i. Body
5:51
Body is the first chapter of Odes (see ii.Outside, iii.Work, iv.Time). I shot it in 1 day, then spent weeks recording and rerecording over 200 foleys :0
Materials: My friend Zoe. Bolex H16. Kodak VISION3 500T color negative film (7219). Lights. Tripod. Tripod roller. Various cardioid and shotgun microphones.
Note:
Body drew thematic and aesthetic inspiration from Maya Deren’s relationships between the body and camera movement and Chantal Ackerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975). The protagonist's actions are carefully choreographed with the camera motion, but depict ordinary images because I want the viewer to believe they are peering into an intimate routine that would happen with or without the camera, which is aided by the “diegetic” audio. Similar to Jeanne Dielman, I hope the audience feels bored yet entranced while watching the woman’s motions. This chapter, and a lot of Odes, is inspired by Ackerman’s idea of the hierarchy of images. She claims that cinema considers everyday images, like women doing labor in the home, uninteresting and are therefore not worthy of capturing on film, which reinforces how we conceptualize what’s valuable in our lives. I want this chapter to depict the beauty of the lowest level of the hierarchy and implicitly argue for its value by using an expensive medium. By reproducing banal content through highly controlled and visible production methods, I also want Body to highlight the tension between reality and artifice that’s inherently present in cinema.
Note on Odes:
Odes is a collection of five experimental shorts made on video and film about the everyday. The goals of Odes are two-fold: to explore the fundamental components of cinema that are unique to it as an art form and to use those attributes to create distinctly cinematic experiences of everyday sights and sounds. Odes is fundamentally interested in different cinematic representations of reality and uses recreation and documentary modes of production to explore this. I believe cinema cannot convey “truth” or “reality” without meta-analysis of its limits and conventions that are apparent to the viewer in the final product. Every chapter of Odes practices this idea differently by drawing attention to mediums, different production methods, and arranging images and sounds unconventionally.