch is, unlike real life, each of these scenes that I am creating can ultimately be pieced together to create meaning. But, like in real life, it will not be obvious.
In closing, this is a cinematic installation. It has sound that is designed for the characters, it has music that help tell the story, it would be like if you were watching a movie but there are no seats and the screens are split into five and you kind of had to think a little more to understand what is going on and the whole movie never ends, unless you walk out of the theatre. I am being blunt and a little sarcastic, but yes. It is an experimentally experienced film, or a cinematic installation.
To sum it up, here's the new short pitch.
I am creating an cinematic installation experience entitled Ricerca, which in Italian means "search." As human beings we are constantly looking for signs, meanings, patterns because ultimately these images and memories make up what we each call our lives. In Ricerca, we follow the lives of two people, a girl growing up and a man growing old and how their encounter for a brief moment changes their perception of time and space, ending their search in life momentarily by finding what they are looking for in each other.
This film will be experienced on five different screens in a gallery space with surround sound, effectively creating a space for people to be immersed and actively participating in their own individual experiences of these lifetimes.