Silent Movies has it. Slow movies has it, empty spaces has it - the It seems to be a lack of something. How can you create a piece of nothingness? This thought fascinated me, and I started to go back and go through the material of films that moved me long time ago, the films that stuck in my memory, that in a way still moved me as they were implemented in my memory bank as images of a something.
The Andalusian Dog by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali Á Bout de Souffle by Jean-Luc Godard Nightporter by Liliana Cavani Lost Highway by David Lynch Elle by Paul Verhoeven Je, tu, Il, Elle by Chantal Akerman
The films above are very different from each other and what they have in common is not genre or style but an interest in the unknown. With creating a world of clues, characters and closed rooms they tell much more than a line of actions, activities and causal events. They tell about the human experience. They tell me something about me.
And what are the ways that something can be presented to most effectively invite us to think and ask questions about the world we live in? this is what I ask myself constantly. I am drawn to stories that open a passage between familiarity and strangeness so that I cannot help asking questions in the absence of limiting explanations.
Motivated by the impact the films of Akerman have on my looking at moving images - I set out on a journey to investigate the created filmic gaps within the narrative of character. With a background in acting my search focusings on the actors´ bodily performance, the movement and the face - the interplace and the chiasm (Merleau-Ponty). My next work will move around the Face and Landscape as different arenas for sharing. This work will stay at the face at the thinking actor´s.
With relating to the other; the object; the subject; we are becoming -instead of a more static being - this is the liminal state and watchable on the screen
with filming the narrative of the pre-reflective process of thinking we create a gap of transition
the character´s face and body in process is the surface of interplace - this is where I create my gap of focus
staying at the threshold of the unknowable is a stage full of possibilities
2 short gothic horror [her]barium
writing a non linear script
in a non linear process
in preparation with cinematographer Rossi -
conversation about imagery,
theme, color, light, place, space
resulted in a linear shooting/editing/mixing process
2023-2024
3 interviews - directors on directing
Stockholm filmfestival 2023
Catherine Breillat
Lone Scherfig
Tina Satter
Mary Dauterman
all the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players (Shakespeare)
we were born players, hopefully most of us still are. art may be a playful game, but I would suggest art to be a serious experiment with a very silly game - life
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imagine with me - this play with characters, as in film, where we can push the buttons of stop and play - stretch time in order to visualize thought
THE FIRST STORY HAD NO WHY
- NARRATIVE AND WHAT IS IMPORTANT
we are born with stories, about who did what and when. the first story had no why. there was no looking back. with staying at the Now, the threshold to the next Now, the moment inside the movement - we are both present and organic - breathing, reflecting. the only way to change. to re-narrate ourselves and each other.
as a spectator I want to feel left alone with my experience. I need space within the story to connect the film with my own (in-) being.
as a filmmaker I need to be brave trusting your artistic instinct and not giving all the answers. They will follow...
(Swart, 2013)
I chose to stay at the character´s thinking -
following the actor´s mind moving through
reflective and even pre-reflective processes.
this created a gap in the narrative where we had never been before and never will be again. in the now. in the gap. the interplace where you and I meet, where actor and spectator meet. hand in hand. eye in eye. this one liminal space where the re-authoring is taking place.
Gaps in film have the effect of breaking the flow of motion, and leave the spectator alone- with themselves. Such gaps can be the black square - in silent movies they were filled with explanatory text. Kieslowski put his black frame as a gap within image and sound. Gaps can be the Visual silence like in Mia Engbergs work. Gaps can be the asynchronosity between dialogue and image, or dialogue and action as in Bergmans Viskningar och Rop.
Motivated by films that have made an impact on me, moved me - I have explored the gaps within character creation. The opacity in the acting at Isabelle Huppert in the film Elle (Verhoeven) or by Delphine Seyrig in Jeanne Dielman (Akerman) creates something inside me, a universe of awe for something beyond the art work - the human experience. To expose black holes, gaps full of nothing is a treasure of the unknowable.
Jeanne Dielman (1975) - domesticity as world
is a piece o filmic experience where the Now is cherished, and the audience is invited (forced?) to enter the domesticity of a single woman with few or no possibilities to escape. The magic is not in the naturalism of the interior; the kitchen, the utensils or the activities. We all know it is not a documentary, we all know it is fiction. But what we do not know- and want to know more about - is what is inside, inside the created universe of the piece of art
(Photo with compliments from Sam Sarowitz, Posteritati)
APORÍÃ
With Plato and his earliest dialogues the dialectic conversation was born. The aporíã includes contraditions and paradoxes and the conversation includes diversity, as we can here in the di-. Most interesting for my work is the phase of transition, where we are inside the puzzle, the corridor, the road, the transition, the quest, the transformation.
The film doing philosophy neeeds a space for reflection, and it is in the creation of the architecture of aporí inside the narrative of character that I have come to explore.
With leading the spectator into the story through clues, I left them now and then in a gap of telling. The characters in my film was given the task to reflect about what they saw, heard and how they were to react. I wanted not the reaction or the action. I wanted the space in-between. I gave the actors directions instead of dialogue. I wanted the character to reflect instead of react.
(PHOTO: APORIA CRATAEG, by Didier Descouns / https://creativecommons.org/compatiblelicensesI)