Category: Essay Film

In Lost Book Found (1996), Jem Cohen’s documentary style of filming – like the street photography exemplified by Garry Winogrand and Joel Meyerowitz – features snatches of people and the street-life of New York. Filmed on Super 8 and 16mm over a five year period, these unmediated, chance encounters and random incidents in public spaces convey a realistic view of the city.

The narration, voiced by Cohen’s brother in a reflexive tone, devoid of emotion, recounts his experience as a sidewalk ‘pushcart’ peanut vendor and his attempts to decipher a mysterious book that unlocks the ‘secrets of the city’.

I have been at several screening with Cohen in attendance. At Aurora in Norwich I had a conversation with him, and mentioned how he’d been filming a lot with the camera held at waist level, allowing more ‘candid’ filming than might have happened with the camera raised to his eye. His face was a picture, fleetingly looking like he’d tasted sick in his mouth. In more formal Q&As he wouldn’t reveal whether the ‘lost book’ really existed. The film, like the man, needs its mythology.

Turner made an essay film travelling across Russia – Moscow to Irkutsk, Siberia – filming every day on the train journey, reenacting the same journey she took 20 years earlier. The use of memory is subjected to a formal methodological constraint where she is not allowed – by collaborator Matthew X – to review or make comments on her filmed material until the next day. This separation of the time of capture from the time of reflection of the filmed material feels similar to shooting then reviewing Super 8 film later.

We spent quite a bit of time in NiMAC’s auditorium with Father-land screening. The wall onto which the film was projected faced approximately north, so it’s not too much of a stretch to ‘project’ that if the illuminated rectangle was a window the view would be not entirely dissimilar.

Geographer Jay Appleton, in his book The Experience of Landscape talks about the human response to being in a place of safety where one can look out into the landscape, framed as prospect and refuge. Our rooftop outpost above the Powerhouse Café allowed us a secluded vantage point to film over the Buffer Zone in a way that mirrored the lookout posts of the soldiers along the Green Line. Near Trikoupi Street, the guards’ feet were only two meters above street level but it was easy to miss them as they looked down on the passers-by below. As we began filming we were unsure of the etiquette around the Buffer Zone, nor the legal strictures since there were many signs proscribing filming the guard posts and fortifications in the south, and the Turkish soldiers to the north seemed even more forbidding.

The construction of the art centre meant that sounds from outside became imbricated with the soundtrack of the film. I was conscious that the amplified call-to-prayer from the north would be less remarkable to locals, but also perhaps unwelcome being repeated in the gallery as it is a sound that permeates the city every day. It was slightly uncanny hearing a constantly changing augmentation to the film’s audio – that is itself composed of the sounds of the city – by the sound filtering in from outside: the muezzin relayed from Istanbul reciting the adhan over loudspeakers on the Selimiye Mosque, pigeons on the window ledges, crows calling, people’s voices, construction and traffic noise. If I had thought of it I would have recorded the ambience from outside with the film’s soundtrack silenced…

First Symposium of the BAFTSS ‘Essay Film’ Research Group
18 and 19 November 2017, University of York, UK
Organised by BAFTSS and The Interdisciplinary Centre for Narrative Studies, University of York

Troubling dialogues: fitting words into place

Abstract

By Stuart Moore and Kayla Parker

This paper examines the screenwriting processes developed during the creation of a collaborative essay film. The strategy emerges through its authors’ shared production experience, allowing the intertwining of their subjectivities with political and social histories. Using their practice research project, Father-land as a case study, the authors critically reflect on their evolving dialogic methodology developed through collaboration.

Continue reading “Essay Film and Narrative Techniques: Screenwriting Non-fiction”