Film Rules and Principles

 

Spending quiet time in nature has been a vital part of my life for as long as I can remember.  When I discovered dance and the experiential study of the body, I found something similar to what I experienced in quiet time in nature… a kind of rejuvenation through releasing of subtle tensions, an opening up of the senses, and a revitalized sense of connection to the world I live in.  In the late 90s, through the Dancing Wilderness Project, I started to facilitate gatherings of body-based artists in wilderness areas to explore this connection.

An intent of these films (Accidental Tourists and Presence and Pipelines) is to create a film that acts on the viewer’s body to evoke a sense the kinds of spacious mental, emotional, and sensory states that potentially arise in simple, relaxed experience of nature and places less marked by human presence. While we must understand that human industry and activity affects everything on the planet and exists in relationship with all of the biological and physical systems of the planet and that it is a certain kind of western privileged construct, ‘untouched nature’, we can not deny upon witnessing of and being in these places less marked by the human that there is something very special to the human psyche about natural places less dominated by human industry. While each such environment and place has its idiosyncratic affects on our minds and bodies and evokes different metaphors, myths and memories, there is also something in common that often arises, especially when we let go of both internal and external chatter… a spaciousness of sensory awareness, a relaxing of the breath.

A few years ago, I had the chance to see some films at the Wild And Scenic Film Festival and was struck by what felt like a dominant reference point for a lot of these films, the adventure film, full of death defying moments and nature at its harshest, accompanied by dramatic voice-overs and evocative music tracks. While I can understand the draw of this genre, it was not the experience that I seek, so I wanted to create something else:  the ‘anti-adventure film. The goal is to evoke an embodied sense of the quality of just ‘being there’, the simple pleasure of just looking out over a lake, lying back on a rock in the sun, hearing the wind in the trees, or feeling the rain.

These films are postdramatic, non-narrative video collages of somatic explorations and sensory meditations intended, both through content and process, to evoke the potential opening up of the senses that can occur with time in nature.  The simple rules of filming and editing are intended to minimize manipulation and create space for audience agency in experience of the images.

The films are long collages of simple, unhurried images of bodies in nature sensing and experiencing.  They aim to create an environment where we can feel ourselves in the place through our very human process of empathic projection and by evoking our own memories of such experiences with, to borrow a phrase from David Abrahams, the ‘more than human’. To do this, the film follows a number of simple filming and editing rules meant to minimize the manipulations of film and create a less mediated experience of the recorded  event.

On another level, the films serve to act as models for a kind of accessible art-making.  Inspired by the film rules of Dogma films (deep bow to Lars Von Trier…), these films follow further restrictions that put them in a category of art making that is more accessible than even many independent films which become heavily mediated by money and economy.  These films join a movement of art-making that specifically de-privileges money, creating a less mediated and more personal community of art making.

The Restrictions…

  1. Simple Action: the actions of actor/dancers in the film are all very simple sensory meditations, taking in the environment, interacting in very simple ways with the environment to explore what is seen, felt, heard in relationship to the land.  While all are trained dance performers, the physical actions will be simple enough that all might relate to what they see in the film.
  2. No Acting:  We will not be trying to pretend to experiences, not trying to portray experiences.  We intend simply to  have the experiences and allow the camera to capture us as we are in the experience.
  3. No Words:  because the presence of spoken words facilitates a consciousness state different from that which can arise in prolonged  time without words, there will be no words spoken in the film.
  4. Simple Camera: All shots will be simple fixed perspective shots.  No zooming in or out, no panning.  The intention is to give a simple visual perspective on the action that audience members might feel they could really have, as opposed to the physically impossible perspectives that a camera can allow.
  5. Calm editing:  all clips will be at least 20 seconds long, time enough to settle into the perspective.  There will be no startling jump cuts, only slow cross fades, so that the editing does not startle the viewer.
  6. No added sound: the only sounds of the film will be sounds actually occurring during the filming.  No added music, no voice-overs.

I hope that you will be able to come and judge for yourself the results of the experiment.  Check out the trailer for Accidental Tourists, come see a screening of the film, and definitely come check out our new film Presence and Pipelines when it premiers in early 2015.