The Other Side_Lucricia Martel

I chose to attend the Lucricia Martel talk as well as finish watching The Other Side and I would like to split this week’s response between both of them.

The Other Side is an experimental documentary film my Bill Brown . The juxtaposition of images follow the form of a structuralist film, with the camera being set-up in different cities and places across the U.S border. Following Deleuze’s cinema theory, one could say that the entire film is made out of perception-images with the camera as the position of perception. The camera stands film in different places across the border, and the images usually do not include any people, but perspectives of cities, shadows, the desert and experiences. The images are united through the voice-over by the film-maker himself who uses it as a travelogue, a way to share his experience travelling across the border. The camera almost has a different experience than the film-maker, people enter and exit the audio-scape, stories are being shared. The camera stands alone in space, invading landscapes, capturing moments in space and time, following the traces that were left behind from the pilmigrage of immigration. It seems that the juxtaposition of images and the soundscape are too independent pieces that can work separately. One can only listen to the piece or look at the images or both, there is an attempt to re-create his travel experience and share what he discovered by travelling near the border.

One thing that one could say is common in Lucricia’s Martel work and Bill Brown’s work is the importance of the soundscape. The Other Side would have never worked without the unitary and deeply personal voiceover. Lucricia Martel almost directs with her ear, first she creates the soundscape and the imagines and sets up the images and movements inside the frame that will produce this narrative. For her what is absent in the frame is just as important as what appears. She uses sounds to trace the unseen and help the spectator put the pieces together and construct their own assumptions and stories through her images.  Her films allow the viewer to imagine, she focuses on leaving little traces that the viewer can use to construct the narrative himself instead of giving the entire story in the film. She puts reality into doupt and brings small everyday horror in the surface, using images to think about the world around her. Her talk was very inspiring because she uses her childhood memories and the tensions that developed in her own family to draw ideas for her films through real human experiences.  

Structural film | Serene Velocity

The structural film is a popular and intriguing type among film forms, it is a kind of experimental film. It doesn’t have a specific outline or storyline since it focuses on the expression of the author. Instead of telling a story to the audience, it emphasizes how the audience be absorbed in a compositive film without a feature. It develops gradually in order to draw the audience’s attention to the details of the process, then begins to contemplate the while film. The structural film is like a looping slideshow, with its montage way to express the main idea step by step. This kind of film is more like a carrier of the authors’ thoughts rather than an entertainment to the audience.

In “Serene Velocity”, it keeps bringing the dizzy view of an empty and dark corridor by shifting the lengths on a lens. The edit of this film puts the scene of zoom in and zoom out together in just one second and loops it makes me feel hypnotic. I feel like I am immersed in this scene and get lost in it. The images were structured in the center of the corridor, and the fast motion both intensify the experience in this film.