A filmic research on self-portrait cinema
A filmic research on self-portrait cinema
The Reflective Rationale
The Reflective Rationale
Introduction
The purpose of this project is a practice research towards the self portrait in cinematic forms.
The question that led me to the start of this project was: If self-portraits were a dominant subject for most if not all visual art forms (i.e. photography, painting, sculpture), where does it situate in cinema?
Is any image/moving image with the self a self portrait?
One could argue that the self of the filmmaker is embodied in any body of filmic work, as Agnes Varda explains in her portrait for Jane Birkin in Jane B. For Agnes V. (1988), “[…]it is as if I filmed your self-portrait. But you won’t be alone in the mirror. The camera, which is a bit like myself, will be there, and it doesn’t matter if I appear in the mirror or the frame. You just need to follow the rules of the game and to look at the camera as often as possible. To look at it squarely, otherwise you won’t be looking at me” (69, Ibáñez). Lourdes Monterrubio Ibáñez further explains, “the filmmaker affirms that both the portrait and the self-portrait are generated through the relation with the other, through a film apparatus that turns into a mirror where one must look at oneself: ‘The filmmaker defines a playing field between the camera –a substitute for the eye– and the mirror that returns its gaze, between the portrait of her model-like actors and the self-portrait of the filmmaker who is revealed through her own images’” (69). The act of filming becomes a relationship between the filmed and the one filming. Meaning there will always be a degree of the filmmaker self seeped in any act of filming an other, one could well be un-deliberate in making a self-portrait, but ends up making one anyway - Any movie could then be a self-portrait. It is hence important for me to assert that the filmic self-portrait I’m discussing central to the thesis of this project is not simply a cinema where the filmmaker just so happened to portray themselves, but where their primary intention as they set out to make the film is to portray the filmmaker self. There are nevertheless many intricacies in the dialectics of the filmic self-portrait that have to be discussed before realising this thesis into practice, hence the premise of all written parts of this project.
A reflection on process
PLANNING
The idea of the self-portrait was and is still hard to navigate. There were an abundance of questions that ran through me in writing the narrative: How do I present, or “package” myself into a filmic body? What do I talk about when I talk about the self? Who is the implied audience? How does that affect what and how many I disclose? In writing and in the literary discussion of its theoretics, I fail to find the words to wholly answer these questions. It occured to me then, some questions towards the filmic language cannot be answered solely through literature and theory. Hence, the aspect of practice as research in this thesis plays an essential role.
The preliminary plan for the video circled to the below personal themes:
1.To uncover what is a self-portrait whilst making the self-portrait
2.To document the mundane and everyday specific to my localism in the city, as well in the
domesticity and intimacy of the home.
3.To situate queerness within personal locales, stories and sentiments to the city.
These were the areas that I felt personally reflects my "self" (apart from the "self" without any cultural signifiers and politics): In queerness, in localism, at home.
As I’ve accumulated more and more literary and filmic texts to reference by throughout the semester, a good number of technical devices were jotted down:
1.Temporal categorisation in accords to chronology and the intricacies in arranging and challenging
a narratorial time (much inspired by my analysis on Varda’s Beaches of Agnes, but more importantly
Mieke Bal’s writing on the sequential arrangements of time in narrative as theorised in Narratology:
Introduction to the Theory of Narrative).
2.Sound and motifs in music to be placed onto moving images does not necessarily have to be its whole,
but dissected however the filmmaker pleases, especially when one has the technical knowledge in music
production to do so (i.e. myself).
3.Film languages do not have to follow a strict, formalist production / approach. Something as simple as
a video-blog; as spontaneous as Varda filming and discussing the variety of potatoes across France in The Gleaners and I (2000), meanwhile making the most random and comedic observation
about aging, wrinkled hand skins, postcards in Japan, cats that doesn’t care about her in her home…;
or a capella girl hummings and singing that fills the entirety of the soundscape of Chantal Akerman’s
The Room (1966) could well suffice to make phenomenal cinema.
STRUCTURE: The play of chronology (memories, present, reimagined present and future)
The structure of the video research started off with me wanting to permeate the work in a foundational layer of a filmic “presence” - narratives that have no essential linearity or progression, that stays more or less idyllic and constant at the moment it is situated in. Where these would depict quotidian scenes from the intimacy of my home, this segment is very much so a personal rendition to Chantal Akerman’s The Room (1968).
I invited my childhood friend Tris over to help me out with this part, seeing she has grown up with me since I’ve lived in this home at a young age, and that we have since established a comfortable dynamic for me to take photos of her. Initially I planned with her filming me, but having tried a couple shots, it didn’t feel right. We traded spots eventually, in the realisation that I was much more comfortable asserting myself into the project as the owner of the look of the camera than in the performance of myself when being filmed. This is one of the reasons why I’ve decided a self-portrait of myself could have minimal screen-time of my physical self.
There were the other temporal layers that build on top of this “present” basis: Memory (the segment “Tris in Berkeley”), a reimagined present (“JOSH”) and a manifestation of a future (“ERREN”). In retrospect, these were all projected from the consciousness of the present. The basis of the present temporal narrative is then all the more justified as the constituent underlying all.
All temporal components are interlinked by the “interludes” in a very deliberate fashion. I wanted to confront the often unquestioned “seamlessness” in transitions between montages; the gaps in the narrative. Ironically, the "interlude" mediates these gap between the episodes of stories but all the more accentuate them. This was a transition that tells you, you are very much so in transition.
The other temporal segments were more driven by plan than by chance compared to the present narrative. The story was written with the “actors” in mind, initially just to avoid the technical complications in having to film myself, but more so taking what Varda says about Birkins in their filmic interaction to my own practice and experimentation.
The filmed subjects were all close friends of mine. Having also initiated photo and video excursions with them before, I felt for one, we trusted each other in our process of shooting and being shot respectively, for two, there were a distinct "filming" dynamic with each and every one of the “actors” that I have asked to represent me. To have written the narratives premeditatedly with them in mind, it was not only myself projected onto them, it was as well myself in condition to how I see them, a character that was written based on our relationship, hence in documentation I call these characters josh/tiff or erren/tiff.
FILMING: To capture a moving image , to film the self through the other
Why not picture my physical "self" in my self-portrait?
On a technical layer, having tried filming myself for experimentation, I felt the act of filming one self is a whole different filmmaking experience than me having to film another. The process followed more procedures, it rids the immediacy of simultaneously experiencing a moment and capturing said scene. To film the self became first, performance, then looking at the playback and reliving what is captured. In a personal layer, it meant looking at the self momentarily in alterity of the look of the camera, not through my own subjective eye, and this momentary detach of my own gaze proves to be disorienting. I become dissatisfied with my own performance a lot of the time and the process becomes tedious having to go back and forth with capturing what I felt was the "right" image.
On a more theoretical level, one of the notions of my entire thesis is to argue that a filmic self-portrait is not only about what and who is visually subjected, because this would mean relying on the often subconscious and unchallenged hierarchy of image over sound. Hence to make up for the absence of my self in visuality, the sonicscape is predominantly occupied by myself - in its spoken narration as well in its music and sound arrangements.
SOUND: The Self-portrait soundscape
I didn’t want to just find royalty-free music that I felt “fit the vibe” and slap it onto the video. At the stage of planning the storyboard of the video, I have decided the process of producing the tracks would either 1. be done before the filming process (hence when the filming takes place it would at least to some degree be driven by the energy of the soundtrack - the hierarchy of the audio and the visual reversed when it is the audio that precedes the visual) or 2. done in simultaneity to the process of post-production. The premise of the latter approach was to compose and edit the raw materials and footage of the visual aspect along with the raw musical and sonic materials collected during filming. This initial idea was to treat the production of the “audiovisual work” as a composition itself, the visual materials a part of the compositional component, instead of seeing audio and visual as two separate blocks; to deconstruct the approach (that I’ve taken in previous video projects) of merely having two completed bodies of work mushed together in post-production. Although in the end not all of the soundtrack could follow through with this practice (due to technical constraints), it was nevertheless a renewed way of thinking about the interplay of sound and video in the combined practice of the two. And more personally, to put my two “academic” identity, a musician and a film studies student, at test in a trans-disciplinary manner.
“Weird Times” and “Berkeley Hillside” were made before the storyboard was written, two improvised pieces in two categories of instrumentation (acoustic and electronic) respectively. whilst some other pre-filming tracks were left unused, below are all the tracks that has been made pre-production of the visuals:
In the process of editing, I decided the “interlude” segments needed a transitional song that punctuates its interposing nature. Thus birthed the soundtrack “Interlude” as the first simultaneous production of the audio and the visual:
A more basic epiphany: It occurred to me that without the motivic recurrence of the primary soundtracks (i.e. the tracks “Interlude”, “Berkeley Hillside” and “Weird time”) the work wouldn’t appear as much as a packaged whole, more so fragmented episodes. As an afterthought, I can’t help but contemplate the malleability of the image against the audio, how a mere repetition in sound could change the feeling of curated-ness on visuality. This could be a further thesis in a future extension of the project.
Having needed to critically reflect on the works of Akerman and Varda in my film review, the awareness of their treatment to sound has enabled me to ponder on how the audio could decidedly flow with, respond or protest against the visual. Indeed, the process of capturing a video in this age automatically presumes the capturing of the visual and sonic in a simultaneous experience. I am thus grateful for my lack of professional audio-capturing equipment that urged me to retract back to the era of “dubbing”. This meant I was given the space to think of audio-making in the separate course of action from filming.
AFTERTHOUGHT
I showed a few friends the final cut and their comment was that it was very me. I do feel so as well, but I didn’t know what they meant specifically, nor could I myself pinpoint what it was that made this film an extension of me. The question I raised at the beginning of this reflection really revolved around one fundamental question: “who am I in film?”. In watching my final work, I think the question is answered. I still cannot bring myself to give a written answer, so I cannot tell you what it is, and who I am right here. To be frank I started this project exactly because there have always been points where I found language and word to be insufficient in fully presenting and representing myself. The motivation of the creative project was really a way for me to retreat from having to write a long-form essay, it was also simply because I liked making films and images.