My Current Work, pt. 1

THE DRIFT

Production History
During a visit to Argentina in early 2007 I had the opportunity to produce some self-funded and self-motivated videos with fellow Canadian video artist Ruben Guzman. Our travels took us to the town of Santa Catalina, population 200, high atop the Andean Plateau along the Argentina/Boliva border. I concocted videos that were modest in scale and quick to realize. Two videos are now forming: Vanishing Point and The Drift. It is for The Drift I comment upon here.

Overview

An excerpt from Carlo Levi sharpens the focus of my video:

If a straight line is the shortest distance between two fated and inevitable points, digressions will lengthen it; and if these digressions become so complex, so tangled and tortuous, who knows–perhaps death may not find us, perhaps time will lose its way, and perhaps we ourselves can remain concealed in our shifting hiding places.”¹

The Drift is an experimental venture with cinematographic language to daze time. The goal of my video is to create an encyclopedic chronicle of a small passage of time in the lives of three Kolla (pre-Inca) children by extending that passage with multiplication, repetition, and digression. It is an attempt to use cinematographic form to simulate photographic form. It is an attempt to use motion to simulate stillness.

The narrative action in the video is simple: Three children walk along the bank of a turbulent stream. A bell sounds from a great distance. The children comment on the progression and range of the bell’s report. The children disappear; massive cumulonimbus clouds signal an approaching storm. The children speak these lines:

First Child: “There’s the bell.”*
Second Child: “It’s the first bell.”
First Child: “Maybe it isn’t the first, maybe we didn’t hear the other one, before…”
Second Child: “We would have heard it, same as this one.”
Third Child: “We weren’t as near before.”
Second Child: “We still aren’t near.”
First Child: “There’s the bell.”

It is my intention to make a video that is narratively slight and thematically ambiguous; nevertheless, the minimal action drapes a spectre of death over the children while the bell whispers redemption. Or perhaps the bell does not offer refuge at all. Perhaps, after all, the bell merely calls the flock to Mass, or warns of an approaching storm. The meaning could be literal or symbolic–I leave it for the viewer to choose.

Concepts
I’ll outline some of the key ideas I had during the production of this video which I plan to develop during the post-production:

(1) To experiment with editing to create the sensation of slow time. The image edit for this video is anticipated to be very complex, in deliberate contrast to the simple action. During production I videotaped the children and wildlife repeating the same actions over and over again, with different lenses and perspectives, in order to create a simple rendering of a small passage of time with hundreds of image fragments.
With a bounty of fragments I am able to slow the action down, paralyzing time with minute repetitions and extended multiplications. The editing ratio is about 60:1 (sixty minutes of camera footage for every single minute of edited video). I wish to slow down the sensation of time passing without the use of optical techniques like slow-motion or freeze frames; the sensation will be constructed from editing only.
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(2) To experiment with non-narrative forms as a means to encourage participation from the viewer. I am interested in storytelling that moves away from classical dependency on narrative dramatics, specifically “cause and effect” dynamics. Formal dramatics–the interplay of order and disorder–found in lyric poetry, for instance, are better suited to the “single dramatized moment” (using highly concentrated ordering patterns to describe a catastrophe, for example).

In The Drift, the action focuses on three children wandering along a riverbank while talking about their location in relation to a distant bell. In a classical, Western sense, this is not much of a narrative. At most, it would be regarded as a fragment of a story. However, in non-Western forms like Chinese and Japanese poetry, which is all lyrical, this image would be considered whole. Although the likeness is crude, in broad strokes the video could be thought of as a kind of audiovisual haiku.

The form encourages the viewer to take an active role in the experience, from playing with symbols to responding to audiovisual stimuli in the form of rhythm, colour, movement, etc.

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(3) To experiment with editing to create formal dramatics via the interplay of image and sound. I recorded sound and image separately for this project. There will not be one instance of true sync sound; image and sound were recorded separately. Instead I captured all sounds on an audio recorder on different occasions at the same location. Even the words spoken by the children were recorded with different kids. I want to create a landscape of images and sounds that can only exist on-screen. The form itself is dramatic, that being the interplay between order and disorder. It is the dramatic interplay of image and sound.

Viewers have a well-developed sense for recognizing harmony between eye and ear. When that harmony is even slightly upset (image and sound barely out-of-sync; the “wrong” sound for the image; etc.), the viewer becomes aware of that discord. I plan to keep the sound design fairly realistic in the beginning, only to move sound and image into further discord as the piece progresses. Sound and image drift apart, but not necessarily unnaturally: consider a distant flash of lightning and the clap of thunder that follows several seconds later.

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(4) To experiment with blurring the division between traditional foreground and background elements. Most narrative films and videos are photographed and assembled to serve the emotion and plot of a story. The location is relegated to the backdrop, like a stage. I wanted to make location a character in the video by bringing the landscape elements into the foreground.
I chose to make the video in a single location where I could videotape details to an exacting degree: desert flowers, bees, grasses, mud, geese, water currents, pebbles, shale, grasshoppers, crickets, clouds, reflections, sparrows, etc. It was conceptually crucial to collect all audio and visual materials at one single location as to be able to build a stimulating, hyperreal audiovisual continuity in the editing process. Formal dramatics are created from rapid edits within a continuous environment.

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(5) To compose a small piece of electronic music to accompany part of the video.
I will keep it simple, with one instrument repeating a four-note pattern while a second instrument repeats a seven-note pattern. The music will shift in and out of harmony, which is conceptually consistent with the rest of the video.

About The Title

The word “drift” has a raft of meanings, including “meaning”. I’ll outline some of the other definitions in relation to elements in my video: drifting river; drifting clouds; a drift of earth, like a riverbank or cliff; drifting snow; drifting, as in movement without destination; sound and image elements drifting out of sync; musical notes drifting in and out of harmony.

©Michael Mills 2007

*Dialogue taken from “The Shore”, a short story by the late great Alain Robbe-Grillet. Used with kind permission.