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• Catherine Taylor 3 months ago
  
  Hey Peter,
  
  Actually, I gave it five stars because I did like it! It was unpredictable, in a good way, which Shooting People films rarely are. Too often they are examples of perfectly well formed narrative short films which are ultimately exactly like thousands of others. Nothing interesting about them. I didn't give you five stars because of this, though, I think the overall oddness of your film just appealed to me. Also, the longer I work in this industry, the more fair Shooting People seems by comparison- and I don't even mean a personal grudge, because I'm quite good at going "you don't like my work, that's cool" but I do have a tendency to get annoyed when I see people with talent being ignore for people who make mundane shit. I'm not going to share an exact example of this, I'll be here forever :-)
  
  Now the music video thing is really really just my opinion. It is something that I sort of "forgive/make exception for/enjoy despite itself and only with" with Kenneth Anger. I especially enjoy the looping in Rabbit Moon, to give a materialist effect. I don't think Anger's treatment of music is "music video" partially because he generally predates music video, and partially because you always get a sense that the music is being played via an external source- perhaps one of the characters in his films- because he is essentially recording a recording (record) rather than adding a sound track. I also sort of feel instinctively that we do sort of have to acknowledge technology, the advancements- the materialism of digital media- and that if we're doing something that was common practice in film rather than digital, we're being retro. So I think "what's the purpose of being retro?". I'm not even saying I'm right, I'm just really debating with you. Also, your film never made me think "how dare you use Scott Walker!!!", instead it actually made me want you to slash up the Scott Walker track a bit, which is unusual for me. I guess I felt like I wanted a bit of Stan Brakhage sound to go along with my Anger when I watched your film :-), just to get the tactile nature of the threads.
  
  And I do feel like everytime we frame a shot we manipulate the viewer, but sometimes it feels like we're leading them somewhere special, and sometimes it feels like we're taking a short cut by using a few cheap tricks to cut effort out of the journey. I'm not saying I never do it, I'm not saying a lot of the work I love never does it- it's just sometimes you get a feeling that a film is cheating itself a little bit, like it has potential to be more effective if it's more subtle. That again is completely just my opinion, but I think I wondered if you felt like there were bits that you couldn't let stand for themselves and needed a little push and I think generally the edit stands for itself without the sound. I guess contradictorily I'm saying that simultaneously the music adds nothing to the actual film and the music emotionally manipulates the viewer, so perhaps I'm saying that I feel the music takes away from the film. I could of course be completely wrong and I'm probably prejudiced. Also watching it online affects that. I imagine if I was watching it in a huge space how much cooler it would be perhaps with mute silence than the music. But I'm merely speculating.
  
  I suppose with Koyaanisqatsi I feel like it's more of a collaboration, and I do feel elements of the sound motivating the visuals and vice versa, in a dialectic, rather than one way relationship. Perhaps knowing that both elements are essentially found elements, rather than constructed makes the elements more interesting, but I guess I feel like the way you've carefully mined the image for the best footage makes me interested in hearing what it would be like if you'd cut up and mined the track in the same way. Or perhaps it's just the formalist in me wanting the experimentation and construction to balance. And there's absolutely no reason why they should have to, just my personal feeling when I watch the film is that I want them to. Which at the very least, is clearly making me question why I am so OCD about balance :-)
  
  I was being a bit flippant about the slow motion- I am actually doing way too much slow motion work myself at the moment, so I used it as an example of how it can be. I love the way you've manipulated the footage, in the good way of manipulation. I do get sick of After Effects- in the way that the standard effects are often applied, not in the way that there's some amazing creative work being made. And the slow motion thing is a similar criticism- I don't like effects when they are applied without thought, simply because the maker thinks "i need to do this, this is the conventional way of doing it, so I'll do it like this", which is absolutely not a criticism I'm making about your film in any sense other than the music. I love your visual effects. They're interesting, captivating, evocative, clever and make worlds and meanings within worlds and meanings. I think they're perfect. I suppose what I want is a reflection in the sound, of that kind of craftsmanship. Which is again, purely my humble (honestly, it is!) opinion.
  
  Personally I don't have a problem with the vaginal imagery. No, that's not true, I really enjoyed it :-) I think the issue of modesty is an interesting one, especially now knowing that it's a filmed performance/found footage. Maybe you could actually get away with being more explicit, maybe that's why it feels as though the filmmaker is sitting on the fence- not in the audience watching the spectacle, and latching on to those moments, and not on the stage in the performance. And actually, that's a very interesting place to be, we don't get that feeling very often. Maybe in that sense it's possible to feel that the filmmaker has become the camera, rather than the objectifier, object, subject or maker. Very interesting.
  
  I hope you didn't think I meant that I thought you should change or stop or anything! Quite the contrary, I meant I'm interested to see more. I hope my obnoxious criticism is encouraging- personally if someone says to me "that's lovely, and offers nothing more" I suspect they mean I should give up now, whereas if they get annoyed at something they believe in my ability to do better. Perverse perhaps, but in my experience when people say my work is great but I'm not getting commissions or exhibitions there's something wrong. If someone tears me apart, I feel like they'll commission me if I sort out the issues. Not that I'm at all saying that's what's going on here, I was just a bit shocked when you mentioned that you mean to continue- I really hope that should go without saying! I guess what I've done is given the reverse of the backhanded compliment- I think I may have attempted the backhanded insult, with a nice core once you examine it.
  
  Best,
  
  Cat
  
  
  
  
• Peter Hastie (Filmmaker!) 3 months ago
  
  Hi Catherine
  
  Well, it is certainly nice to see some words in response to this film. I get the feeling that you may have been motivated more by my criticism of the fairness of the competition than your innate interest in my film, so I'm not quite sure you ought to have awarded it five stars given your reservations. I appreciate all of these things are relative, however, so I am still very glad for your input, and I'd be happy to explain a few things since you do seem to have an active interest in these matters.
  
  First of all the film no doubt sits oddly because it is indeed odd. I wanted to work with footage which I had no input in making, and was given five or six DV tapes of an art installation called Threads, which indeed had feminist undertones, although most of the footage was in visual terms fairly flat (aside from the endless threads). I found the girl who features most prominently in the film to be by far the most natural on camera and plotted "moods" around the best footage I could extract of her (I have uploaded the raw footage that forms the core of the film here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IqOmycVOMmM). I then used Scott Walker's track as a general guideline to the visuals.
  
  So, yes, you could call it a music video since it features only a single musical track, but then you'd have to call Koyaanisqatsi, most of Kenneth Anger's work and a myriad other seminal experimental films "music videos" too. Repetition of images is a staple of music videos as the chorus is to a song, so in that light, and since I only used Walker's music for occasional cues, I do not think it is viable to call it a music video.
  
  I am acutely aware that conventional editing is a manipulative tool, but so is a great deal of avant-garde practice. I am not committed to either, but thought better of using dissonance in this case since I wanted to the film to be a (big screen) experience first and foremost. As for manipulating imagery and time being "cheap", I might ask you isn't it cheap to only use real-time footage when you have the means to utilise so much more at your fingertips? Slow motion, and slow-ness in general lies at the heart of most poetic cinema, so I hope you can learn to undo your bias against it (it is also practical when certain shots don't last long enough).
  
  Likewise, since I had no input as regards the content of the footage itself, I can't agree that my focusing on the girl throughout could be conceived as voyeuristic. I did indeed evoke vaginal imagery, but this forms part of the thematic tapestry that the film attempts to illustrate (if you look at the raw footage cited above, you can see where I edited around certain parts purely for the sake of the girl's modesty).
  
  The film is clearly open to interpretation, so you are bound to see elements that I myself might not, yet I doubt any viewer of the film - with a background knowledge of film and art or not - would not at least occasionally consider that the majority of the visuals are subjective interpretations of what the objective subject is experiencing. So in concrete terms the film is an experimental narrative.
  
  I'll not bore you with a sequence by sequence outline, but notions of birth, death and spiritual rebirth are all present, and they do work towards a whole. The film is by no means perfect as I had to segue in some images that didn't quite fit at points, but since, at the time, I had no roadmap to even making a film like this, I am able to forgive myself and trust I can learn from my mistakes.
  
  There are two other aspects which I think are worth mentioning, namely that the film itself could be seen as a representation of (good) sex - I'll say no more about that - and also it is important to understand that I am not a special effects wizard (I don't know After Effects), but I wanted to highlight the fundamental power of classical film language in a digital context, as I think there is a high road to be found in teasing out the best elements of both. So in a sense the film is also a homage to the phantasmagoria of cinema.
  
  Good or bad I mean to continue, and to do that I need to drum up as much attention as and where I can. If I think a playing field in which I might prosper, however slightly, is biased towards budgeted, narrative films, I will do everything in my power to ensure it is fair, both for myself and the sake of others like me. If I didn't think I had anything to offer, I wouldn't stick my neck out and I remain troubled that people have so little to say about almost everything I do - despite visible reactions - and will continue to fight my own corner out of necessity. If I sound vacuous at times, you can imagine why, and I ask your forgiveness.
  
  Thank you sincerely for your comments. I hope some of what I have said makes you see the film in a different light.
  
  Peter
  
• Catherine Taylor 3 months ago
  
  Hello! I read your shooting people post, so I thought I'd check out your film. If I give you five stars can I give you my opinion? No? Well I'm going to anyway.
  
  To me the film sits oddly. Which is not necessarily a bad thing. It feels like a music video, it feels like the film, is very much led by the music. Also it feels very voyeuristic (again like a music video) because none of the shots show us the woman's perspective, and we're always watching her- we never hear what she hears, we never see what she sees, we never feel inside the cocoon with her. If this is what's intended, nice one, but it does tend to objectify the performer, like a model in a fashion video, or in a music video. And her make up makes me think maybe that's what's intended, but I'm not sure. It's certainly a portrait, not a self portrait (like Maya Deren), which isn't problematic in itself, just how it feels.
  
  The part where we shift into the geometric mirror abstraction made me think, aha! he's doing this on purpose, because it is very Georgia O'Keefe-meets-strip club in its obvious vaginal imagery, and it seems now it's definitely about making the woman a spectacle, and I think to myself, nicely done, this is a subtle and elegant way of suggesting that even performance art is still about objectifying women, for all its subversive intent. So, if that's the point of the film, then I love it and it's ace. By the way, I'm very rarely accused of being a feminist, this isn't an issue that occurs to me a lot, it just really stood out here.
  
  I still feel that relying on music to create an emotional journey, and cutting the film to the music (which is how this feels, even if it's not been cut like that) is a cheap trick narrative cinema uses to emotionally manipulate the viewer, and with a more "experimental" piece I don't like being insulted like that. I want to find the emotion in the performance, not have it thrust onto it by someone else's music. It's like making the image black and white and slow motion to make things seem more emotional- it's cheap.
  
  I actually suspect if you didn't have any music, or had brief passages of music with sound design this would be a stronger and less confusing piece. Certainly, it would be braver and you'd be standing by your imagery and character, and the viewer would feel more inside the performance than watching a music video that goes on for too long. You spent a lot of time and effort crafting the visuals, and it shows, but it feels like you didn't bother with sound, for the most part it's just playing a track. And there's so much scope for sound with a piece like this!
  
  You possibly can't tell that I actually did like it and found it interesting. But I wouldn't bother to write if I didn't think it was worthwhile, and I'd love to hear about your choices and your "you just don't get it at all, do you?" defences. But I will certainly be giving you 5 stars, wishing you luck, and watching your next one!
  
  
  
• Joe McArdle 4 months ago
  
  Very interesting & inspiring
  
• David Graham Scott 4 months ago
  
  Experimental genius!
  

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