Alice Devine. BA Illustration, year two.
Moving Image Elective Evaluation
Coming into the elective with little knowledge of avant garde film-making, I enjoyed learning about the different movements in the history of this subject. I particularly enjoyed learning about the Dada movement that developed during the first world war, around 1916-1922. It concentrated on anti-war politics, and rejected the current standards seen in art. The word Dada was chosen as a meaningless word, and reflected the purpose of the movement, to ridicule the modern world. Surrealism developed out of Dada in the early 20s and is known for the art and writing of it’s group members. The films featured the element of surprise, the unexpected, and were out of the traditional sequence.
We watched Un Chien Andalou, which is a silent surrealist short film made in France. It defies convention by seemingly having no plot, and a disjointed chronology, jumping in time with little change in character and events. It’s closely associated to the then-popular Freudian free association. During the elective, we made a presentation of a film we made in the ten-week period. A book of short stories called No One Belongs Here More Than You by Miranda July, inspired my film. I wanted to explore the frustration with life and the self-loathing that the characters feel in her book, and chose to illustrate this quite literally with a female character stabbing a feather pillow in a garden. I decided to not use sound with the piece as I thought that would portray the act as too violent, what I wanted was a beautiful quiet image of distress. I used split screen as I enjoyed the elements of the surrealist and dada movements with the fragmentation of the films, and the chaos caused by having little plot, and I wanted to attempt a similar play on time with my own film. The split screen allowed for the film to have no particular plot, as the viewer watches the beginning and the end simultaneously, as if it’s a constant battle with the pillow. I was also pleased with the composition of the shots, as I used an angle taken from slightly above the actress, so that grass and feathers enclosed her, as if to imply she felt very small in a large empty surrounding.
I also enjoyed learning about the process of film-making, as this was something I knew very little about. We watched Retour a Raison which was directed by Man Ray in 1923, which consists of animated textures and rayographs, which I learnt are images made without a camera by placing objects directly onto the surface of a photo-sensitive material and then exposing it to light. This was interesting to study, as although I did not particularly like the film, I was fascinated to understand how it was made and how he used these solarised images, learning mistakes, to make something beautiful. The film plays with ideas and images and reflects the values of the Dada movement, which said that experimenting with concepts and ideas was the actual work. It was also useful for me to keep in mind the limited camera skills and knowledge that these film-makers would have had, considering that at this point the camera was still relatively new.
Whilst I enjoyed learning about the conceptual films and movements, and in specific the lecture on performance in film, as an illustration student, I felt that the aesthetics of some film-makers in particular, were more of an interest to me. For example I particularly liked the work of Jonus Mekus. His diary-based work, Walden in 1969 as well as others, was very inspiring to me as a designer. The act of collecting these fragments of his life and piecing them together appealed to me, as the films are very beautiful to watch, the composition of the images inspired a new way of looking at my own work and how I frame and compose a finished piece.
