Experimental Moving Image:
A great site from an artist using moving image:
Memory:
Memory is the diary that we all carry about with us. (Oscar Wilde)
Every man’s memory is his private literature. Aldous Huxely
But this is History. Distance yourselves. Our perspective on the past alters. Looking back, immediately in front of us is dead ground. We don’t see it, and because we don’t see it this means that there is no period so remote as the recent past. And one of the historian’s jobs is to anticipate what our perspective of that period will be… even on the Holocaust.
An important set of information about research approaches and content on experimental film is here to download.
Research and experimental film pdf BFI
It has been produced by the BFI (British Film Institute) and says some useful things about approaches that you might make in relation to thinking about media artifacts. The writing is skewed to talk about media texts but what is said completely holds for the creation of media artifacts themselves.
It reiterates the difference between primary and secondary research and how important primary research is. In brief it is much richer for you to go out and encounter the real world yourself and find out something on the ground that relying on secondhand pre digested material.
Primary: This is first-hand research. In other words, it relies on you constructing and conducting surveys, setting up interviews with key people in the media industry or keeping a diary or log of data on things such as, for example, what activities women are shown doing in advertisements over one week of television viewing. Unless you are equipped to conduct extensive research, have access to relevant people in the media industry or are thor- ough in the up-keep of your diary or log, this type of research can be demanding, complex and sometimes difficult to use. Having said that, if you are preparing for an extended essay, then it is exactly this type of research which, if well used, will make your work distinctive and impressive.
They use a good analogy:
You cannot simply rely on your existing knowledge when approaching work in Media Studies. Although you will have some understanding of the area being explored, it is not enough to enable you to examine the area in depth. If you were asked to produce a piece about the people in your street in de- tail, you might have some existing information about names, faces, relationships, issues and ac- tivities but this knowledge would not offer you details such as every single one of their names, who knows who, who gets on with whom, how people earn a living, what has happened to them in the past and so on. This extra information could change your opinions quite dramatically. With- out it, therefore, your written profile would end up being quite shallow and possibly incorrect. The same is true of your understanding of media texts, artifacts, issues and institutions.
Making the effort ot encounter the world is worth it, you will find more out and it will challenge and refigure your own prejudices. Research should tell you new things, unexpected things, things that test your own views.
In relation to memory this can be very interesting……..
We asked you to think about significant personal memories……… are memories correct, do they get re remembered… are they accurate? Do people that you share these memories with remember them in different ways?
This re remembering can become solidified into recorded history. Just look at the things around you that offer a story or commemorate a particular time, event, happening.
In Coventry as in other cities this is all around you, there is a Blitz Industry.
The dead. The body count. We don’t like to admit the war was even partly our fault cos so many of our people died. And all the mourning’s veiled the truth. It’s not “lest we forget”, it’s “lest we remember”. That’s what all this is about – the memorials, the Cenotaph, the two minutes’ silence. Because there is no better way if forgetting something than by commemorating it. From the History Boys
Is there another history and story to the bombing of Coventry that hasn’t been explored, yet is still a part of some peoples living memory?
If you don’t get out and talk to primary sources…people who were there then you can never know.
A recent piece of work did indeed challenge the Blitz industries regular story to reveal an aspect of ordinary peoples experience that has been hidden or not recorded.
In our current hyper celebrity obsessed culture the cynicism or undermining of everyday peoples experience has become even more disregarded, devalued. Just outside here there are experiences, memories that are explosive and rich.
On a recent MA mass observation of a village in Northamptonshire a postmen was followed on his round and then talked to about the strike……he said things about his working conditions and how they have changed in recent memory that was a devastating critique of much of the guff reported even in the broadsheets. It was first hand, solid, based on grinding knowledge not secondhand regurgitated press release material. No body is talking to people to find out.
Pasolini a controversial filmmaker in Italy who was imprisoned for his work in the 1950’s 60’s and who was killed in the 70’s based his work on a connection to the people living in Italy, without influence and without power.
We have asked for you to do something different something that you haven’t done before. Primary research is one way. Other ways are embracing techniques that you haven’t yet used.
The cut up technique is a way of re making your experience of the world around you of taking bits of it and reordering them to produce chance and unusual juxtapositions.
Derek Jarman an experimental British filmmaker combined the use of super 8 with 35mm to produce both personal movies about his own memories or reactions to the world around him and movies that combined the look of the school play with little known actors to comment on the recent events of the past.
His film Jubilee was a commentary on the Britain of the early 80’s
What some of the experimetal works have in common is a relation to evocation, the poetic rather than the dominant narrative tradition particularly in British film.
Blue
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