I have really enjoyed the last 3 days working together again and it's been nice to properly work with Ian and Lov and be out and about in the sun talking thinking and making. As I write this I am downloading all the footage from yesterday. In total we have about 2 hours of which is stupidly massive - it is around 80 G of storage. In my memory there are about 6 short clips I remember - they are points where my brain and camera came together at the same point and it became a fragment. I will call it the darkness of the lived moment as this is a term from Block which is about how we can never see the moment we live it it is like the dark side of the moon consistently turning itself away from us to obscure itself.
We have talked a lot about film specifically the film we are making together as part of the "Back to the future" work in Gainsbourgh. I like the fact we are trying to make a joint piece of practice which is a film as it is challenging and a new discussion. We have made films together for the poly-vision project and I love some of these, yet the film part is almost not that important, they just happen to be films. When we talk about them we say that they are not films in the traditional sense we just pointed the camera at things and recorded them - we were making you-tube tutorials and within these we were clear that it was the quality of the information - the knowledge- not the quality of the film that is important. I think this works for the early ones which feel snatched and honest but as we move on and introduce cutaways and edit the talking down they become something in-between. We say it would be mannered to make "Poor Film" we make them as best we can with our knowledge and equipment and this is also fine but I think that the film for Gainsborough is different to this and we have been working through a set of complicated interrelated problems about taking something away from where it is made the people it was made with and the lack of control we have other how anything is viewed once it's published.
I have been thinking a lot about Rita Sue and Bob Too. A film I found difficult to watch, made far worse by the chuckles of middle class art cinema goers - It is one of the best examples of British social realist cinema, the UK's Bicycle Thieves - I was talking to my friend Jason about it and he was saying how when they watched it in the 80's it was just their lives but the general audience couldn't see through to the fine grain the reality of the lives it portrays. Andrea Dunbar had no route of escape through a Billy Elliot middle class transformation, cycles of disadvantage run deep.
Anyway we will not be making Rita Sue and Bob to but I hope we will get chance to see it -
We have some hard thinking to do about the film we make - Me and Kate decided that we need to make something which is site specific to be shown at the Middlefield estate for the people in it and perhaps that's it. I'm fairly comfortable with this but also think it sounds a bit like a dogma and I'm not sure if by doing this the point we make will become art and leave the situated place it was made We will talk about it and say through doing it we are not doing the thing that we don't want to be doing but actually may be doing it - that sounds a bit like Donald Rumsfeld known unknown quote but it is a concern.
The big thing from the last 3 days for me is that most of the young people we met seemed to be having a great time - a great childhood - swings, dens, games, friends - the thing that many adults think have gone was really just the fact that as adults we have grown blind to the warm winds of Hiemat preferring to think of a lost world rather than the one outside the back door.
Anyway thinking of the film I have I was reminded of another film project I completed where all I had was fragments - I made this film about it.
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