Elective

As part of the second year of my degree, I had to select an Elective. I am doing the Documentary Elective so this page is really for all my research towards the elective. I am collaborating with another artist to produce a mock-style documentary on ritualistic behaviour. 

RESEARCH 

> 

> At the beginning of my research into Documentary, these are a few artists I looked at who I found on

Deutsche Börse Group website (http://deutsche-boerse.com/dbag/dispatch/en/kir/gdb_navigation/about_us/10_Deutsche_Boerse_Group) 

:

Paul Almasy 'Archive of the World' - Photojournalism, He travelled the world with his camera cataloguing the photographs by country then under labels such as 'culture', 'state', 'economy' etc. 

Man Placarding, Paul Almasy.

Anna and Bernhard Blume 'Constructive Chaos'  which are 'performance-like and staged' photographs with sets and costumes made by the artists themselves as they immersed themselves within the artistic processes . The everyday objects they work with have metaphors attached to them and it really seeks to demonstrate the symptoms of changing times.  There are levels of ordered chaos and distortion in the photographs. I would consider this an abstract way of documenting the changing times in relation to everyday objects.

Ein psychopathetischer Vorgang, from „Trautes Heim, Anna and Bernhard Blume.

Peter Fischli and David Weiss ‘The Way things go’ (Here is a shorter edited version on YouTube, I saw the full version in an Elective session) 

AND

Bernd and Hilla Becher

‘Functional Buildings'

Winding towers, France, Belgium, Germany, Bernd and Hilla Becher.

Emerging post-war the work bordered on minimal and concept art, it was undoubtedly important historically as documentation of mines, winding towers, gas containers, blast furnaces, power stations etc. A real evidential documentary of industrialisation which really showed countries having an identity, the industrial buildings almost gave us as a character study, by the way of construction and materiality of the buildings and how they were different in each country.

                           Winding towers, France, Belgium, Germany, Bernd and Hilla Becher. 

****************************************************************************

Orson Welles 1938 Radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds – Fooling people into believing something is real, I see this in relation to mock documentary and clever advertising much like the advertising of films such as ‘Blair Witch Project’ and ‘Paranormal activity’ which are both presented in a documentary style mode.

******************************************************************

Mock Documentary

- How ideas started, from the beginning 

Secret Garden, Search for a secret Garden

So the idea is to go on a quest for a Secret Garden in London, the Garden is a metaphorical image  for the brain, which holds within it's wall's structured chaos. 

> ideas were around the contrast between a stressful city and a peaceful secret garden. 

My collaborator and I wanted to really be more involved in the physical camera processes, such as smearing vaseline on a camera lens to created a misty dream-like effect, filters and really playing around with the Aperture and Exposure settings,  using tracing paper and placing a magnifying class in front of the camera. 

We wanted to research into rituals in Gardens.

*****************************************************************
Faking it, Mock documentary and the subversion of Factuality, J. Roscoe and C. Hight.

Factual vs Fictional 


Nichols "A fiction like any other, documentaries construct narratives, construct stories about the social world"


Transforms the fragments of real life into an argument or story p. 8, 'Faking it, Mock Documentary and the subversion of factuality'


Documentary is seen as recording the REAL, the camera does not lie.


'The claim that documentary can present a truthful and accurate portrayal of the social world is not only validated through the association of the camera with the instruments of science but also depends upon the cultural belief that the camera does not lie'


So is documentary tied up with science and ethnography? 
'Discourses of science were married with a liberal humanist view of the world and were propelled by a desire for social change and progress, p. 9 'Faking it, Mock Documentary and the subversion of factuality'
**********************************************************************
I did a brain storm of my ideas for the elective.

Performance
voyeurism
recording art for archiving
self obsessions, obsessions exposed
confusion and chaos, creating chaos.
Mock documentary
reconstructing history
another dimension
staged
CCTV footage
surveillance
exposed, spying
*************************************************************

Julika Rudeluis  

on Art Papers, Niels Van Tomme in conversation with Julika Rudelius

(http://www.artpapers.org/feature_articles/feature1_2010_0102.htm)

''Julika Rudelius: While the discussion about fiction and reality in film- or video-based art is somewhat new, it has been going on for a really long time in cinema. I'm always astonished that we are still caught up in this specific debate. When you come from a documentary background, it's customary to restage half of your shots. Photographers and filmmakers always ask people to repeat something or to reposition themselves. That was also my initial starting point: I could stage everything because the documentary is already staged. This whole fiction vs. reality discussion in art is a little belated; it took place in filmmaking years ago.''

Neils Van Tomme goes on to discuss documentary as being staged and how this genre relies on being pre-constructed, he notes Nanook of the North, 1922 as being one of the first documentaries which was also deeply staged. The idea that documentary films involve some artificial construction continues to be part of theoretical discussion. Fiction and reality is a continued discussion within the art world. 
***************************************************************


I think it is important to mention Oil Gobblers (Ropáci) a Czech film directed by Jan Svěrák in 1988, Oil Gobblers  is a comedy mock-style documentary following a team on a quest for the Oil Gobbler who dwells in a polluted world, he goes around eating anything plastic, they thus try to film and capture this creature. 


Here is the first clip of the film on YouTube, I'm afraid there's no english subtitles for this film, but if you focus on the visual images you can see just fantastic the shots and editing is. 


 Oil Gobblers 

**********************************************************
So i have been asked  to participate in the Global remake of  Man With A Movie Camera 


(http://dziga.perrybard.net/scenes) so I have to now selected a scene and upload some shots. 
(I will upload onto the site when I have finished it) 
*********************************************************

Quick update on progression of ideas

So I have had an idea swirling around my mind, like a tropical storm. Here is how I see it, A world, our lives through a microscope. All those little details that go unnoticed in our daily lives the invisible. It would be the perspective of an outsider and how they perceive the human race. Another World, full of fantasy and a blur between reality and dream space a documentary that oozes surreal. Can you produce a documentary when the idea is so obscure? 

*******************************************************************

ANNIKA VON HAUSWOLFF

Posted by Emilie Gordon on October 9, 2010

Annika von Hauswolff

Swedish documentary photographer

I have to admit with great excitement that this is one of my favorite photographers at this moment in time, alongside Sally Mann.


Annika Von Hausswolff was born in Gothenburg, Sweden in 1967 and was educated at Sven Winquist School of photography in Göteborg from 1987-89, followed by the University college of Arts, Craft & Design, Stockholm in 1991-94 then the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts in 1995-94. She now lives and works between Stockholm, Sweden and Berlin, Germany. I came across her work recently while researching Artists from Northern Europe. Annika Von Hausswolff is a borderline documentary/staged photographer and installation artist; there is the presence of the human body in her work but which often has an unattainable distant manor. Works such as ‘’The Memory of water, 20 05” presents us with a discarded shirt, crumbled and forlorn on the ground, here we recognize a “shirt” as an association with human life. There are other works such as her ‘Back to Nature’ Series, which could be ambiguous and involve a narrative confronting sex, violence and possibly suicide. I see a similarity between this and Sally Mann’s forensic work.

Back to Nature, 1993. Annika Von Hauswolff.

******************************************************************

Idea update

So my collaborator and I had to really begin to discuss where our ideas were heading, it involved a lot of talking, going over ideas, re-evaluating them, it was a very long process to reach the final point.  We of course began with a shared interest in human behaviour and psychology; we were looking at obsessive behaviours and other mental illnesses. It was finally agreed that the subject was far too vast we couldn’t single out a particular area to work with.  So we resorted to more discussions and then a Garden popped up into our troubled minds, we began by thinking of the Garden as a representation of the mind itself and initially we were going to fill the garden’s with sculptures, our own relics, this idea however took a sudden shift in a different direction when we found ourselves unable start with the filming process. We discovered both of us had an interest in ritualistic behaviour, from the modern everyday rituals to those of a more religious nature. To bring rituals and documentary together was the next step, we had to research into the history of rituals and hunt down some artists/filmmakers/exhibitions that sought to express or propose ritualistic ideas. We need to be able to manipulate the audience into believing in this ritual.

*****************************************************************************

“The performance of ceremonial acts prescribed by tradition or by sacerdotal decree. Ritual is a specific, observable mode of behaviour exhibited by all known societies”

*****************************************************************************