A temporary map of some recent ideas found while making videos.
1. Wherever possible, disconnect the image and the soundtrack.
1.1. This seems to produce a point where a quality inherent in the moving image becomes visible. What is this quality?
1.12. When disconnected from sound we can see the image moving, even in video there is a sense of it running as a printed surface over a light. Maybe this is the quality.
1.13. The sense of a machine at work.
1.14. The quality of something that is accessible, repeatable and arrangeable.
1.15. The image as a layer printed over the darkness of time.
1.2. When it is impossible to disconnect the soundtrack from the image, a different definition of the possible is at work. A moment when things connect, an epiphany? A space and time where sound and image are indivisible, trees and their sound.
2. The duration of a moving image should be the duration of the gesture (or action) in that image.
2.01. For instance the line the boy makes with chalk on the pavement in Spare Time (1939).
2.1. Therefore, when shooting moving images, look for gestures and their durations.
2.2. If there is no gesture and the image is static, cut it into the montage as a still.
2.22. Use a still camera for static images.
2.23. Or cut static images altogether, print them as still images. Then you can look as long as you like.
2.3. What about the duration of images that are both static and moving, for instance the shadows of moving leaves?
2.31. This opens up lots of questions. Should the work allow you to look at something moving for as long as you might in everyday life (insofar as it is possible for a moving image to let you look at anything for a duration of your choosing)? Why do you look at things for these durations in everyday life?
2.32. When this is the case, the duration should be the duration of a gesture in the soundtrack (find a piece of soundtrack that has a gesture).
2.4. Try to decide the duration of the whole work at the first opportunity.
2.41. If you leave it too late, choose a duration shorter than you would like and cut ruthlessly.
3. The duration of a recorded sound should be the duration of the gesture in that sound.
3.1. A point at which a quality in recorded sound becomes audible is harder to place. I’m not sure I have had this experience in the same way as with the image.
4. A moving image work could be a dance, a series of pairings of gestures in sound and image, or more complex than simple pairings.
4.1. What these gestures are and how they are connected and contrasted could create possibilities.
5. The editing of a montage has its own anthology of technical gestures - cut, dissolve, overlaying and so on.
5.1. It could be useful to produce an anthology of non-technical gestures for montage (applicable to both soundtrack and image). These gestures are more like questions.
5.12. What world does a cut create, what formation of space and time is being constructed? What real space is jumped in a cut? What passage of time is produced?
5.121. It might be useful to create another anthology that breaks down the different aspects of the moving image in a different way, also relating its practice more to space and time.
6. A gesture based practice requires more thought when shooting and recording, looking for or writing gestures, thinking about how they are framed, considering how the framing of each one relates to the others.
6.1. I am sitting on a bench, looking down the avenue of a park, which is naturally framed by large trees that create a canopy over the avenue and turn it into a stage. People enter and exit the stage, making different gestures, while the whole dance of entering and exiting is a gesture in itself.
6.2. If sound and image become a search for gestures, filmmaking begins in the encounter with the world, even if there is no camera or microphone. Filmmaking as research as a way of looking and listening, a part of everyday life.
6.21. Something you can use to alleviate the tedium of labour.
6.22. A search, an adventure.
6.221. Then let that adventure be expansive, various, a mystery, a process of chance, open, humble, modest.
6.222. Not a trap, not a limiting of the encounter with the world, not a way of defining and limiting the world in your own encounters with it.
7. May the adventure of working with the moving image be a search for rhymes and connections across different encounters with the world, E.M. Forster’s connection of “the prose and the passion”. Rhymes and connections among confusion - but let the world remain confusing, various, and the rhymes and connections remain transparent, contingent, alterable.
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Sunrise (1927) - the city that sounds like a quiet bell.
