"But is it really REAL?"
During my summers at Kentwell hall 'working' as a Tudor Limner I would be asked this question an awful lot ... about the most surprising things. Apparently when my fellow limner Kate used to bring her large and smelly (& obviously animated!) dog to the re-creation people would stare in wonder ... "But is it REAL".
I'm currently traveling back from the 'reality' overload that is IDFA, the amazing documentary festival held each year in Amsterdam. Where else could I spend only 3 real-time days but what seemed like many months in contrasting 'realities' as diverse as the Antarctic (Herzog's 'Encounters at the end of the world') a plane fuselage submerged in snow (Gonzalo Arijon's extraordinary epic 'Stranded') a premature baby unit (the Lataster's 'If we Knew') and a dutch school Garden project (Roel van Dalen's 'Green Paradise') Ironically only this morning's offering 'Mechanical Love' took me any where near my own 'reality' and that was about Robots!
No wonder I'm tired.
Anyway watching all these docs. back to back obviously makes you think about different ways to make situations real for people and reminded me that I've been meaning to write something on this topic regarding Penny Woolcock's film 'Exodus' which I saw a couple of weeks ago at the Barbican. I already had a kind of 'connection' with the wider context of this project, as I (like many of London's art day trippers) had been in Margate for the burning of the giant Anthony Gormley figure made of rubbish. Despite 'enjoying' the day out with a dip in the sea and the amazing spectacle of the burning man plus thousands of people waving camera phones at him, I was really intrigued and somewhat cynical about how she might convincingly weave this event footage into the narrative of the film - of course in my miserable-artist capacity believing the fact that Art Angel had persuaded Anthony Gormley to 'design' (?) this prop to be an irritating and pointless bit of PR.
However, much as I'd have liked to have used this as a space to do a bit of blanket-public-Gormley bashing the way this particular aspect of the film worked surprised me. (Actually just as an aside if you want to really have a cringe-worthy Gormley meets public moment just look at the 'making of' doc put together to supposedly promote this part of the piece and shown on channel 4 despite it's terrible production values and content!) ...
ANYWAY this wasn't what was surprising or disappointing about 'Exodus', in fact this huge rubbish edifice and the whole of the 'rubbish' set created at Dreamland were part of the film that I loved. I also really admired the ambition of the piece & the fact that (as we are led to understand from all the publicity) the film was made almost entirely in Margate, with folk who live there, many of whom had never been involved in anything like it. Sadly though, this is also the big disappointment of the film. It's of course an epic and at times surreal tale & I could have taken all this in the Margate/contemp. setting if the acting had been better. I know many of the stars were first timers (and some of the 'discoveries' like the glue-bag kid were fantastic) but at times I just couldn't take the film seriously as their on-screen personalities were so unreal - ironic of course as they really were 'the people of Margate' whatever that means. Sadly I've only seen clips of the directors other films which also use non-actors in a mix of documentary-style fiction which (from the brief bits I have seen) were all too convincing ... but here it didn't work for me, and I spent the whole film unable to relax and go with it because of this.
A few days after this screening one of my new first year students presented a really interesting piece of work at their first crit - I don't as a rule write about student work but this is more about the approach than the content. Anyway, in order to convey a rather complex future scenario where two 'remote cleaner-robot operators' illegally trace each other and meet IRL as well as on the floors of the museum they nightly clean together via remotely controlled robots (I told you I spend time with robots for 'real') he had put together an extraordinary piece of video work to tell their story.
Utilising a piece of Korean (I believe) day time TV footage which he'd had managed to persuade someone to download for him, he had subtitled an actual exchange between a couple and a chat show host. As there was (surprisingly) no Korean speakers in our current group we still don't know what they were 'really' saying but he had managed to subtitle their exchange in such a way as to make them appear to be telling the story of how they met through these cleaner robots they both worked from a distance. I was amazed to see how convincing the exchange seemed - and to give the student his dues he had done a really good job of the subtitling and responding to the couple's body language - somehow because the exchange we were witnessing was both 'real' and familiar if linguistically impenetrable to its current audience, we completely bought into the story that he then over laid onto their actions with the subtitles. What we were watching wasn't , of course, entirely real but their actual natural body language managed to convince us that this future scenario REALLY could be very real. It's going to be a hard act to follow as the usual fare of students 'acting' in other students films (& believe me this can be far worse than the good people of Margate gave) is somehow not really going to cut the mustard now.
I'm currently traveling back from the 'reality' overload that is IDFA, the amazing documentary festival held each year in Amsterdam. Where else could I spend only 3 real-time days but what seemed like many months in contrasting 'realities' as diverse as the Antarctic (Herzog's 'Encounters at the end of the world') a plane fuselage submerged in snow (Gonzalo Arijon's extraordinary epic 'Stranded') a premature baby unit (the Lataster's 'If we Knew') and a dutch school Garden project (Roel van Dalen's 'Green Paradise') Ironically only this morning's offering 'Mechanical Love' took me any where near my own 'reality' and that was about Robots!
No wonder I'm tired.
Anyway watching all these docs. back to back obviously makes you think about different ways to make situations real for people and reminded me that I've been meaning to write something on this topic regarding Penny Woolcock's film 'Exodus' which I saw a couple of weeks ago at the Barbican. I already had a kind of 'connection' with the wider context of this project, as I (like many of London's art day trippers) had been in Margate for the burning of the giant Anthony Gormley figure made of rubbish. Despite 'enjoying' the day out with a dip in the sea and the amazing spectacle of the burning man plus thousands of people waving camera phones at him, I was really intrigued and somewhat cynical about how she might convincingly weave this event footage into the narrative of the film - of course in my miserable-artist capacity believing the fact that Art Angel had persuaded Anthony Gormley to 'design' (?) this prop to be an irritating and pointless bit of PR.However, much as I'd have liked to have used this as a space to do a bit of blanket-public-Gormley bashing the way this particular aspect of the film worked surprised me. (Actually just as an aside if you want to really have a cringe-worthy Gormley meets public moment just look at the 'making of' doc put together to supposedly promote this part of the piece and shown on channel 4 despite it's terrible production values and content!) ...
ANYWAY this wasn't what was surprising or disappointing about 'Exodus', in fact this huge rubbish edifice and the whole of the 'rubbish' set created at Dreamland were part of the film that I loved. I also really admired the ambition of the piece & the fact that (as we are led to understand from all the publicity) the film was made almost entirely in Margate, with folk who live there, many of whom had never been involved in anything like it. Sadly though, this is also the big disappointment of the film. It's of course an epic and at times surreal tale & I could have taken all this in the Margate/contemp. setting if the acting had been better. I know many of the stars were first timers (and some of the 'discoveries' like the glue-bag kid were fantastic) but at times I just couldn't take the film seriously as their on-screen personalities were so unreal - ironic of course as they really were 'the people of Margate' whatever that means. Sadly I've only seen clips of the directors other films which also use non-actors in a mix of documentary-style fiction which (from the brief bits I have seen) were all too convincing ... but here it didn't work for me, and I spent the whole film unable to relax and go with it because of this.
A few days after this screening one of my new first year students presented a really interesting piece of work at their first crit - I don't as a rule write about student work but this is more about the approach than the content. Anyway, in order to convey a rather complex future scenario where two 'remote cleaner-robot operators' illegally trace each other and meet IRL as well as on the floors of the museum they nightly clean together via remotely controlled robots (I told you I spend time with robots for 'real') he had put together an extraordinary piece of video work to tell their story.
Utilising a piece of Korean (I believe) day time TV footage which he'd had managed to persuade someone to download for him, he had subtitled an actual exchange between a couple and a chat show host. As there was (surprisingly) no Korean speakers in our current group we still don't know what they were 'really' saying but he had managed to subtitle their exchange in such a way as to make them appear to be telling the story of how they met through these cleaner robots they both worked from a distance. I was amazed to see how convincing the exchange seemed - and to give the student his dues he had done a really good job of the subtitling and responding to the couple's body language - somehow because the exchange we were witnessing was both 'real' and familiar if linguistically impenetrable to its current audience, we completely bought into the story that he then over laid onto their actions with the subtitles. What we were watching wasn't , of course, entirely real but their actual natural body language managed to convince us that this future scenario REALLY could be very real. It's going to be a hard act to follow as the usual fare of students 'acting' in other students films (& believe me this can be far worse than the good people of Margate gave) is somehow not really going to cut the mustard now.
Labels: documentary, Exodus, film, IDFA, reality
posted by Nina at 9:08 PM
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