Medium Format - Feabhra

Watching and Learning

I have been voraciously consuming documentary films, with the aspiration that my editing practice would be reinvigorated. I'm simultaneously awed and intimidated by all the beautiful work I've seen and it has been helpful to remind me of the story I am telling.

The link is to a beautiful film by Chiara Clemente, it is a poetically shot documentary that pays homage to 6 female artists living and working in New York.
http://www.ourcitydreams.com/

Audio

Looking at footage, writing and organizing cannot be done without the audio for me. Recording my own voice and working with the audio files is so much fun. I recorded a conversation on skype with my mom and it was such a laugh. The unscripted conversation is really what I'd like to explore more. The conversations then can become intervals between interviews and b roll can illustrate them also.

Finally a bit of a breakthrough!!!

Bias and Working with Testimony

Since returning from Ireland I have been struggling with constructing my outline. I write daily, brainstorm, edit and compile data and yet my conclusions elude me. The desire to confine such complex issues within analysis is also not really fulfilling at this stage.

I have to ask the question of whether as a researcher and artist,  I can present an argument and conclusion to such complex issues? While I have the ability to do this, for a variety of reasons I resist presenting biased date.

At this stage it becomes important to ask..

What is this project at it's root?

A collection and a glimpse, born form the desire to show positive change.

What is hard is that what I have found is dark, complex and truly unresolved. I hoped to show the positive changes that can happen when women unite and now all I can see is the living evidence of sexism. This is just the filter with which I am viewing the data at the moment and that is what I need to shift.  To resolve the burn out I am currently feeling, I am going to edit some of the more joyful moments of my footage to music and see where that takes me and alternate that approach with writing the structure down,

Possibly the greatest lesson gained form this pursuit is finding that I am a researcher and an artist and that working with others lives in documentary form is incredibly challenging.

There are changes that have happened that are positive and by focusing more on these I hope to show that progress has occurred. That progress is in evolution.  Questioning the progress I see is important  and staying open to the truth is vital also.

Compiling my resources and interviewing people was my favorite part so far and this stage of working is work, a lot of hard work. I want to do these women's lives justice and that might be my current  problem. I am not the one who gets to save anyone else and honestly these women don't need saving and neither do future generations, sometime during the last week I forgot that I am only the one asking questions!

Letting people speak for themselves in this film  is really important and what I want to do is create an environment that is open and contemplative.

Handing over and trusting the process is once again what I need to return to.

Discovery is complicated, that is the thought I'll leave you with.. and this weekend I'll present some of my findings.