Thesis Committee Meeting Statement

My thesis aims to discuss and explore film’s potential to construct reality through the medium’s unique portrayal of spatial relationships, perspectives, and cinematography. I wish to examine these ideas through a small body of work in both traditional screen-based and installation formats.

Bicycle Camera
This is a reiteration of a work done in the Spring of 2007. A 8mm film camera capable of taking single frames is connected to a bicycle. Each spoke of the front wheel triggers a toothed gear in passing. One turn of the gear flicks the shutter one frame. The faster the bicycle travels, the more frames per second the film records. As a result, the faster the bicycle travels, the slower the actual footage of the travel appears during playback. The pre-established relationship between time and space is inversely altered. During the first iteration of the project, the mechanism functioned according to plan and produced five minutes of film, albeit being just off axis enough to exclude the road and the cars around the bicycle. The camera was also destroyed after being repeatedly stuck by the aluminum gear.

This semester, I will revisit the project with a better camera and more a reliable and non-destructive mechanism driven by magnetism. Most importantly, I will traverse a further expanse of landscape, from nature to suburbs, from the metropolitan downtown to the industrial underbelly of the city. The landscape’s change provides a deeper look at our emotional and cerebral response to movements in space as portrayed by screen-based media. In the framing of the film, I will also include moving objects in the bicycle’s surroundings, such as traffic, pedestrians, and fellow bicyclists to further emphasize the re-definition of time in space.

The relationship between speed and space is organized by time. We all have a strong sense of how fast we travel down a road based on the quickness of the objects passing by and the slip of the road beneath our vehicles. What I strive to achieve with this work is both a thorough reconstruction of the intrinsic nature of the film medium, and a discourse in regards to the physical relationship between the lens’ eye, the film (which is a linear continuum, a path), and the space interpreted by the camera.

Blowing Up “Blow-up”

Michelangelo Antonioni’s “Blowup” (1968) is a film about the construction of spatial reality through still images. The central character, the photographer, discovers the hidden truth about a murder through re-arranging and blowing up a series of photographs he shoots at the park.

What alarms me – and eventually provides the reason for my work – is the eye-line of the woman in one of the photographs. In the scene, she is having an affair. During her embrace, she looks worriedly toward the fence the lines the park. This gaze is what arouses the photographer’s curiosity, and in turn to take a closer look at the reality reproduced in front of him.

For this work, I will print out and arrange every shot in the park scene of “Blowup” to represent the park as a physical location. The key is to use the fragmented visual information provided by the cinematography, performance, and editing to construct my own sense of spatial reality. The work is not so much information visualization as it is an exploration of the difference between what we, the audience, register as the reality in the film and the hard visual facts presented by the film. With this work, I intend to depart from the original narrative of the film and generate a new audience perspective through the literal breakdown of perspectives.

Untitled Documentaries

This is what I envisioned as the structure of these documentaries:

I have followed several of my close, intimate friends from when they started to when they ended their days. These days were not particularly eventful days – nor were they chosen because they were the most uneventful of days. They were arbitrarily chosen.

I presented no directions to my subjects nor did I restrain myself from posing questions, framing my shots, or turning on/off my camera. For example, I would film the entire duration of a lunch enjoyed in silence and skip dinner entirely. Similarly, I did not impose on my subject any particular subject matter, actions, or way of going on about their days. Most importantly, I did not ask my subjects to ignore the camera. I kept rolling the camera until I felt that I record the essence of the moment, or until my subjects kicked me out of their personal spaces due to discomfort.

I wish to weave these documentaries together in the editing process. The arc of the work centers on the dynamics between my subjects, the camera, and myself as opposed to the sequential linearity of time. It is an observing piece that tries to challenge the traditional association one has between the documentary camera and reality.

A conventional narrative requires the storyteller to maintain a certain kind of distance from his/her subject matter. A story is succinct because it is causally driven by a chain of important actions. I am interested in the drama in the mundane. Through a series of documentaries, I wish to ask these questions: how exactly do we extract a story out of our daily lives? How do we get a sense of the reality of certain relationships? How do the presence of a camera and the specific identity of the documentarian mediate/alter the portrayal of that reality?

Bibliography

My work is informed by a blend of traditional and avant-garde filmmakers, video artists, photographers, philosophers, and art and culture theorists. Through my thesis, I wish to investigate the evolution and construct of film through cross-referencing these different disciplines, but still fully maintain the integrity of the cinematic language. During the thesis writing process, I will relate and discuss projects by filmmakers such as Dziga Vertov, Sergei Eisenstein, Georges Méliès, Jean Renoir, Karl Freund, Francois Truffaut, Alfred Hitchcock, Jean Luc Godard, Agnes Varda, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Lars Von Trier. I will draw from writings by Walter Benjamin, Gilles Deleuze, Theodore Adorno, Jean Baudrillard, Paul Virilio, Christian Metz, Guiliana Bruno, Jonathan Crary, Maurice Merleau Ponty, Slavoj Zizek, and Henri Lefebvre. Finally, I will respond to the bridge between the traditional film medium and new media through looking at work by Nam Jun Paik, Douglas Gordon, Luc Courchesne, Michael Naimark, Jeffrey Shaw, David Rokeby, Susanne Jaschko, Joachim Sauter, Dirk Lausebrink, and Masaki Fujihata.