Conceptualising the Mediation of Subjectivity in Documentary Film Practice – A Case Study of the Cinematic Portrayal of Blindness

 Catalin Brylla, Friday 14th February 2014, 10.30am-12pm, Goldsmiths, MRB Screen 3

The objective of this practice-based research project is to explore methodologies that facilitate the mediation of subjectivity through documentary film. Wayne (2008) identifies three essential functions of documentary practice: research practice, critical practice and creative practice. According to these, my proposed methodology suggests three different stages of mediation for the filmmaking process: mediation in a critical context, mediation of the encounter, and mediation through film form. For each stage I use cross-disciplinary methods, based on representation, anthropology and audience reception.

My case study looks at the representation of blind characters, and how these can bypass existing stereotypes that stigmatise blind people as “the other”. I focus specifically on embodied experience through filming interactions with spaces and objects.

www.catalinbrylla.com

 

© Catalin Brylla

The Contradictions of Hybridity: Re-reading the Visual Representation of Hybridity in Visual Art

Nina Mangalanayagam, Friday 10th January 2014, 10.30am - 12pm, Goldsmiths, MRB Screen 3

© Nina Mangalanayagam

My research and practice takes its starting point in the personal. It came out of the frustration of not finding artworks and theory resonating with my personal experience of having conflicting narratives, being a mix between a white and a black parent. And also by the difficulty making photographs on this experience, without falling into a metalanguage of hybridity. My research contributes to a re-reading of hybridity in photographic art, where the racial Hybrid is involved in a complicated struggle between its histories as both coloniser and colonised.

My practice involves placing myself in situations and locations within my cultural and familial structure to reflect on my position. The main focus is on how other people’s perception of me influences my relationship with others. I expose how internal contradictions mirror external cross-cultural complications. My presentation focused on We call her Pulle - a three screen video installation in progress on my experience returning to Jaffna in Sri Lanka, the childhood place of my father. For most of my life, I had no access to this place due to the civil war. Having only visited once before my memory and image of the place is partly imagined through stories from my father and from the Western society I grew up in. My process includes deconstructing my idea of the past, while simultaneously attempting to re-construct it from the ruins and traces I find. The video focuses on my relationship to my aunt, Pulle, and her house.

The final piece aims to contest ideas of origin, stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, and question assumptions and attitudes that I have brought with me from my background. I expose how the hybrid also needs to assess their presumptions and stereotypes of others.

www.ninamanga.com

January 2014: Making history,  CAB 2014 - Colombo Biennale, Sri Lanka

June 2013: Land/Home, Michealis Galleries, University of Cape Town, South Africa        

Patients as Authors [working title]

Christine Douglass, Friday 15th November

I am applying the theories of shared visual anthropology and the methodology of shared visual ethnography to produce collaborative films with 9 individuals who have had a breast cancer diagnosis. My practice seeks to position patients as active producers of knowledge by facilitating a framework for them to “structure their view of the world - their reality - through film” (Sol Worth 1997: 7). It addresses the constraints of knowledge produced by a singular authorial view through the presentation of the individual perspectives and aims to capture the experience of having had a breast cancer diagnosis in a language that is not sanctioned. Equally though I don't want to promote a trope of victimology. My practice challenges the hegemonic epistemes used in clinical research to explore illness experiences. Cameras were 'handed over' to patients for 6+ months, the resultant footage has been collaboratively edited and will form a gallery installation in December 2014.

Worth, S., Adair, J. (1997). Through Navajo Eyes. An Exploration in Film Communication and Anthropology. Revised edition. Albuquerque. University of New Mexico Press.

Still: TB 2012

 The next presentation is with Tom Tlalim, 10.30am, Friday 13th December 2013 in MRB Screen 3.

Documentary - Intimacy - Migration

Marianne Hougen-Moraga,  Friday 11th October

My research takes its point of departure in my own film-project, which focuses on migration and long distance relationships (including all kinds of relationships from couples to parent-child relationships) and how the feeling of longing for someone and eventually somewhere creates another kind of long-distance intimacy than when being together.

By looking on my own moving image practice, I explore how I can achieve an audiovisual intimate aesthetic through different kinds of approaches as e.g. a confessional approach, close-ups and recorded conversations done on video calls by the characters themselves.

I am recording with four characters and aim at recording with at least five more. The recordings are planned to end up as a one hour non-fiction film.

Film as an Archive for Still Images: strategies for activating colonial memory

Miranda Pennell, Friday 31st May

My research explores the possibilities of film as an archive for assembling and animating colonial still images.  I hope to show how the merging of still and moving images bears on the perception of time and of history, collapsing the disconnections and separations that enable the colonial past to be kept at a safe distance. My research proposes a formal means for inviting the colonial past to be felt in the postcolonial present. 

For this session I shall look at some of the ways the archive has been theorised.  My current practice re-organizes the visual archive of the Anglo Iranian Oil Company (BP). One of my immediate aims is to unravel the colonial construction of ‘Iran’, and of the British subject,  and to engage alternative readings of the company’s historical narrative. What are the techniques of seeing and knowing the world produced by the archive?  By which methods can these be grasped? And what kinds of knowledge or experience might a moving counter-archive hope to produce?

I will present a number of sequences from my film-in-progress, each sequence constructed either from an album of official company images or from the personal album of an employee. Each sequence seems to elaborate a way of seeing and of knowing the world. My film will act as an accumulation of different orders of such image-series, which I rework and reframe with other elements, including sound and voice-over.

*** Next meeting will be Friday 12th July 

AVPhD Group member's participation in Sheffield Fringe 14-15 June

Sheffield Fringe programme announced including "Urban Observations: In and Around Istanbul" curated by November Paynter with films by Köken Ergun, Didem Pekün, Annika Eriksson, Halil Altındere, Esra Ersen.
Saturday, June 15 at 12.00

http://goo.gl/yGe4W

Also showing Amanda Mc Dowell & Jennifer Fearnley's  programme in tribute to Michael Grigsby. Living on the Edge (1987) reveals the impact of the Thatcher era on three families, counterbalancing the exuberant Sheffield Media Unit archive (1984-89).


Saturday, June 15 at 4.30 pm

FLAMIN artist Charlotte Ginsborg’s Over the Bones launches Sheffield Fringe 2013, as the opening salvo of a curatorial mix tape that positions artists’ film as musical, selected by Minou Norouzi.
Friday, June 14 at 6.00 pm

Full programme details: sheffieldfringe.com
Image: Didem Pekün, "Of Dice & Men," 2013

OBJECT DOCUMENTARY: EVERYTHING

Project Title: Object Documentary

Minou Norouzi, April 2013

Through literary adaptation of Everything, a short story by Ingeborg Bachmann, using only personal archive and through themed curatorial presentations at Sheffield Fringe, this PhD by Practice research project titled Object Documentary surveys the relationship of contemporary artists working with documentary material today. The project questions what the ethical implications are of using actuality as object. It tries to keep an open, critical perspective on the positioning of documentary as material in art production - rather than simply as a genre as in film practice.

It investigates how far the ‘creative use’ of actuality can be taken in this context.

Looking at specific contemporary examples, including my own objectifying practice, the project also examines the relationship between audience and maker, placing audience interests and drives against the drive of artists.

The project occupies an intentionally oppositional space. Looking at deliberately questionable ethical practices, the project asks when and how it might be useful to objectify. 

minounorouzi.com

sheffieldfringe.com

Minou Norouzi, 'Everything', 2013. video still