Different perceptions of reality
Alan and Yvette changed my perspective on reality.
Two film excerpts from my film 'illimited', 2010 (46min) to get an idea of my previous documentary films.
Yvette:
Alan:
During the process of making 'illimited', I was mainly focussed on how to recreate their reality. I did this by reviewing sequences with them that I made and discussing with them if this was similar to their experiences. For example I would ask Yvette (from the first fragment) from which perspective she saw herself swimming when she connected to another body. All this information was translated in the visual approach to come as close as possible to a visual reconstruction of their perception, but it left little room for the imagination of the spectator.
Last year I started stripping more and more cinematic elements from a scene. This year I worked on a commissioned film of one hour about a hospital and I used this film as a testcase to see what the minimum is for a spectator to connect emotionally to a scene:
I realise it is probably one of the last things you would expect in an artistic master, because of the traditional approach of using a 'talking head'. Coming from an Art Academy, I would've found this horrendous and not cinematic a few years ago. But for me it was a very valuable experiment. Because in stead of creating the image that I wanted the spectator to see, it leaves more space for the spectator to imagine themselves.
This idea of testing the basic elements you need and how to use them best so the spectator can connect to this 'other' perception is a method of experimenting that gives a lot of insight for me and something I want to pursue in the lab further.
