Perhaps this is too candid,
but I had entirely different plans for my piece. I think these plans were
promising, and I was excited to act them out. Then I caught the flu, which kept
me confined to my room. My original plan was to film a complex
scenario/interaction, and strip it of any sound while editing. The goal would
be to convey the mood of the interaction, and the basic story without its finer
details.
Being confined to my room for the better part of
a week, I was forced to take a similarly minded approach with an existing set
of materials. So, I went through my computer and found footage of a storm I
filmed in Ocracoke, North Carolina. As I worked, I increasingly thought of Stan
Brakhage’s Mothlight. I found that film beautiful, and admired its
willingness to completely eschew narrative function. To convey images with no
clear meaning is a statement that art is above literal meaning, or at least not
beholden to it. It can also be a realm of nebulous emotion. I think that
everyone subscribes to this idea, even if they do not know it. We all accept
the power of music, even without knowing why a certain melody or sound causes a
reaction. The mysticism of it is beautiful in its own right.
McCloud’s essay-via-comic Setting
the Record Straight pulls a cool trick. It establishes a pejorative
view of comic books held by those who do not esteem them as an important or
promising art form. It then defines the form of comics and explains why they
are valid. While reading it, I realized that his claim that comic’s are capable
of more than superhero yarns is proven by his decision to essentially write an
essay in the form of a comic.
My piece did not pull so devious a trick, though
I do think it highlights qualities of film. My goal was to put something
together that suggests what a storm feels like, or perhaps what the idea of a
storm feels like. Jonathan Glazer, while interviewing for his film Under the
Skin, mentions a Jean Renoir movie called The Grand Illusion. A sequence in this film
involving a prison-escape resonated with Glazer because he felt, “right there”,
or “in it.” He uses the word sensory to describe his experience with the film.
Cinema can be intensely visceral, and I find
that I dwell on this. In assembling my piece, I wanted to express murkily
defined feeling via sensory overload. Editing was my main tool in shaping this.
I wanted to pair a jarring quality with a sort of quiet, and hypnotic mood.
So I robbed the piece of its sound and arranged the images according to a shape
expressive of my feelings. The timing, framing, and color of moving images lend
films a sense of shape. Maybe our emotional reactions to cinema are a
reaction to this sense of shape.
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