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| Artist Peter Goode (on screen during Amanda's Talk) |
A Kind of Making – A talk at Fabrica Gallery
Amanda Ravetz
I began the talk by showing a twenty minute film I made in 1996. Peter’s Stone God is about the artist Peter Goode. It begins with a scene of Peter carving a length of wood found in the canal – the only sounds are of him carving. Over the course of a couple of minutes, we witness his tactile relationship with the emerging form. This is followed by a scene of Peter in his living room talking about his journey over the past 12 years which has involved trying to read and write. He says he is severely dyslexic and that nothing he has tried (group classes, writing groups etc.) has worked. He adds that a couple of people have said to him ‘you wouldn’t be like you are [an artist] if you could read and write’, but he says he considers this a copout – why can’t he be like everyone else? It must be that he doesn’t try hard enough, he adds.
As the film unfolds we see Peter’s developing relationship with the carving which he calls The Guardian. We also find out about his poetry which we see being scribed for him by a friend who reads his letters out to him including one to say that a poem is being published in a collection; towards the end of the film we see Peter at a Christmas party with other writers where he struggles to read one of his poems aloud.
The film ends with an insight into Peter’s emotions on completing the sculpture. He reflects on their journey together. The poem Stone God is read again (as a voiceover) by someone who read it at his request at the Christmas Party.
This was the first film I made during the MA in Visual Anthropology which I completed at the University of Manchester. In some ways it is a funny film to choose to show at a public talk as technically its very poor quality, having been made on a VHS analogue editing system, at the beginning the course. But I showed because it lays out many of the issues that are still central in my work.
I asked the audience (of about 15 people) to respond to the film – what had they thought and felt while watching it? There were lots of mixed and interesting comments. Then I explained that I see the film as emblematic of themes I always come back to:
- making, as this relates to physical materials, to relationships b/w people and the environment, and to the craft of video;
- a certain kind of filmmaking, observational cinema - which I and others consider especially attuned to the senses; but which also raises questions, dilemmas, issues about power and authorship and about relationships between those being videoed, filmmaker and audiences;
- experiences of reverie, play, and improvisation that I find are sometimes induced by experiences of making.
Video and making
Peter’s God focused on material making – that was what I was interested in finding out about and drawn to.
In the next part of the talk I said more about observational cinema and how I came to think of it also as a kind of making, It involves following rather than directing or recreating scenes, and it relies on close relationships with the protagonists, a particular kind of attention to ways of being in the world – to material as well as other relationships; long takes. Observational Cinema (OC) follows a Bazanian aesthetic and philosophy meaning its not about dissecting reality or producing meaning through cuts and juxtapositions – montage – but about a continuous practice, about responding in the moment, while also having an understanding of social and political context. (for more on this see Observational Cinema: anthropology, film and the exploration of social life by Anna Grimshaw and myself (Indiana 2009).
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| The Bracewells |
In some respects observational cinema relates closely to participant observation – the central method of a certain kind of anthropology which is immersive, durational, qualitative, developed through relationships with people at the same time as paying attention to cultural differences, political structures, dissonant information and so on. The approach places emphasis on the body of the filmmaker and the senses – how you move, proximity and distance, sound, visual appearances and touch are all relevant when using a medium that is indexical, that records your movements as well as those of your subject. This is not to say text cannot do these things, or that film cannot be used in ways that suppress these qualities, but they have a kind of primacy in this strand of filmmaking.
Next I talked about how I continued at U of M after the masters with a PhD in Anthropology with visual media. My fieldwork was in Todmorden, where I was living and involved 3 sites – a factory, a farm and a housing estate.
My PhD film
The Bracewells, was shot in 1998 and edited in 2000.
Click here to see 'The Bracewells' http://vimeo.com/33465829
I found out through this film and the fieldwork I did immediately before it on a housing estate that OC is suited to some, but not all, situations and this gave me an important way of understanding more about my research questions.
It turned out that OC was well suited to the research I was doing with farmers – a number of things about it that fitted with their sensory practices and knowledge. It was possible to use the approach in a way tuned to the senses. For example, what I was doing with the camera was not dissimilar from what the Bracewell’s were doing themselves – movement, rhythm, touch, smell, looking and listening were central to their daily work. So my use of OC allowed me to stay close to these rhythms.
This did not mean I wasn’t on the look out for larger social ad political contexts in which they were doing this kind of work. For example there was a kind of bureaucratic knowledge they were increasingly being asked to use at this time of BSE. These two kinds of knowledge not always comfortable together – in a scene when a woman from MAFF comes to do a spot check you can see difficulty.
Making the Bracewells helped me see that my preferred filmmaking was about achieving a shared presence in an environment; and the making involved in editing was about maintaining a semblance of this in the finished film – though shared presence in a way that doesn’t eliminate difference, but makes it possible to relate across difference.
But just before this, I’d been on housing estate and had a really different experience there of trying to use OC which showed me that this approach is not appropriate to all situations. In particular I found that in this environment the camera was viewed overwhelmingly as a mode of surveillance.
Here is an extract from my fieldnotes:
Art and craft. T and D watched football video while I played with Ts daughter R outside. Later art and craft parents and toddlers. Everyone tense and R and K fighting. S is not here today and I didn’t have the camera pointed at them or on at this point, but felt tension between censoring reality and not wanting to record things that expose or objectify T and C. or things that will make them vulnerable to outside criticism – they’ve had their children taken away and T is working towards getting R back fulltime. First of a number of difficult issues that came up about video today .
A lot of filming happened during this time and of all different kinds - participatory, OC, and the girls filming things they wanted to – often one another - because much of the time I was driving them to different places – shopping, court, social services, relatives and so on, and of course I couldn’t film at the same time. But I was unwilling to use this material in the end because it I thought it was objectifying. Instead I wrote about the estate.
Extract from thesis
We all leave Cheryl's and set off down the snicket. It’s a sultry day. Just now, lying in
Cheryl's doorway, Cath remarked on the white clouds delicately suspended in the sky and for a few moments there was a stillness and calm amongst us. Now, as I follow Tina and Cath, Deanna, Vron, Mat and Anne along the path the muscles in my stomach tighten again.
Tina is drunk and noisy. She swaggers along, laying claim to the Avvie even though she has been banned from here by the conditions of her bail. I struggle momentarily with the desire to take the downhill road that leads to my house, but instead I follow the others into Tina's dad's house. Sitting in the small front room Mat draws attention to his sister Rachel who appears on the road above us. She is a thin, wiry nine year old wearing a short skirt, tottering on black patent shoes with 2 inch heels. She comes down the path, into the living room and springs catlike on to Deanna's knee. Tina is eating an egg sandwich she has just made in the kitchen and tells Rachel to leave the room as she isn't invited. Rachel taunts Tina back and soon they are chasing each other round the cramped room. For a moment or two the fight is a perfectly
choreographed performance but Tina is easily riled and tells Rachel angrily to ‘f’ off.
Rachel flies at her, arms and legs flailing, her nine year old body making little impact. Cheryl sits a little uneasily smiling, her eyes worried, betraying the unspoken feeling that Tina bullies all of us and that it is only this child who stands up to her. Tina opens the back door and pushes the child out, locking it behind her and laughing loudly.
'She'll come round the front now' says Vron. 'What's she like, little bitch!' her voice thick with maternal pride.
The front door rattles as Rachel tries to force her way through, then reappearing again at the back she is both laughing and crying and Tina swings open the window, barely missing her head and throws the egg sandwich in her face. The child moves like lightening, darting up the path, temporarily out of range. By now we are all on our feet. Tina fetches a raw egg from the kitchen and goes into the back garden with it hidden behind her back 'Rachel, come here darling, come here babes'. We laugh: the small girl holding her own, determined not to give up. As Rachel's frustration and humiliation reach a frenzy she begins to sob and then, between admonishments that she is soft to cry and she'll get a good belting if she does, Vron and Tina cuddle and comfort her. As we leave the house and head towards the town centre, Rachel asks Tina if she can stay at her house tonight and Tina lifts her up and tells her she can.
Through these two different ways of working I understood that the filmmaking I’m happiest with has potential in it for what you could call continuous practice –things unfold through the making, and you follow idea through that process, not knowing exactly what outcome will be. Explicit or verbally articulated thought and understanding sometime occur afterwards – or another way to put it would be thinking through making rather than a practice where you think as a way of making –where you plot the course something will take before doing it through e.g. theory or drawn plans or shooting script.
But I also saw that this wasn’t always most appropriate method for some kinds of circumstances.
I think there is need to reflect on the kind of approaches you are comfortable with and whether you might want to challenge those – what other methods there might be, why you are attached to some over others, how you might extend yourself.
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| Beautiful Colour |
Reverie, play and making
Moving closer to present I showed a film I’d made in 2009-10 called
Beautiful Colour.
This took me back to a theme evident in Peter’s Stone God – making – but in Beautiful Colour I was more consciously interested in the relationship between making, play and reverie.
Click here to see 'Beautiful Colour'
Thinking back to what we are comfortable with – the thing I did differently in this film was to place far more conscious limitations on what and how I filmed – to only film in Ian Partridge’s part of studio, not to try and explain what happened outside that space, but to leave that to the viewer’s imagination. I wanted to focus on the place where Ian has some real autonomy.
In terms of ethical considerations and access. I made this film with my sister who was the producer and who works with Ian. Permission for the filming was given on Ian’s behalf by his advocates who felt that it would benefit him as an artist. There were issues about other clients at the artbarn where the film was made not getting in frame as we had no permissions for them to appear. Again the method was to stay close, to think about continuity in editing, not to ask Ian things or interview him but to try and enter into the space of making with him.
I learnt a great deal from making this film – about play -- open play rather than purposeful play. It encouraged me to begin to draw again after twenty or more years of doing very little. Other people often say that seeing Ian work makes them want to paint – it makes it seem within reach, more possible.
Ian was not very interested in the film – he saw it when it was finished and also attended a screening of it at the BigScreen in Norwich. But it has had some positive benefits for him – I showed the film to Bryony Bond the curator of a big exhibition of outsider art at the Whitworth Gallery in Manchester and she realized after viewing it that she had work by Ian in the Musley Kinsgrove collection. As a result she decided to show Ian’s work along with the film at the exhibition.
Videoing Ian led to the last film I showed which was made in India and is called Entry . Ian’s playfulness as an artist helped me see possibility of doing this more proactively as a filmmaker.
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| Entry |
Click here to see 'Entry' http://vimeo.com/19328902
Entry was made during a month-long residency at Arts Reverie, an artist’s house in Ahmedabad that brings Indian makers and international artists together in various exchange programmes. Arts Reverie is located in one of approximately 600 ‘pols’ found on the east side of the city of Ahmedabad. Pols are high density neighbourhoods that were once homogeneous communities associated with different castes but are today increasingly diverse.
The project team consisted of three UK researchers - Cj, Amanda and the artist Steven Dixon (principal investigator); and two Indian researchers - the artist Lokesh Ghai, who took the role of project manager (and who was also collaborating with Steve on a separate project for the AIAF), and Palak Chitaliya who had consulted with local people about environmental conditions on previous occasions and had good relationships with people living in Dhal ni Pol. Our attempts to get to know people were helped by the timing of our visit which coincided with Navratri (8), a festival of nine nights, which is celebrated in part through dancing each night, something we enjoyed joining in with.
The film came about through Cj wanting to find visual stories with which to decorate chai ceramics and me wanting to find a way to further my work on reverie and play. Through various discussions we arrived at an idea for an event which would take place over one day – a doorway would be set up in a public space and people would be invited to interact with it while I recorded material from a fixed point and Cj took photographic portraits.
We set up the doorway outside his house, in the street, on the auspicious day of Dussehra (the festival that ends Navratri.
On my last night when having screened the film, someone who had taken a large part in the filming was angry that I had not given him a dvd with everything I had filmed on it, rather than just giving him the edited film. I had been unable to fit all the material onto one dvd in time and the material has since been supplied, but this moment revealed how at this point of leaving, we were or seemed to be appropriating something. We know that ownership is a big issue in research and in ‘socially-engaged’ art and its something that Cj and I have written about at more length in a book called Collaboration Through Craft that is coming out with Berg in 2013. I also have to ask myself whether the way I make films allows an audience to move beyond seeing the people in the film as stereotypes, fixed entities, or as objects, so to not close thought down or misinform audiences in ways that are damaging to people or situations who the films represent.
Conclusion
The talk concluded by revisiting the question of making – the 3 kinds of making mentioned at the start - material making, film making especially regarding relationships; and reverie and play as states associated with making. What joins them together for me is the possibly of connection and even some kind of dissolution between self and other, self and world.
So film as a kind of making, for me is about fluidity and movement where I can hopefully stop looking at myself and look at world – MacDougall puts it like this “simply to look, and look carefully, is a way of knowing that is different from thinking. This not necessarily a matter of greater concentration, for often the more we concentrate, the more we only see ourselves. Concentration is not the same as being attentive and free of distractions…paying attention is not a matter of projecting oneself onto things-in-themselves but of freeing one’s consciousness to perceive them (from The Corporeal Image. (2006: 7).
