Tag: Project Development

Reflections on Diamond

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Diamond  is a short, immersive film depicting Diamond Plantation, a small enclosure on Woodbury Common. I chose to make a film about this place because I wanted to keep the canvas small while getting used to my new camera, and also because I wanted to see what would happen when I kept the location very tight. 

It’s proven the most difficult film I’ve ever made, not least because I’m unsure what it’s about or who it’s for. I’ve made immersive, place-based films before, with a strong focus on look and texture and an absence of dialogue – but even then, it was following documentaries like sleep furiously  and still created with a film festival or conference circuit in mind. Making a film as part of a photography MA raises the question of exhibition space, photography being a medium of the gallery, and some of the images deliberately taken for their abstraction. Certainly, every single person I’ve talked to about working with the moving image for this module assumed that what I’m making is video art, and that’s telling. 

So – maybe – this would work in a gallery space? I’ve certainly seen worse films in galleries, but I’m so very new to thinking this way, I’m feeling my way in the dark. With next to no experience, no art background at all, and little guidance, I feel I’ve come very little distance in understanding the moving image in a fine art context. Certainly, I find the overwhelming majority of what’s called video art to be alien and uninteresting – that’s to say, when I’m actually able to find my way to a complete work online – the digital walls around video art are frustrating to say the least and something that keeps it in its niche. 

That’s not to say I’m throwing in the towel with this direction. Far from it. It’s been a very busy few months and I haven’t had the chance to do this justice – certainly, I remain interested in the moving image in other contexts than the cinema, and note that several of my favourite directors are too. But if I’m going to work up a piece for a gallery context, it’s going to take a lot more thinking, experimenting and research. And definitely finding more practitioners whose lead I can follow. 

I swiftly abandoned voiceover for Diamond. This is most odd, as one of the reasons for the turn to moving image was to include words, but the subject was so subtle here that a voiceover would have completely dominated. Instead, I chose to make more use of sound to expand the space – the soundtrack is multi-layered, and often was recorded completely separately to the image. It’s far from perfect. Working on heathland means no protection from wind and my on-camera mic picked up too much wind, even with a fluffy. Many of the sounds are very subtle – rustling bracken, bird song, water, distant conversations – and so traffic and aircraft noise are far more intrusive than I’d like, even if they’re definitely part of the feel of the place and not to be omitted. Sound is something I want to work with more carefully next time and am planning to splash out on some decent kit in the coming months. 

One of the decisions I had to make was duration. Some of the shots are very long – one is over four minutes to allow for clouds to throw patterns behind trees. I didn’t feel that very long takes work in this film – though that’s perhaps timidity on my part. There are strong philosophical reasons for long static takes of nearly static scenes and the effects those create, but I didn’t feel I’d earned the right to do that here – I was very much aware of this being watched by peers and time-pressured tutors and impatience causing them to pay less, not more attention. I think in a gallery context, which is essentially a contract for attention, it would feel very different, and long takes on multiple screens would be great. But that’s a long, long way in the future before I can think more in terms of that. 

I know Colin didn’t like the shots with the static wood in the foreground and the barely-moving background. And I also know that Jesse doesn’t like me using very shallow depth of field. And I guess that’s where personal preference comes into play – this IS what interests me. I like the strangeness of those shots, as if they are both still and moving, as if manipulated, and I like how shallow depth of field replicated attention and thus subjectivity. I don’t believe I’ve a chance in hell of taking my photography anywhere beyond this course so I might as well make the work that I want to see. These shots might not work in the context of this film either – I’m prepared for that – but there’s such a strangeness and presence to them it was crucial I include them. It may be that in future film work – and by that I mean cinema – such shots can be used to punctuate my work, as cutaways, as interstices. They are precisely how my stills photography and my filmmaking intersect, which is exactly what interests me on this module. They are my style. My visual language. That thing we’re all supposed to be working on. 

Strands: a documentary at Lamplighter’s Marsh – Self-reflexive accompaniment

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It will doubtless appear somewhat strange to include a previously written essay. Nevertheless, the points raised here are no less valid for my work now than they were over 18 months ago. This also demonstrates my academic writing, to me a natural part of the thinking-through process of a creative project and one which I have sorely missed.

I have a lifelong artistic commitment to exploring and representing geographical space. My first film, Walks of Life (2018), investigated the wellbeing functions of favourite walks and my second, Abridged (2019), investigated and developed my personal connection with the River Exe M5 bridge. I wanted Strands (2019) to combine the interpersonal engagement of the former with the essayistic, fixed-shot style of the latter, to examine Gideon Koppel’s sleep furiously (2008) as exemplary of this intention, and to explore critical frameworks to ground the film’s making in its location. I also wanted to strengthen my use of my camera, the Sony a7iii, doing so early on through a paid-for tutorial at dslrvideoshooter.com(Pike, 2018). 

Strands was shot at Lamplighter’s Marsh, a ribbon of land between the Portway arterial road, the River Avon, the M5 Avonmouth Bridge, and Station Road, Shirehampton. The site includes Bristol City Council-owned green space (Lamplighter’s Marsh and The Daisy Field Local Nature Reserve), Avon Sea Cadets, Portway Park and Ride, JP Crane Hire, a Wessex Water-owned tenanted boat yard, private residential housing, privately-owned untended marshland, and the Crown-owned strand, part of a Site of Special Scientific Interest with the second highest tidal variance globally. There are visible traces of post-Blitz landfill and railway sidings, the site is crossed by a rail line and a subterranean fuel pipe supplying Heathrow, and includes water pumping constructions and a gas warning siren which is tested monthly. Another Local Nature Reserve, Pill Foreshore, is directly across the river. The green spaces are well-used and Friends of Lamplighters Marsh (FOLM) are a highly active group who safeguard public access and animal and plant conservation, including a large badger sett and a nationally-unique moss. I first visited to photograph a nature walk as part of the Being Human Festival 2018, made of particular interest due to my connection with the M5. I was warmly welcomed by organisers and local community, and soon wanted to make a film there.

I have previously investigated pro-filmic landscapes using eco-critical theorists such as O’Brien (2018), and documentary relationships with participants using models of voice such as Bakhtin (1984) and Renov (2005). To interrogate my own relationship with landscape as a film-maker, I turned to phenomenological cultural geography, brevity requiring it is heavily-summarised here; I additionally found environmental psychology, which also uses phenomenology (Seamon, 2014), relevant to identifying themes common to my film’s participants. 

Wylie (2007) identifies in phenomenological cultural geography a complicated division between self and landscape, where landscape is an always-already physical actuality, pre-existing individual cognition and across which culture is ‘laid’. It can find expression through an artist’s ‘immersion’, which Wylie shows draws on what Heidegger, then Ponty, describe as ‘being-in-the-world’, permitting an embodied view within landscape that intertwines both. Personal meaning is found through a ‘togetherness’, formed by ‘dwelling’ in the landscape through practical activity, rather than cerebral activity – such as imposing a framed view. While a frame-imposing artform, film-making nevertheless has the simultaneous potential for artistic dwelling through immersion and foregrounding its practical and social activities in landscape; film-making thus becomes an embedded technological ‘mediation’ between person and landscape, as described by Tilley (2017), akin to trail biking or model plane flying. Tilley envisions the researcher as material ‘interface’ between inner (personal) and outer (material) landscape, a ‘fellow traveller’ amongst those physically, and emotionally, connected; psychologist Seamon (2014) identifies a similar dialectic and both identify useful dimensions of engagement, such as mediation, ‘conflict’, and ‘creation’, as seen later. 

Several phenomenological studies of film draw related conclusions about landscape. Lefebvre (2006) challenges the conventional interpretation of pro-filmic landscape as culturally framed by creating a fluid, subjective division: ‘setting’ (location being subservient to narrative, and viewer experience manipulated), and ‘landscape’ (beyond events, and the viewer having agency to look). Geographer Massey (2011) notes a strategy in Robinson in Ruins (Keiller, 2010), the work of her project collaborator, of complicating landscape rather than ‘smoothing’ it, preferring an ‘entanglement’ of loose ends which lets the viewer piece location together. She also notes that his fixed frames might infrequently carry narrative but are never static, recording landscape in the process of becoming and changing. 

When I came across Gideon Koppel’s sleep furiously in 2018, it resonated powerfully. Its pre-occupation with place echoes my own by representing people as located within, rather than dominating their landscapes, in sympathy with a worldview local to the Welsh community of Trefeurig where it was largely filmed (Koppel, 2007). It is unlike my films by doing so in part by absenting talking heads interviews and voiceover, but like Abridged in its reliance on fixed-camera long takes from which people often emerge. sleep furiously is not ‘about’ Trefeurig any more than Abridged is ‘about’ the M5 (Woods, 2014); both films seek to evoke landscape rather than accurately reproduce it (Newland, 2016). The long takes of the film’s mini-narratives – hay-baling, a garden contest – encourage viewer agency, and while each shot is framed with a meticulous aesthetic sense, these provide a ‘stage’ for change in landscape (Banville, 2009), including people connected with it, allowing the oscillation between Lefebvre’s binary division. This is not, however, observational film-making: the film-maker is the participants’ audience (Koppel, 2007), and Koppel has described his film-making as subjective immersion in landscape (Robinson, 2012). 

When approaching a documentary subject, I have previously drawn on my social science training, typically, albeit loosely, having a research aim, later constructing footage into a visual ‘argument’. It was in such a spirit that I drew up an interview guide before meeting participants selected for differing relationships to Lamplighter’s: those born locally, the long-term and newly locally-settled, those connected through work, and those travelling in to visit. Finding my questions less compelling than what participants wanted to tell me, this separation quickly felt disingenuous; rather than making a film about Lamplighter’s Marsh, it swiftly became a film at Lamplighter’s Marsh, documenting an immersive encounter. As fellow traveller, I was freed to become materially and emotionally involved in the film, an interface, my presence as filmmaker another situated social interaction, my practical activities joining the dog-walking and conservation work. Thus, Strands is strongly inflected with my own aesthetic interest in lines and textures, and incorporates my explorations of places not referred to by participants, such as the Pill Foreshore.

I explored Lamplighter’s in pre-production seeking to evoke activities and places that seemed key to the participants, and shots of these are integral to the film. To Renee, for example, the railway bridge was important as a ‘portal’ to the marsh, while to Richard, the many gates mark out conflicted ‘borders’, both identified in a foundational environmental psychology study (Altman & Chemers, 1980) as two dimensions by which understanding of ‘place’ is commonly ‘created’ (Seamon 2014). Lamplighter’s is a complex place to get to know, particularly when understanding the interrelationship of the various patches of land. Rather than coming up with a solidified perspective, requiring smoothing, I thought it better to immerse myself in complexity and conflict (another of Tilley’s (2017) key dimensions of landscape connectedness), recording components of Lamplighter’s as I encountered them. I increasingly envisioned the project as a mosaic, each piece – whether biographical, geophysical, economical and so on – distinct, and interrelated as a pattern by proximity rather than commonality. Expressing this intention is echoed in the pun Strands, evoking disparate, incomplete, but entangled threads which, like the landscape, materially pre-exists their organisation both by participants and myself.  

I scheduled three shoot days. The first coincided with the gas alarm test and included Renee and her husband’s short walk to ‘the lookout’, and Helen, an artist, looking for driftwood. The weather went from sunshine to drizzle in four hours, the resulting footage seemingly shot on different days. I discarded the radio mics as distracting, opting for my on-camera Røde mic, knowing that most speech would be inaudible. This was disappointing: sound is meticulous in sleep furiously and I wanted to likewise record people conversing with one another. However, not doing so located people within the landscape, speech neither more nor less important than birdsong or road noise; it also helped evoke being there, of straining to hear snippets of conversations, of guessing meaning. Not privileging the viewer with supernatural hearing keeps the view within the world, allowing for what Sobchack (1992) calls the ‘thickness of experience’ rather than striving for an artificial authenticity. 

I coincided the second shoot with the monthly FOLM work day so I could film practical activity and the landscape in the process of change; several participants had described Lamplighter’s in social and practical, rather than aesthetic, terms and this decisively changed my course from the more aesthetically-motivated Abridged. I also recorded traces of those who use Lamplighter’s for subcultural activity like drug-taking and bike-racing, hence shots of a woodland desire path and the remains of a riverside barbecue; doing so indicates alternative, conflicting forms of dwelling beyond the world of Strands and its participants, giving these voice and underlining the film project as an incomplete view of a slightly unknowable landscape. 

My final shoot coincided with the Nomads walking group. I have filmed walkers before, but this time made them part of the landscape, especially where filing into Lamplighter’s in their segment’s opening shot, a minute portion of the screen. I also filmed Richard and his dog; Richard is a contentious figure who lives at the boat yard, the only participant born locally, who some dislike, and for who Richard has a certain amount of contempt. Doubtless, some would rather he not appear in this film, but while Strands demonstrates conflict, I chose not to take sides; doing so would be smoothing. Lastly, from across the Avon at Pill Foreshore, I filmed Pippa walking her dogs along the strand at Lamplighter’s. Pippa, my first contact with Lamplighter’s, dislikes being filmed, and this extreme long shot was a suitable alternative. The penultimate shot of the film, it is alone in visually referencing sleep furiously – Pip’s walk to and from her husband’s grave, shot from across a valley. I wanted to show Lamplighter’s from afar (a landscape within a larger landscape, like Sobchack’s (1992) Russian doll analogy), and to provide a human sense of scale. I was ambiguous about the results; Pippa and her dogs are tiny in the frame, and the wind meant removing the Røde mic to avoid it shaking the camera too much. However, I believe this final shot inverts setting/landscape such that the mini-narrative of the dog walk emerges out of the non-narrative of landscape. The viewer is freed to piece together the mosaic of locations shown earlier and to observe ‘movement’ (Tilley, 2017); I hope that the longer the frame persists, the more its cerebral ordering function is handed over as a stage for change. I kept the loud in-camera mic wind noise as I believe it evokes the tactile experience of standing beneath the bridge; it would have been easy to source a better sound track, but I believe the distortion provides ‘thickness of experience’. Doing so, especially at the end of the film, additionally emphasises film-making as a practical activity, and the camera as mediating my connection with the landscape. 

Many post-production choices were thus grounded in technical circumstances and mishaps, something not uncommon for documentary. Just as with sleep furiously (Newland, 2016), the uncontrollable soundscape of air and road traffic, bird song, the rattling bridge was explored during editing and has been adapted for its capacity to evoke and contrast elements of infrastructure and biodiversity unavailable visually. The weather, another uncontrollable element, with its attendant variability in wind noise, contrast and white balance, suggested that sequences be composed of shots filmed at the same time. The film’s structure was thus composed of 11 of these, most following the route of a walk which suggests myself, and thus the film, as moving through landscape, emphasising it as an embodied, material view within Lamplighter’s. An argument could be made for allowing jarring juxtapositions, but I felt this would emphasize the cerebral rather than practical process of film-making, and reduce the film’s capacity to evoke. 

Experiencing the rapid and dramatic hourly changes in tidal level, a theme all participants mentioned, can be disorientating. I had considered ways of recording the tide – such as shooting from the same location between tides – but this was impractical. However, while I wanted to evoke Lamplighter’s as slightly unknowable, just as Trefeurig is slightly unknowable (Koppel, 2007), there is a major difference between a film that is meant to be disorientating and a film that is simply disorientating, and I felt any confusion would be worsened by what could be experienced as the film’s seemingly unstructured passage through the landscape. Carroll (2003) argues that the terms of documentary truth, to be assessed, need to be signalled, either inside or outside a documentary. I thus created the colour tiles primarily to signal a step away from narrative authenticity and towards abstraction, but also to divide up the sequences; both hopefully make the film easier to read. I have borrowed this in part from sleep furiously (the colours of its opening tiles mirror the town crier’s costume just as mine mirror leaden skies, gorse, the bus lane, tidal mud and so on), but through being stretched throughout the film, my tiles also function differently by describing film, landscape and my experience as a mosaic. The tiles do not form a regular pattern, but they are nevertheless comprehensible as one, describing Lamplighter’s as unknowable and abstract, pre-existing any attempts to impose order, but at the same time a lived, personal, physical thing, both inside and outside of the people who dwell in it. Reducing visual stimulus also gives viewers a chance for focussed listening.

Although I am happy with Strands, there are still technical skills for further development. Several shots of participants are marginally out of focus and while I can build a philosophical argument for this akin to that of indistinct speech, I think the film would have benefitted had this not been so. Similarly, although I have worked around not using radio mics, I will use a sound recordist for my dissertation project, to which speech is more important. I also feel I am now working at the limits of the a7iii in an outdoor setting; while using a small film crew would significantly change the experience of film-making, and thus the terms of engagement with subject, I would consider doing so carefully in future for the sake of a richer sensory range. 

Following Heidegger, Tilley (2017) briefly evaluates landscape as a ‘gathering’ of diverse elements such as “geologies…biographies…monuments…academic disciplines” (p.20) and this idea was especially useful in immersing myself in and then evoking Lamplighter’s Marsh. Doing so required a move away from narrative documentary and towards more experimental forms I had not anticipated. Likewise, it required I took a more spontaneous, looser approach to film-making. I will carry these invaluable experiences forward into future projects. 

Works cited.

Altman, I., & Chemers, M. 1980. Culture and Environment. Belmont, California: Wadsworth, Inc. 

Bakhtin, M. M. 1984. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Translated by Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Banville, J. 2009. sleep furiously: The hills are alive. Sight and Sound [online] June. Available at: http://old.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/review/4958. [Accessed 13th May 2019].

Carroll, N. 2003. Engaging The Moving Image. Yale University Press. New Haven: Yale University Press. 

Koppel, G. 2007. Documentary – the evocation of a world. Journal of Media Practice, 8. pp. 305-323.

Lefebvre, M. 2006. Between setting and landscape in the cinema. In Lefebvre (ed.) Landscape and Film. pp. 19-60

Massey, D. 2011. Landscape/space/politics: an essay. The Future of Landscape and the Moving Image [online] April. 

Available at: https://thefutureoflandscape.wordpress.com/landscapespacepolitics-an-essay/ [Accessed 13th May 2019].

Newland, P. 2016. sleep furiously: interview with Gideon Koppel. In Newland (ed.) British Rural Landscapes on Film. Manchester: Manchester University Press. pp. 180-189.

O’Brien. 2018. Film and the Natural Environment: Elements and Atmospheres. London: Wallflower. 

Pike, Cabel. 2018. Sony A7III Video Guide. [online]. Available at: https://academy.dslrvideoshooter.com/courses/sony-a73-video-guide. [Accessed 13th May 2019].

Renov, M. 2005. Towards a Poetics of Documentary. In M. Renov (ed.) Theorizing Documentary. New York: Routledge. pp. 12-36. 

Robinson, G. 2012. ‘Belonging To The Land’. The New York Jewish Week [online] 7 March. Available at: https://jewishweek.timesofisrael.com/belonging-to-the-land/ [Accessed 13th May 2019].

Seamon, D. 2014. Place Attachment and Phenomenology: The Synergistic Dynamism of Place. In Manzo & Devine-Wright (eds.) Place Attachment: Advances in Theory, Methods and Applications. London: Routledge. pp. 11-22. 

Sobchack, V. 1992. The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 

Tilley, C & Cameron, K. 2017. An Anthropology of Landscape: The Extraordinary in the Ordinary. London: UCL Press.

Wood, J. 2014. Gideon Koppel. In Wood (ed.) Last Words: Considering Contemporary Cinema. New York: Wallflower Press. pp. 60-65.

Wylie, J. Landscape. 2007. London: Routledge.

Audiovisual works. 

Abridged. [short film] Dir. Andy Thatcher. UK. 2019. 9 mins. 

Robinson in Ruins. [feature film] Dir. Patrick Keiller. 2010. BFI. UK. 101 mins. 

sleep furiously. [feature film] Dir. Gideon Koppel. Bard Entertainments, Van Films. UK. 2009. 94 mins.

Strands. [short film]. Dir. Andy Thatcher. UK. 2019. 20 mins.

Walks of Life. [short film]. Dir. Andy Thatcher. UK. 2018. 4 mins. 

And breathe…

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Hawkerland Common, November 2020.

First time out shooting stills intensively in two months, and there being a three month gap before then. Those last two times out felt strained – Bristol’s Clifton Downs and Exeter’s Stoke Woods. I wasn’t there for me – I wasn’t just strolling around seeing what was going to happen. I was trying to plug a hole which I felt to be at the heart of my work: my photos had to be ABOUT something. It was a constant – yeah, very nice, but who cares about nice – WHAT IS THIS ABOUT??? WHERE’S THE CRITICALITY IN THIS IMAGE??? And in the wake of that screaming voice, I managed a few images that I would’ve taken anyway, and really didn’t have too much of a good time. 

Stoke Woods, September 2020.

So now I’ve let go of my photography being more than a personal interest. The skills I hoped I would acquire on this course, I have not, and I am learning to OK with my work having a very limited life. After all, my film work is moving ahead, and it makes sense to put my attention where it is valued. Of course, there’s a cross-fertilisation between the two – what I learn through taking photos directly affects my film work and vice versa – and photographing sometimes feels like I’m sketching in preparation for the more intensive work of filmmaking. 

Colaton Raleigh Common, November 2020.

I really enjoyed yesterday out on the heaths. I made images just because I liked the way things looked through the viewfinder, as I always do. I made images because I came across something beautiful, something atmospheric, and I wanted to remember it and maybe do something with it some time. I made images not FOR anything, not ABOUT anything, but as an integral part of being out and enjoying the final gasp of autumn. I made images because it’s an excuse to get out of the house and go exploring – and I made a bee-line for some new hidden corners I’d not got to in the summer. Ultimately, my photography is a very private thing and isn’t ABOUT anything else. Nor does it need to be. 

Harpford Common, November 2020.

Of course it’s possible that, should I do the FMP, there might be an opportunity to think through all this work on the heaths, find a way of drawing it together, promoting it. Rather than creating new work, that could actually be the most valuable use of my time. 

Harpford Common, November 2020.

Friday shoot at Diamond Plantation

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After a lot of shoots that felt like tests, partly technical, but also philosophical, Friday’s shoot felt like one I could run with beyond the test. Why? It was the first time I shot decidedly at Diamond Plantation for starters, knowing that the materials for creating whatever this project becomes are right there. It was also the first time I’ve gone knowing the kinds of shots I’m looking for – making loads of use of shallow depth of field. It was also the other side of a lot of reading on slow cinema and long takes, so finally happy just to let the camera record for 40 seconds or longer. And it was also the other side of a load of great feedback on my work for Devon Wildlife Trust – a real affirmation of my competence and value as a filmmaker. 

There’s always unexpected take-homes. First, was how great it was shooting with almost no wind – much of the shoot appears to be stills, especially where a tree is the focal point of the shot, so the tension between still and moving image is really heightened, something I want to play with. Second, shooting with the cloudy white balance setting, which has given everything a slightly antique, orange hue – a step away from wanting to capture ‘the way things really are’ (which is impossible as there’s not such thing nor any device which could do so if it were). The hue helps me say what I want to say about Diamond Plantation and helps me feel about it in a certain way. 

I had a great chat with Karen Brett from Falmouth, who’s a fair amount of experience with video art. She’s very much an independent thinker who, like me, despairs of much video art, which was a relief. It’s good to know that narration CAN exist in video art (if that’s what I’m making) and she’s given me some useful leads to follow. 

The big questions to consider are where the real learning on the module is going to come from:

  1. How topographic is this work going to be? To what extent is it going to ‘show’ and to what extent ‘tell’ about this place? 
  2. What role is narration going to play? Is it going to follow previous work, or is it going to work differently?
  3. How am I going to work with duration? Are there going to be less shots of longer duration? 
  4. What is the format of this project? Installation? Projection? Film festival/ online? This decision will have profound implications to the other points. 

A matter of resources

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Any successful creative endeavour, whether in the fields of the arts, business, science, whatever, is dependent on a practitioner having an understanding of how to get the most from available resources. Resources are diverse, and include materials such as machinery, inks, paper, screens, physical spaces and buildings, human resources such participants, collaborators, enablers, advisors and audiences, and knowledge in the form of contextual understanding, practical and thinking skills.

My resources as a photographer are very limited. My technical skills are basic and limited to the use of a digital camera in a digital environment. I do not have access to studios, printers, other cameras or camera kit, and I do not have a local network of people I can work with. I have no experience of galleries or understanding of exhibitions, no connection with people who work in them, and no idea about approaching them. I had hoped that I would begin to learn these things on this MA, but that does not appear to be on offer. An input session on ‘working with galleries’ would have been useful, but it seems to be taken for granted that I know these things already. As with so much else.

Video art, installation art, these are complex technical forms that rely on galleries and belong to the world of fine art. It would be pointless, I believe, to pursue this line of research further. Were I on an MA which, for example, provided a module in installation art, or in video art, and gave me the training and contextual and philosophical understanding of these things, then there would be a basis for learning and experimentation. But I cannot meaningfully learn about these things from books; I need discussion and input and guidance, and I am unable to find these things from peers or tutors on this MA. The resources which I would need to create video or installation art are thus out of reach, and pursuing them would be a fruitless distraction. To create a meaningful work, I must examine the resources that are available to me, work with those, and somehow bring to bear the learning that I’ve achieved over the past year. Quite where that leaves me, I have no idea, but that’s not such a bad place to be.

I know I can make an excellent film for this module’s Work In Progress Portfolio. I have everything I need to do this – I have much greater faith in myself as a filmmaker than as a photographer. I have no doubt that I can make a film which would get a good grade. But what I don’t want to do is ‘just’ make a film. I want to make a film that’s somehow relevant to my time on this course, that’s in conversation with the ongoing struggle I have with placing myself in the context of contemporary photography. I don’t need to do this, and in many ways I don’t want the hassle, but neither do I want to feel like I’ve passed up the opportunity to rethink my filmmaking in a possibly radical and productive way.

Susan Trangmar: Unfound

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In 2016, Trangmar was commissioned to create a film in commemoration of the Battle of The Somme. To do so, she visited the area, both the landscape, the war graves and the everyday places in Somme.

Unfound (2016) is not a film that has me convinced, and lacks coherence – markedly different to A Play in Time (2008). Trangmar has described the difficulty of creating a work about which so much has already been said, and that the film did not capture her entire response, something which she has set right in a later article (2098).

I can’t help but wonder why there isn’t a voiceover. Unfound seems to demand verbalising, as if Trangmar has decided to keep her thoughts muted. This would have been fine if her thinking were more explicit, through the development of a more strident range of symbols, or carefully placed events, but Unfound seems like a slide show. There is thinking happening, quite clearly – juxtapositions of industry and commemoration, agricultural routine and leisure – but it’s hard to penetrate. A Varda, or a Keiller would have quipped, mused, questioned. And I wonder if this reluctance to narrate is one of the features of video art as a moving image genre. If so, and there most definitely are works which don’t require narration – A Play in Time for starters , then it’s a decision which should arise from the work and its demands. To refuse one of the most powerful facilities of the moving image – to be able to have words and images in a single experience – seems deliberately obstinate. Perverse, in fact.

Trangmar, S. 2019. Passages of Inscription. Photographies 12. pp. 63-80.

Field notes

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I’m maybe interested in creating a moving image version of The Pond called – you guess it – The Field. The interesting thing here would be, rather than finding nature in the urban, finding the urban in nature. As the field is – aside from being quite a weird place – away from settlements, that means the intrusion is going to be harder to find – no litter or knives in trees. BUT, there today, the intrusion was sound – you can hear the M5 from there, which I’d never noticed. Also planes, helicopters, and the sound of heath users – the RM, mountain bikers etc. So rather than look for natural sound, look for dissonant sound. 

The Field is weird, but actually what I’m looking for this time isn’t narrative – it’s visual form. To an extent, when I visit places like this – as with the M5 bridge – I’m going for the same reasons I visit a gallery (aside from getting the inspiration of a meeting of minds). I’m looking for formal fascination, beauty, sensory experience. It’s another kind of fantasy, another kind of play. Not separate either from the fantasy of childhood fiction and horror, another kind of escape, but again an imaginative interaction with environment, adapting raw material, inventing. So choosing one particular place, the approach, the enclosure of a gallery space, it kind of makes sense. So not a documentary exploration of space, a sensory one, an abstract one. An adventure. Placemaking.

David Campany: Motion and Stillness.

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I love the way David Campany writes. It’s for the same reason I love the way Geoffrey Batchen writes: it’s lucid, personally felt, rigorously thought-through and informed, and with a general readership in mind. You don’t need to knee-deep in postmodern theory, or catapulted from your private fine art niche to hear what he has to say. 

I’ve read Photography and Cinema (2008) before, when I was studying for a Masters in Film & TV at the University of Bristol.  Back then, I was thinking about looking at documentaries about photographers for my dissertation project (I didn’t, in the end). But having read Campany, I could see he not only had a profound grasp of film, but also knew how to talk to those working in film. In fact, until beginning a Masters in Photography, I hadn’t appreciated that photography was his point of departure. 

What particularly impressed me about Photography and Cinema was Campany’s grasp and elucidation of the qualities, limitations and overlaps between the still and moving image. As a practitioner in both, and as one whose practice as a filmmaker, using fixed frames and long takes, was deeply inflected with the working methods of stills photography, I’m acutely aware of and curious about what makes a still image quite so still, and what makes a moving image truly moving, aside from technological differences. After all, the movement in Warhols’ Empire, is barely perceptible, while the blurred figure of Cartier-Bresson’s celebrated Behind the Gare Saint-Lazare is a trace of movement; to this extent, Warhol’s is more the still image, Cartier-Bresson’s more the moving one. 

I’ve heard it said that such permeable boundaries between the two types of photography render the boundary arbitrary, yet another rigid binary for the all-conquering postmodern army to demolish. Permeable and arbitrary, sure, but to deny difference is to deny their qualities and usefulness. As Campany argues, this tension, this constant struggle over territory, is as old as the medium itself and practitioners in both fields, often using this site of conflict in their practice, are to be found ever since the inception of the moving photographic image, the younger of the two technologies. 

Campany argues that what defines each, moving beyond photochemical or digital processes, is not what they are but what they are for. There is nothing inherent in such processes that determines their utility – moving image as popular entertainment, still image as scientific record, for example: rather, that lies in the domain of the cultural. The phenomenology of each is also defining: the still implies a past moment recorded, whereas the moving image provides an illusory presentness, and relate to the previous two examples which I have plucked at random: moving image as voyeurism, still as symbol, as fetish. To phrase it in terms of environmental psychology: the still and moving recorded photographic image offer different affordances. 

Campany notes that the still and moving image are phrased differently depending on context. To be confronted with a still image – even if it’s actually a sequence of 25 frames per second – in which nothing appears to move accentuates its stillness, anticipates motion to an almost unbearable degree, and invites scrutiny: which is this? Still or moving? To come across a moving image where one would expect a still – such as a flat LED screen on a gallery wall – frustrates the idea of stillness, accentuates the perception that a movie screen is a window rather than a terminal surface. And yet, paradoxically, the still image implies duration in a way that the moving image does not: through accentuating its extraction from a continuous present, the moments bracketing it, stretching out infinitely, are implicated. This does not happen in the moving image: the illusory presentness of film implies an immediacy unavailable in the still, and one is trapped inside the moment of the film in a way that does not happen in the still. These paradoxes, especially when still and moving images are set against one another, liberate extraordinary, profound and distinctive effects. 

This divergence deeply inflects the way narrative operates in each medium. At its most basic level, the moving image is a medium of narrative, even if that narrative is no more complex than ‘the blade of grass waved back and forth’. The still image, on the other hand, as with the painting, requires the imaginative engagement of the viewer to construct the narrative. Even when the images, moving or otherwise, are connected through editing or montage, the demand on imaginative engagement remains higher: it is, to the uninitiated, more effortful to ‘read’ a photobook than a short film, and this should not be seen as a difference in effectiveness but a difference in qualities. As Campany argues, ‘photojournalism requires journalism, because facts, however ‘powerful’, cannot speak for themselves’ (p.28); this cannot be said for video-journalism (should such a word exist), which has a wider range of communicative strategies and a more visually literature ‘readership’ (at least for the past several decades). 

I’ve mentioned that my fondness – partly born from necessity – of fixed-frame long takes makes my filmmaking more ‘photographic’. Operationally, this makes my work more akin to the large-format landscape photographer than my rapidly-moving landscape still photographic practice, chasing light and change. It also taps into a rich tradition of avant-garde filmmaking which eschews the rapid-fire editing of commercial film, allowing the viewer to ‘dwell’ in an image in a way similar to how they might view an image on a gallery wall. This problematises filmmaking, calling attention to the event of recording and implying the present of the filmmaker to a greater extent than if the viewer were carried along on an endless stream of montage. Crucially undermining the perceived function of filmmaking, it drains image of narrative: the longer a shot persists, by and large, the more the uneventfulness of daily life is implied, narrative being an artificial imposition on its random, meaningless flow. It also opens up space for the viewer to exert agency, to gaze around an image of their own volution. The fixed-frame long-take is a cinema of surplus, and many of my favourite directors – Michaelangelo Antonioni, Kelly Reichardt, Gideon Koppel – grasp this. There is much I have yet to understand and articulate on what is known in some circles – already rejected by many filmmakers – as ‘slow cinema’. This post is not the place to engage with this matter fully, but will be the focus of my research in the coming weeks. 

Campany, D. 2008. Photography and Cinema. London: Reaktion Books. 

Returning to video

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It’s time to reflect on what’s happening with my practice since I – essentially – stopped shooting stills and moved on to video. It needs to be said, this hasn’t happened exactly like this – I’ve always shot stills alongside video, but video has always been project-based, not the casual shooting of stills. That’s changed – if I’m currently going out shooting, then it’s going to be video. 

I’ve learned lots. One of the first things is practical: if I’m looking at an image, whether still or moving, then I want to be able to look at it for a while. Hence, I need to make sure each take is around 30 seconds and – crucially – that I don’t mess around with ND filters, exposure comp, depth of field or any of that. I just need to set the shot up and let it run. The only thing I’m happy with changing is focus, to move that to where my attention goes, or where things are happening. 

This is instructive. It reminds me that there’s a pleasure in looking, whether the image is still or moving. There’s an ontological sameness, gazing, focussing on different parts of the image, weighing up, making sense, appraising. That’s probably because I’m looking at the image on a screen, the framing of an app reminding me of a certain parity. But that curiosity, and that meeting of inquiry with stimulus, is identical. 

But there’s a distinct difference in duration: to a certain extent, movement divorced from narrative, movement that’s reactive and reflexive, can appear abstract, ghostly. There is no hand making this movement: it’s not the movement of a car or a pan or a couple kissing. It’s movement not put on for the camera, but captured by it. It has agency beyond the frame. The world is revealed – or at least foregrounded – as alive and with its own agenda. 

It’s these kinds of movements that I seek out, have always sought out. Reeds waving in the wind. The play of patches of sun on concrete. A butterfly shooting across the frame. Clouds moving across the sky. Even the slightest wave of a dead twig suggests a continuity, foreshadows greater movement. 

Such movement, for me, jars against a too restrained, too formally literal composition. Composition that’s too neat, too obvious – this is the ground, this is the sky – imposed an order on the world that the movement demonstrates to be completely artificial. The shots I’m happiest with are ones you have to work at – using shallow depth of field to keep the moving trees blurred, having only the treetops against the sky, not having the banks of the river, looking up at the tree without roots or tips, avoiding horizontals. In the field I shot on Friday, there’s no structure to fix things, anchor things, like the motorway bridge. There’s no information. There’s just sense. I think, for this project, I’m moving towards the impressionistic. 

I’ve taken one or two shots that repeat the tree close-ups of ivy and weird shapes. These have fascinated me, for superficially, they are repetitions, but the slight movement provides a sense of the spatial completely different to the stills. In those, the tree is everything, and the background is scenery, whereas with moving image, the background has its own life, its own agency. It invites the viewer to look longer and more carefully. 

These are just tentative thoughts. I need to go back over David Campany’s Photography and Cinema (2008) to flesh this all out a bit. 

Campany, D. 2008. Photography and Cinema. London: Reaktion Books. 

A video artist can be a filmmaker and a filmmaker can be a video artist but video art is not film and film is not video

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Not coming from a background in fine art, I’ve struggled with the fine art focus of much contemporary photography, much of which leaves me completely cold. I’ve also struggled to address this with tutors and peers, who have of occasion been quite definite that fine art isn’t such an integral part of contemporary photography as I think. And yet, on deciding for the current module to return to shooting video, it’s been indicative that I’ve been pointed in the direction of video art by everyone I’ve spoken with. 

If I’ve had any contact with video art, it’s generally been by accident or because there’s a crossover of some kind with a filmmaker. Every once in a while, I’ve come across video art in gallery spaces and the only one that has left any impression was a ridiculous black and wide film of a naked man bouncing on a trampoline from the 1960s, memorable only for its absurdity. I went to Mark Leckey’s retrospective at Tate Britain essentially because it was built around a motorway bridge, and I enjoyed it as an installation – less sure what I’d have made of Fiorucci Made Me Hardcoreif I’d come across it in isolation. Much of Agnes Varda’s installation work is an extension and reconfiguration of her films. Hassan Hajjaj’s recent exhibition at the Arnolfini included a brilliant film which was basically an extension of his portraits of musicians and performers, but playing with the juxtaposition so that the separate portraits appeared to be aware of one another. I’d had Tacita Dean recommended to me and went to her exhibition last year at the RA – and I’m afraid walked out after 10 minutes as I just didn’t get what on earth was supposed to be going on (without such knowledge, the whole thing was an ugly mess). 

It’s worth recalling the reasons for my return to video. First, with my new Sony, I’m now able to shoot video that looks the way I want it to look. Second, my background is in film and narrative form, primarily the novel. Third, I’m curious to learn just how video occurs in the context of the discipline of stills photography – I’ve heard repeatedly that working in video is something photographers do, but nothing about how that works and why it’s done. Last, I’m keen to bring what I’ve learned over the past year into the way I shoot the moving image and see what happens. 

The first book I tried engaging with, Still Moving(2008), is a collection of essays. It is, I swiftly discovered, an exercise in interrogating the medium, a solipsistic analysis of the technological, economic and ideological contexts of the making of still and moving images. The focus is here on the act, as often in academic works on photography, and rarely moves beyond that. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m not interested in these conversations, at least not right now; what interests me is what I can learn and draw from my environment, physical and cultural, through the act of photographing. I have other means of doing this at my disposal – writing, walking, discussing, researching, looking, listening. When I listen to the world, what interests me is what I can hear and through experimentation, getting the most out of hearing; I’m much less interested in HOW I can hear, and it’s the same for me with photography. After a skim through of introductory paragraphs, Still Moving is consigned back to the shelf. 

The second, Moving Image(2015), is a collection of interviews, articles, reviews and the like, investigating the subject of video art. There is here, too, an overwhelming emphasis on interrogating the medium, a fascination with scratches on celluloid, repurposing tv adverts, the technologies of utopias and a telling discussion which attacks narrative cinema for being toxically ideological (I think there are better ways to destabilise ideologies than making difficult art which is only readable by your peer group). It is telling that Bill Viola, who I’d never heard of until beginning this investigation (such is the invisibility of video art beyond itself), and who makes work that is accessible and exquisitely crafted but philosophically astute (my personal definition of what makes for great art), has explicitly stated his gradual rejection of these obsessively abstract, obfuscating means of practice. 

In amongst this is the concept of ‘expanded cinema’, which envisions video art as a development of, not a reaction against, narrative film. Expanded cinema reconsiders the context in which the moving image can be experienced, whether in an art gallery, projected onto derelict buildings, through water, or whatever. I think this is useful as a defining concept that draws a line, however tentative, between the cinema-based film, in all its forms, I have come to develop considerable knowledge of, and video art. It – literally – expands cinema, suggesting novel opportunities and creative forms. In an era when the moving image is now nearly always experienced on a personal digital screen, this strikes me as crucially important. Other discussions comment on the relationship between film and context as a central part of the art – such that a work of video art can only be exhibited, indeed will only make sense, if the artist’s instructions for exhibition are followed. 

One of the great frustrations of video art – and one I suspect that keeps it from being better known – is its inaccessibility, which is a perhaps inevitable outcome of all the above. With non-time-based media, like photography, painting, sculpture, it’s easy to encounter this work second hand, through print and digital media. Even with time-based media such as cinema or theatre, it’s possible to encounter through DVD, scripts, streaming services, Youtube and so on. But video art appears difficult to experience remotely. There doesn’t seem to be a platform which lets you view video art: the majority of films being talked about aren’t available and so – and this is surely a bitter irony – the only way of accessing them is through the words of someone who isn’t the artists. There ARE platforms, but aimed at exhibitors and at a discouragingly high price tag. And whereas you can experience excerpts from a photobook online, there is not the complete caesura in experience as that between a still from a work of video art – which is an art of movement – and the video art itself. 

Anyway, the upshot of all this investigation is this: being a video artist and a filmmaker are not the same thing, though a filmmaker can also be a video artist (such as Agnes Varda, who is exemplary at both), and a video artist can also be a filmmaker (such as Steve McQueen, who likewise is exemplary at both). And the defining element, to me, is not to be found in interrogating the medium (which film has been doing anyway right from the outset – the Lumiere brothers played with still and moving images after all), but in the contexts in which video art is encountered. It is the markedly different possibilities and limitations of ‘expanded cinema’ which I will now need to investigate to see how my photography can be reconfigured as video art, rather than narrative film. Or whether I will continue to work as a filmmaker, but draw on the experience and knowledge acquired through the practice of photography. 

Beckman, K., & Ma, J. (eds.) 2008. Still Moving: Between Cinema and Photography. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 

Kholeif, O. (ed.) 2015.Moving Image. London: Whitechapel Gallery.