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5 March – tombstoning

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The first shot from the Sea City rushes which was used in Sea Front (2009).

Sea Front from Sundog Media on Vimeo.

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In January 2010 Sea Front was screened in the London Short Film Festival where it won the Trick of the Light Award for “the most gorgeous looking film.”
One of the judges Alison Poltock artistic director of the East End Film Festival said:
“We love this – it looks so retro. And even though we don’t know where it’s set it reminded us of dodgy school trips to Southend in the 80s…. very tenuous link to East End…. And even though it doesn’t have a narrative it’s completely engaging – you’re in that place, and it gives you the same feeling that you have in that environment – voyeurism, lazy sunshine and very simple pleasure…”
The LSFF described the Trick of the Light Programme:
Short films are shown with gorgeous and sumptuous imagery in this stunning collection of rich cinematography and beautiful animation. The programme takes in drama, documentary and experimental animation, to give a varied outlook of life from surreal dream-like landscapes to a more realistic viewpoint, but with equally stunning results.
Year of release: 2009
Original format: Super 8mm
Running time: 5 minutes 40 seconds
Screening format: QuickTime, Blu-ray or DVD
Directed, filmed and edited by Stuart Moore
Producer: Kayla Parker
Production: Sundog Media
Distribution and sales: Sundog Media sundogmedia@gmail.com
Description
The poetry of Plymouth Sound and city seaside culture captured in glorious Kodachrome Super 8: meet the young tombstoners who gather on the cliffs under Plymouth Hoe at high tide to launch themselves into the waves below.
Winner of the Media Innovation Award 2010: Independent Film. The Media Innovation Awards celebrate the innovative use of media and design: the judges described the film as “a very atmospheric and nostalgic production that was beautifully produced.”
Winner of the 2010 London Short Film Festival Trick of the Light Award “for the most gorgeous looking film.”
Production notes
Shot on the last few remaining rolls of Super 8mm Kodachrome 40 colour reversal film before the processing lab closed, with location sound recordings. The film Sea Front focuses on the area of Plymouth Hoe next to the sea known as the Foreshore, where the once-grand man-made structures built into the limestone cliffs in the nineteenth century are now cracked and crumbling. This space between land and sea is the site of rites of passage for modern-day Plymouth youth, who gather here at high tide throughout the summer months to leap into the water.
Sea Front, directed, filmed and edited by Stuart Moore, and produced by Kayla Parker, is the first film to be released from the Sea City project, ongoing collaborative research with Stuart Moore that explores the perimeter of Plymouth along its boundary with the sea.
Publication and comments
Sea Front features in the British Council’s Britfilm Catalogue 2011 in the Experimental Shorts section.
Philip Ilson (2010) The art of short films Film Features, The Quietus. 8 January 2010. thequietus.com/articles/03496-the-art-of-short-films
Exhibition
2015
Bodies of Water presented by Land/Water and the Visual Arts and Moving Image Arts (MIA) research clusters; screening followed by a discussion led by Dr Nicholas Higgs, Postdoctoral Research Fellow to the Director of the Marine Institute; Plymouth University (11 February 2015)
2014
Bodies of Water programme of artists’ moving image for The Power of the Sea exhibition, Royal West of England Academy, Bristol (3 May 2014)
2012
Marine Screen Marine City Festival, Royal William Yard, Plymouth; evening screening outdoors presented by Plymouth Arts Centre, Dartington Barn, and Peninsula Arts (15 September 2012). Showing as the 2011 Deluxe telecine version.
2011
Small Wonder programme, Cine-City, the Brighton Film Festival. A selection of Super 8 films from around the world, curated by Ian Helliwell (19 November 2011)
Plymouth Arts Centre’s Cinema City Mobile Cinema, at various locations around Plymouth; in the Sensing Place programme (4 – 8 July 2011)
2010
International Program 2 at 7:30 pm Thursday 27 May in Capitol Theatre, Windsor Ontario, at Media City international festival of experimental film and video art held in Windsor Ontario in Canada and Detroit USA (25 – 29 May 2010)
East End Film Festival Adventures in Experiments programme at Rich Mix, Shoreditch: “a selection of work from artists, filmmakers and animators, exploring the limits of new form and creative expression” (programme description) (26 April 2010)
Experiment 4 programme (Guild Cinema 14 April) at the Experiments in Cinema festival in Albuquerque New Mexico: (14 – 18 April 2010)
2010 London Short Film Festival, Rich Mix, Shoreditch (13 January 2010)
2009
Assemblage exhibition, Peninsula Arts Gallery, Plymouth University

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One Second a Day

Daily, starting from the 1st March, I will select a clip from my Super 8 archive that was digitised at Deluxe Soho for the Marjon-funded research project Freeing the Archive. Each day I will skim the library in FCPX, stop on a frame and append one second of video to the timeline. I won’t look at the growing edit until it is finished. By April I will have a 31 second edit to put with the other 3D3 students’ One Second a Day video diaries.

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Henk Borgdorff

This seminar by Professor Henk Borgdorff (Royal Conservatoire / University of the Arts, The Hague) starts by asking whether research by artists, so-called artistic research, is equivalent to other forms of academic research. 
Artists in their research often make use of insights, methods and techniques, which stem from social science, humanities or technological research, but it is not clear what artistic research itself has to offer to academia. Professor Borgdorff will develop a positive understanding of research in and through the arts, touching upon its epistemology and methodology, and addressing the form and relevance of its outcomes. He will point to four related issues that are pertinent to research in and through art: an advanced understanding of discursivity and reasoning; the methodological relevance of material practices and things; innovative ways of publishing art in academia; and advanced forms of peer review. For Prof Borgdorff, it is key to the advancement of the artistic research field that we not only advertise and export our epistemological and methodological distinctiveness, but that we also join forces with others in our attempt to re-think academia.
Henk Borgdorff is a philosopher and music theorist who is a Professor (‘lector’) of Research in the Arts at the Royal Conservatoire / University of the Arts, The Hague (The Netherlands). He was a Professor in Art Theory and Research at the Amsterdam School of the Arts (until 2010), visiting Professor in Aesthetics at the Faculty of Fine, Applied and Performing Arts at the University of Gothenburg (until 2013), and editor of the Journal for Artistic Research (until 2015). A selection was published in May 2012 as The Conflict of the Faculties: Perspectives on Artistic Research and Academia (Leiden University Press). Professor Borgdorff is President of the Society for Artistic Research. See his profile page on the Research Catalogue: www.researchcatalogue.net
This seminar is available to any Plymouth University researcher (including those who currently, or intend to, collaborate with arts and humanities researchers in the production of outputs). 
Start time: 17:00.
Please confirm your attendance by emailing theartsinstitute@plymouth.ac.uk.

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Seeing Carol

Super 16 viewfinder

I saw Carol at Plymouth Art Centre cinema sat in the centre of the front row. The auditorium in Looe Street is quite small, and the 2pm matinee screening was almost completely sold out with the venue’s fairly senior regular clientele. I wouldn’t normally sit in the front seats as the screen is quite close (maybe 4m?) but today it worked out perfectly. The visual experience was intense at such close range, the image grain was almost tangible.

Richard Brody compares the sensory affects of viewing Carol (Haynes, 2015), directed by Todd Haynes – which was shot on grainy Super 16mm film – once from the rear of the auditorium then a second time close enough to the screen in the cinema to visually experience the grain structure of the image: “They’re not effects of the actors’ skin but of its appearance on the second skin of the film stock (the French word for “film” is “pellicule,” meaning little skin) which lends the actors’ theatricalized immobility an illusion of shivers” (2015). These medium specific qualia (the experience of the projected grain images) are an example of ‘haptic visuality’ – a method of sensory analysis which is located in the viewer’s body, although it does not depend on the presence of literal touch, smell, taste or hearing. It is a concept of embodied spectatorship that situates the phenomenology of cinematic experience as synaesthetic and interactive: an exchange between two bodies.

Although the film was shot on Super 16 it went through the DI (digital intermediate) process in postproduction and was projected from a DCP. Adding grain in postproduction is common both for a ‘film look’ and also to reduce banding when using 8-bit for delivery – the latter not relevant for cinema workflows. I wonder whether shooting on a Super 16 crop of a digital sensor and using the same lenses to match the Arri 416 film camera, then adding grain in postproduction would produce a discernible difference?

Film Review: Carol

http://www.newyorker.com/culture/richard-brody/carol-up-close [Accessed 9 December 2015].

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Jem Cohen – A Day in the Lives

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Close Up Film Centre, Hoxton, London

https://www.closeupfilmcentre.com/film_programmes/2015/jem-cohen-a-day-in-the-lives/

Nineteen Hopes for an Activist Cinema

By  Jem Cohen

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1. That it tells me something I don’t know and questions as much as it answers.

2. That it holds a mirror to the broken world.

3. That it takes a new shape, somehow unlike that of the movies before it, especially those within its own genre.

4. That it not dehumanise or take cheap shots.

5. That it comes as a shock, even if the shock is that of discomfort or joy.

6. That it not look like a music video, or smell like an advertisement.

7. That it is somehow mysterious, ambiguous, strange.

8. That it is somehow funny.

9. That it inspires me to rage.

10. That it inspires me towards peace.

11. That it not be guided by the Hollywood Commandments (Film as a Business, Movies as Commodities, Worship of Celebrity and Spectacle, Life in three Predictable Acts).

12. That it is more than propaganda.

13. That it avoids sentimentality.

14. That it speaks truth to power.

15. That it speaks truth to the powerless.

16. That it picks at the scabs of history.

17. That it makes me want to get to work.

18. That it strives for honesty.

19. That it blows my mind.

Jem Cohen is a filmmaker. This text is taken from the programme for his festival Fusebox, at Ghent in 2005.Vertigo Volume 3 | Issue 3 | Autumn 2006