Based on the site-specific engagement with the Hasselblad Memorial, the developing process of the narrative outline consisted of three distinct phases:
- Character development
- Documentation/shooting process
- Editing
While the first two phases implied the performance and camera work on site, the last phase consisted of a solo experiment, or a series of editing exercises with the footage generated during the performance laboratory. To offer an overwiew of how these phases helped to elaborate a screen idea and as a result, the editing of the short film I am the Camera, follows here an insight into the plot and character development.
The idea of the plot of I am the Camera emerged during a visit to the exhibition “Hasselblad on the Moon” at the Hasselblad Center in November 2022 (during the character development phase). On this occasion, we went there already dressed as characters, with the intention of not only finding out more about the history of the Hasselblad cameras used by NASA, but also of executing a group improvisation in the exhibition space.
During this improvisation, there was a moment when Charlotta was standing in front of a glass cabinet (displaying different models of a Hasselblad camera), preparing herself for a live broadcast on social media. This moment, or as I like to say, performative moment, seemed to be appropriate for playing with the main motivations of our characters: on the one hand, an influencer eager to make things public and on the other, a documentary filmmaker searching for a good story. In doing so, my character came up with the idea of making an interview with one of the cameras in the cabinet which from this moment on, became central in the development of the plot.
In this regard, a key source was Joe Moran’s article Earthrise: The story behind our planet’s most famous photo, which I had found on the internet. Upon reading it, I not only became aware of the historical significance of this image, taken with a Hasselblad camera in 1969, but also of what it may denote in times of the “post-truth” era. To quote Joe Moran:
Earthrise was edited for anthropocentric ends. The Apollo 8 crew saw Earth to the side of the moon, not above it, and to them it seemed tiny. Anders compared it to being “in a darkened room with only one visible object, a small blue-green sphere about the size of a Christmas-tree ornament”. NASA flipped the photo so that Earth seemed to be rising above the moon’s horizon, and then cropped it to make Earth look bigger and more focal. Earthrise was an Earth selfie, taken by earthlings. 1
Yet, how to approach such a fact, or in cinematic terms, how to tell the story of a camera which represents mankind’s achievements in space and which, in turn, was used to create some sort of illusion? Since I did not want to address this question, neither by writing a script for the interview with the camera, nor by using special effects to make a camera speak, I needed to find other ways. Besides that, my main interest was not in making a documentary about the Hasselblad camera that landed on the moon, but rather in using its kind of “star quality” as a narrative element.
With such an intention, especially of exploring how far our documentary engagement could move towards fiction, I have applied some principles of the Mockumentary. Derived from the term “to mock”, which means to make fun of a situation, to ridicule something, or to simulate a situation, this unconventional film genre appropriates narrative elements to stage a fiction within the framework of a documentary. As Jane Roscoe and Craigh Hight describe:
The mock-documentaries represent the ‘hostile’ appropriation of documentary codes and conventions and can be said to bring to fruition the latent reflexivity which we argue is inherent to mock-documentary’s parody of the documentary project. Despite their apparent subject matter, there are the texts where the documentary form itself is the actual subject. Here, the filmmakers are attempting to engage with factual discourse, and effectively to encourage viewers to develop a critical awareness of the partial, constructed nature of documentary.2
Aside from some ethical implications (e.g., making an audience believe that a “fake” story is actually real), what becomes evident in a mockumentary is an affinity for creating a parody and/or satire about a subject matter. While this may expand the often-serious tone of a documentary, it also challenges the documentary conventions and its adherence to a filmic truth. Here, the principles of a Mockumentary were not necessarily used to feign a story and consequently, to mislead an audience. What became central to me was to explore how we could simulate the camera as a real interview partner, especially by dealing with its co-presence in a naturalistic way (rather than pretending we were talking to an inanimate object). Alongside this, I considered a satirical approach as productive, not only in making fun of an absurd situation, but also for raising a sort of critical awareness regarding the omnipresence of cameras in our digitalised society. Hence, while the plot of I am the Camera stages an interview with the camera that landed on the moon, it seeks to (re)imagine a documentary reading of a profilmic world.
When it comes to the three characters - Influencer, Documentary filmmaker and Clown - their development process was grounded on the camera work on site, especially on what the chosen technological devices of each – an iPhone, a digital camera, and a GoPro – could offer in terms of a performative and cinematic expression. For example, for the influencer, to explore and stage the self-image; for the documentary filmmaker to question a given reality; and for the clown, to interact with the environment. Thus, the character formation did not stem from the emotional and psychological features of an invented persona (as in mainstream realism), but rather from what Jens Eder refers to as ‘artefacts’:
The manifold representational devices of film impart characters with physical concreteness in image and sound. The primary contributing factors here are cast, star image, performance styles, mise-en-scene, camera work, sound design, music, and editing. These production-related concepts can aid the description of the mode of appearance of characters, which would otherwise be most difficult to grasp.3
According to this, the three characters represented not only the modes of appearance or attributes of their technological devices (also considered as props), but especially what they enabled in terms of mise-en-scene and embodiment. For example, the mobile phone camera as a sort of cognitive extension of the body, the handheld digital camera as a physical presence in space and the body-mounted GoPro as a form of surveillance camera. From a stylistic point of view, this allowed us to consider that the role of the camera is,
to open a space for others, creating a community, and ultimately a public sphere. This is not simply a matter of the subject-I with the camera-eye interacting with the public sphere, but the creation of a new space. 4
In this case, the creation of such a public sphere both in the space of the camera and on site, was approached not only through the character’s relationship with the cameras, but also through a comic and/or satirical performance style. While this choice emerged from the practices of each performer (Charlotta in postdramatic theatre, Kristin in clown technique and myself in performance art and experimental theatre), it also aimed to address the character’s formation – whether of the subject-I or the camera-eye - in a playful way.
With such an emphasis, what follows is a short description of each character based on: a) the performative and cinematic expression of each camera, b) some references from film history and c) the main motivation.
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Influencer: Performed by Charlotta Grimfjord Cederblad, this female character is the protagonist of the story. Drawn from today’s mediatised culture or the Web 2.0 user-based and user-centric generation of the smartphone, this character reflects the ubiquitous practice of self-documentation. A phenomenon which, according to Benjamin Koslowski, points to the following idea:
The relationship between performers and audience has shifted dramatically: users of digital social platforms are not just consumers of content, but performers, who try to create and convince their audience of a certain image of the self, based on who they are offline, and how they want to be perceived online.5
From this perspective, this character employs a simple V-log system (iPhone 12 mini, selfie-stick, light panel, and microphone) to both produce content for her channels on social media and to construct and stage an online and offline presence. Having a key interest in art-related topics and for what is going on in the cultural scene at Götaplatsen, her main motivation is to create interesting posts and to acquire new followers.
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Documentary filmmaker: Performed by myself, this female character is seen as the antagonist. Inspired by the cameraman (Mikhail Kaufman) from the iconic essay film Man with a Movie Camera by Dziga Vertov (1929), this character or the analogy of the “Woman with a Moving Camera” illustrates the technological progress of cameras and “the embodiment of the idea of man working with the film-apparatus”. 6 Here, this character uses a handheld digital camera (Panasonic HC-X 2000) not only to portray and participate in the everyday life at Götaplatsen, but also to potentially find a BIG STORY. After reading an article about the iconic image “Earthrise” taken with a Hasselblad 500 EL in 1969, finding out more about the camera that shot this image became her motivation.
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Clown: Performed by Kristin Rode,this female character embodies a feeling of astonishment and amusement towards the technology of cameras. As the only one who does not speak, this character is inspired by Jaques Tati’s clown Mr. Hulot, especially by his performance in Playtime (1967) in which:
The experience of the city becomes most intensely mediated at thresholds: at windows, doorways, vestibules, landings, security checkpoints, commercial checkout counters; and other middle spaces between buildings, between office partitions, between insides and outsides, even between cars. Hulot’s entrance into the film from the socially entangled back door of a public bus, and his farewell gift exchange with Barbara (via a Hulot-like intermediary) at the front door of a departing tour bus, establishes mediating thresholds as a primary paradigm of the film’s double plot.7
With an emphasis on exploring such thresholds, in this case with a body-mounted GoPro camera, the character wanders on and off the screen, before and behind the camera, inside and outside the film set. Since she is not physically visible to the other two characters, she is considered a sort of hidden narrator who, through nothing but images and sounds, provides an insight into the unfolding of the story.