We have been introduced to the brief of transformation and arranged into groups depending on our area of choice, mine being film. Right off the bat I feel so rejuvenated to be studying and making films again, I’ve been desperate to! Experimental film is an area I am very interested in so I am very excited to explore it further. Today I went to the Film editing suite to see if I could get my hands on some celluloid to play around with. Apparently we won’t be getting the film back in a way that we can physically edit which is such a shame as its a skill I would love to use. I got a HUGE box of old discarded shots, I am really excited to splice them together in interesting ways.
I have been looking at Stan Brakhage and his techniques and idea of the untutored eye. This is something I would like to play around with although honestly I find his presentation lacking. I think that by having the film itself evolve or devolve into complete experimentation would be a really interesting concept that would tie in nicely to the themes of transformation. At the beginning starting with a standard montage sequence before the film devolves into still images of varying intensity and then the fabric of the film begins to trip apart and we come into a Brakhage/Stargate sequence from 2001 finale of pure visual spectacle. This could all be tied in to a narrative that I create that ties in to the Structuralist ideas I want to explore within the film, for example the death of a character. Thus the structural experimentation can also be linked to the state of mind or physicality of the character.
Here you can see the sheer size of the box, a lot of film! I’m very excited to head into the edit suite and work on it, I spoke to Sarah Jane and she said that I can talk to one of the lecturers to let me in and help set up and to get a splicer off of Hassan to work with. There are a lot of things I want to play around with, I am going to reread my books written by Eisenstein as I have been wanting to make a ‘pure’ montage for quite some time.
Transcendence 