Forms of Repitition

I initially set out to make a work that dealt with the close-up, playing with sound, and tied in lyrical elements. I wasn’t sure how this was going to work out and quickly discovered that it was not my initial preconceptions and ideas that were going to drive the film, but the raw material I was able to record with the camera. I shot all this while walking around campus taking in the sights and the sounds and thinking to myself, “oh, that might be interesting.” And this film is what grew out of all of this as well as all the ideas discussed throughout the course.

There are a lot of things to discuss here so I will try to be brief and not bore you. This film takes a sequence of shots and repeats them 4 times, with different sounds each time. The sound all comes from things I shot, and I wonder if the audience will connect them to the image they belong to when they see it. I would call this a lyrical work in the sense that it is certainly meditative and essaic, and that the film is meant to create a new conscious among those who view it, and even within it, a new sense of what is going on that is correlated to each new sound we hear. The associations between the image encourage an active audience to assign meaning to it, even if I as a filmmaker have already given it my own personal meaning. I believe that the different sounds portray how film can make us witness the world in new and different ways. I will mention this later when discussing the early formalists.

In many ways, the content of this film represents some of the formal elements discussed by early theorists. It contains many close-ups, especially in nature, and in doing so captures moments for the audience that they would not normally notice on a daily walk. We often fail to notice the bee buzzing through the flowers or the gnats swarming low on the grass. Or what about the cardinal chirping in the tree? It took me forever to find that thing. We hear it, and know it’s there, but we don’t generally see it. The close-ups I use remind me of Munsterberg’s theories in that it forces us to be active viewers by directing our attention to things that we don’t usually connect. The film also embodies Munsterberg in its aesthetics by focusing on the beauty of not just the world, but of the experience of cinema because it is only in cinema that we can really focus and witness these events and play them over and over again. Our mind is engaged and working in this film because it assigns meaning and beauty to the shots.

This is similar to Arnheim as well. In this film, the medium is surely more important than the narrative, and the hope is that the viewer will be able to create the narrative from the meaning it assigns to the repeated images with different sounds. The editing is very Eisensteinian in the way it is put together. Montage overrides most of what is going on as seemingly uncorrelated shots are juxtaposed and hopefully the audience gets something from this collision. Overall, the film resonates with much of what the early formalist theorists had to say about filmmaking.

However, the point of this film overall is to play with sound. Early formalists disliked the use of sound because it made things more real but didn’t add anything artistically to the film. In fact it made it less artistic because the realism made the meaning more concrete. In this film, sound is used in four different ways, each equally distinct and equally unrealistic for the matching images. As you watch each sequence with the different sounds, the sequence takes on a different meaning and the audience gets a different perception. Because of this, sound can actually contribute to the active spectator creating their own meaning from the work. The water dripping, the jarring locking and unlocking of a door, the repeated alarming call of a cardinal, and the mechanistic droning of an elevator all give different impressions as to the texture, tone, and meaning of the images.

Finally, when viewing this work, I would encourage the audience to look for patterns in the sequences, especially repeated contents or materials and their relationships to each other. Everything is outlined a certain way for a certain reason, and I hope that you find as much joy in deciphering it as I did. Let whatever you get from it be what it means to you. Enjoy!

~Nick Jordan