Motion, architecture, and narrative space

So I’ve been thinking about my post-modern studies paper a lot lately and I can’t help but let it inform this video project and my fascination with narrative and Auge’s concept of the non-place. From the start I wanted to do something with public transportation and faces and the language one finds on trains, bus stations, etc whether it be ads, newspapers, maps, or books and then I realized Crawford already did that project with his stop motion studies. Now I think I’m trying to more or less ignore facial gestures and different body disciplines and focus more on motion, architecture, perspective, borders, and text in general.

Derrick and I went to Denver yesterday and got a lot of great bulk video walking around downtown and riding the light rail—we focused on the movement outside the window and the intersection of lines, people, and buildings, rather than anything inside the train itself. I want to try to film in what Auge would call a non-place, ie supermarkets, hardware stores, graveyards, boulder falls, etc because these are places that are inherently full of narrative space, histories, and language. While we’re interested in using a mix of different frames and a contrast of motion and stillness to create these equivocal moments of narrative, we’re also considering using text to “label” what you’re watching. For example if we were to show boulder falls in a frame, the text might say, “This is a waterfall.” But we also want to play with the text and its semantic relation to the images a bit more. Rather than simply mislabeling the waterfall as “a tree” later we might slightly tweak a phrase, for example: “This is a waterfall” to “This is the deadliest waterfall in Colorado.” This qualification drastically changes your experience of the otherwise beautiful, non-descript waterfall and creates a particular response—suddenly you’re looking at a place of death as part of a larger collective, having a collective experience. The “this is” construct is important in making the connection feel given or expected, so that when the unexpected noun/adjective/verb appears the stability and integrity of narrative and language is immediately implicated. (If we do our job right) our hope is that these moments would suggest multiplicity and equivocation more than simple failure or collapse.

Perspective is something we’re still trying to figure out. Our favorite shot was taken sitting on the light rail where Derrick and I filmed the same landscape out of the same window, but from two different angles. Our thought is that if we put these next to each other or sandwich another frame with them we could again make a statement about multiplicity and narrative through movement rather than text. We’re also thinking about other ways of doing this—whether we both move through a hardware store together or use still shots in the produce isle of the grocery store I’m not sure yet. We’re also still figuring out how many frames we want and how they should work, whether they’ll always be there and just turn off and on like little tvs or if some will disappear, get larger, smaller, move around, etc. Right now I prefer a symmetrical three frames that turn off and on to give the piece a greater sense of stability and architecture since there is going to be so much juxtaposition and chaos happening already.