More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
3 April
I am taking this space to start respond to various questions posed in a comment on Epiphany : my visit to Tate Britain II
I have now watched Turner Prize Video artist Elizabeth Price wins and BALTIC Bites - Elizabeth Price, and they should inform my answers
(1) I am unfamiliar with Beckett. If I were to listen to Words and Music, or watch Quad, what influences would be mirrored by Price?
(2) Did it not feel odd to spend so much time on the recreation with the burning furniture?
I can't say that it did.
After all, how do you convey the notion, the terror, of a fire without showing it, and the whole work is only around 20 minutes.
I don't even think that it could be mistaken for a re-creation. At that time, I believe less had been appreciated about how different substances in furniture burn, and how a source of fire might ignite other items.
I took the footage used by Price to be from filmed combustion tests, where the nature and spread of fire was being analysed. I have already commented on the use of two panes : for me, Price located, in this material, the bewitching, hypnotic quality of fire, as against, elsewhere, the destructive one.
(3) With Choir and with the information on the church architecture interspersed, did the fire seem like a sacrament?
(4) The description of the parcloses reinforced an absent focus on the parishioners. How did the film make you feel?
I take it that these belong together.
I watched the film twice through in succession, and therefore knew how CHOIR related to the other two parts of the film the second time.
In my vocabulary, a parclose is merely what I would call a rood-screen or, in other church traditions, an iconostasis (although, in that case, not serving to separate the choir from the rest of the church, but designating, by opaque panelling decorated by holy images, a place limited to the priest).
I am not sure how describing any of the church architecture stressed an absence of parishioners, since there was no one in this part of the film (unlike the distorted moving dancers / singers of the second part, into which the clicks, beats and handclaps drew us).
As I realized that the second section was moving towards giving detail of a fire in which people had been trapped and died, I felt uneasy. We did not see them. We saw the aftermath, and heard from those who had been outside. They were traceless, numberless dead.
They could have been trapped in the choir of a church, and, with no way out (except, perhaps, smashing the windows and climbing out), burnt to death.
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Showing posts with label CHOIR. Show all posts
Showing posts with label CHOIR. Show all posts
Wednesday, 3 April 2013
Thursday, 24 January 2013
Epiphany : my visit to Tate Britain II
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
16 January
This posting continues from a survey of Elizabeth Price's place amongst the nominees for The Turner Prize 2012
As a starting-point (although it was the last of a triptych of films, shown virtually seamlessly), Elizabeth Price took material relating to a fire at Woolworths in Central Manchester (in 1979), and then built up her own vision to prepare for coming to narrate the events, sometimes using reporting speech, sometimes – as the film developed – giving us directly what seemed to be original audio.
Price’s work did so many things that were admirable – the following are in no particular order, and not an exhaustive list :
* Using different audio techniques, from a single beat that emphasized a visual (or a change of visual)* to processed sound
* Mixing styles of depiction, with, when showing stills, often a stereoscopic presentation (later, with footage of burning, this technique had a different effect)
* Risking an authoritative description of church architecture, which might have felt patronizing, and softening it by showing (apparent) source-material for the propositions argued for
* Not holding back from continuing the imagery from the second, dance-movement-related film, into the beginning of the third, when those who seemed to have been contemporary eye-witnesses to the fire from the exterior were saying what they had seen
* Partly in line with the lecture feel of (the opening of) the first film, using graphic design to show, in three dimensions, the feature being described, and integrating it with the appearance of text, and using coloured key-words
* A sure touch in matching the visuals to the audio, particularly in the central film, and in the transition to it, with the first suggestion that, whereas what has gone before has not been untruthful, it has shown material whose tone and style are being subverted
* Moving into the second film, Price blurs what has been precise and clear in giving detail about parcloses and misericords**, giving us sometimes tantalizing moving fragments of dancers or singers, and no longer allowing us the luxury of clearly reading the text that she employs
* This approach, coupled with the slightly crazy message about a definite movement of the right wrist, is all part of signalling that what went before was for a purpose, and that purpose is no longer served by the adjuncts of the lecture theatre (albeit at the behest of a lecturer disinclined to dwell too long on some feature or explanation)
* In the third film, after the initial eye-witness comments, it promptly moved to another level, with on-screen lettering to label the event, and shots of fire-fighters standing down their equipment (including a paced shot of a fireman winding up a compressed fire-hose)
* The stereoscopic device returned to pair slightly non-synchronized clips of flames, with the effect that the comparison between the right-hand (advanced) and left-hand (normal) images showed the change in the effect of the combustion over time, and hence intensified one’s appreciation of the destructiveness of the process of burning
Afterwards, seeing the video- and sound-editing software, on an Apple platform, that Price runs***, I found it evident that she manipulates her material with a skill that makes it look like ease.
The first film in the present work (from 2011 ?) appears to be one on which Price has since built. As the mini-feature also revealed, she says it can take her one or two years of continuing to work even on a video that she has exhibited (she tended to refer to works as ‘videos’) before she considers it finished, so I imagine it likely, if I am right, that the film Choir took a yet different one again when it was envisaged within a larger whole.
At some point, the submerged rhyme choir / fire that underlies the triptych must have occurred to Price, although it need by no means have been the first thing that, for her, linked the Woolworths event and the earlier film. That rhyme catches one up, because, if one knows that the work’s full title is The Woolworths Choir of 1979, the expectation is that a choir of real singers fits in somewhere, and so it catches one up****.
Whatever Price’s starting-point for transmuting CHOIR to be the first of three parts, it was clearly, at heart, the sense of confinement of the furniture store at Woolworths, a rectangular enclosure with similarities to the ecclesiastical space that has become the choir of a church or cathedral, which was the place where the fire started. No greater suggestion of similarity than that is made, save by the title, and Price eschews any comparison between the living physical fire that we see, as already described, in the clips that she has used.
This is Price’s greatest strength as an artist, save only to the skill with which she edits and manipulates her material resources, seen and heard : that she knows when too little is enough so that the work, speaking in its own terms, does so with her voice and stamp of authority.
Questions on Epiphany II via a comment
End-notes
* I detected influences that may have been assimilated, ranging from Beckettt’s radio plays with a score, such as Words and Music, to his work for t.v., Quad Parts I and II, to the films of John Smith.
** Price did not deviate into giving too much detail here (just as she could have done, if she had wanted to explain the term rood-screen).
*** In the mini-feature, which each of the nominees had.
**** Not, one imagines, gruesomely by the victims’ screams, though we learn that cups were being thrown down into the street (perhaps to draw attention to a plight that was being thought ignored).
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
16 January
This posting continues from a survey of Elizabeth Price's place amongst the nominees for The Turner Prize 2012
As a starting-point (although it was the last of a triptych of films, shown virtually seamlessly), Elizabeth Price took material relating to a fire at Woolworths in Central Manchester (in 1979), and then built up her own vision to prepare for coming to narrate the events, sometimes using reporting speech, sometimes – as the film developed – giving us directly what seemed to be original audio.
Price’s work did so many things that were admirable – the following are in no particular order, and not an exhaustive list :
* Using different audio techniques, from a single beat that emphasized a visual (or a change of visual)* to processed sound
* Mixing styles of depiction, with, when showing stills, often a stereoscopic presentation (later, with footage of burning, this technique had a different effect)
* Risking an authoritative description of church architecture, which might have felt patronizing, and softening it by showing (apparent) source-material for the propositions argued for
* Not holding back from continuing the imagery from the second, dance-movement-related film, into the beginning of the third, when those who seemed to have been contemporary eye-witnesses to the fire from the exterior were saying what they had seen
* Partly in line with the lecture feel of (the opening of) the first film, using graphic design to show, in three dimensions, the feature being described, and integrating it with the appearance of text, and using coloured key-words
* A sure touch in matching the visuals to the audio, particularly in the central film, and in the transition to it, with the first suggestion that, whereas what has gone before has not been untruthful, it has shown material whose tone and style are being subverted
* Moving into the second film, Price blurs what has been precise and clear in giving detail about parcloses and misericords**, giving us sometimes tantalizing moving fragments of dancers or singers, and no longer allowing us the luxury of clearly reading the text that she employs
* This approach, coupled with the slightly crazy message about a definite movement of the right wrist, is all part of signalling that what went before was for a purpose, and that purpose is no longer served by the adjuncts of the lecture theatre (albeit at the behest of a lecturer disinclined to dwell too long on some feature or explanation)
* In the third film, after the initial eye-witness comments, it promptly moved to another level, with on-screen lettering to label the event, and shots of fire-fighters standing down their equipment (including a paced shot of a fireman winding up a compressed fire-hose)
* The stereoscopic device returned to pair slightly non-synchronized clips of flames, with the effect that the comparison between the right-hand (advanced) and left-hand (normal) images showed the change in the effect of the combustion over time, and hence intensified one’s appreciation of the destructiveness of the process of burning
Afterwards, seeing the video- and sound-editing software, on an Apple platform, that Price runs***, I found it evident that she manipulates her material with a skill that makes it look like ease.
The first film in the present work (from 2011 ?) appears to be one on which Price has since built. As the mini-feature also revealed, she says it can take her one or two years of continuing to work even on a video that she has exhibited (she tended to refer to works as ‘videos’) before she considers it finished, so I imagine it likely, if I am right, that the film Choir took a yet different one again when it was envisaged within a larger whole.
At some point, the submerged rhyme choir / fire that underlies the triptych must have occurred to Price, although it need by no means have been the first thing that, for her, linked the Woolworths event and the earlier film. That rhyme catches one up, because, if one knows that the work’s full title is The Woolworths Choir of 1979, the expectation is that a choir of real singers fits in somewhere, and so it catches one up****.
Whatever Price’s starting-point for transmuting CHOIR to be the first of three parts, it was clearly, at heart, the sense of confinement of the furniture store at Woolworths, a rectangular enclosure with similarities to the ecclesiastical space that has become the choir of a church or cathedral, which was the place where the fire started. No greater suggestion of similarity than that is made, save by the title, and Price eschews any comparison between the living physical fire that we see, as already described, in the clips that she has used.
This is Price’s greatest strength as an artist, save only to the skill with which she edits and manipulates her material resources, seen and heard : that she knows when too little is enough so that the work, speaking in its own terms, does so with her voice and stamp of authority.
Questions on Epiphany II via a comment
End-notes
* I detected influences that may have been assimilated, ranging from Beckettt’s radio plays with a score, such as Words and Music, to his work for t.v., Quad Parts I and II, to the films of John Smith.
** Price did not deviate into giving too much detail here (just as she could have done, if she had wanted to explain the term rood-screen).
*** In the mini-feature, which each of the nominees had.
**** Not, one imagines, gruesomely by the victims’ screams, though we learn that cups were being thrown down into the street (perhaps to draw attention to a plight that was being thought ignored).
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