Paper short abstract:

Researcher and filmmaker Sam Firth, will share experimental techniques used in an auto-ethnographic documentary studying the construction of individual and shared family narratives using a process in which participants "direct" actors to perform memories.

Paper long abstract:

Sam Firth is an experimental filmmaker and researcher at the University of the West of Scotland whose work has screened at film festivals around the world and won numerous awards. She was recently recognised with a BFI Chanel Filmmaker Award. For this panel she will share the experimental techniques she used in an auto-ethnographic documentary studying the construction of individual and shared family narratives and discuss related work. Her project builds upon Rouch’s premise that any attempts to observe using filmmaking necessarily affect the subject and embraces documentary filmmaking as a mode of collaborative discourse using a process in which the participants helped "direct" actors to perform their conflicting memories. In the film participants give feedback and comments on both the performance and narratives enacted with the actors become fellow collaborators and sounding boards. The audience and participants gain insight into the memories that are shared and how and why they conflict. This technique of reconstruction, retelling and replaying functions as a means of emotional and ethical exploration into the past and the nature of memory; positioning the film as an act of philosophical and ethical enquiry.

The film itself being a study into the impact of trauma and misogyny on a family narrative, a piece research into creative documentary filmmaking processes, and a piece of cinema in its own right having screened at the London Film Festival in 2021.

Paper short abstract:

In the central core of the ancient city of Kerman is a fortress belonging to the Persian empire that, over time, turned into a giant dune. By creating an aesthetic form, Walking on Sol investigate and interweave the impact of the fortress’s history and myth on the region and the world.

Paper long abstract:

The story goes that 3,000 years ago, somewhere in Persia, the daughter of a poor family found a worm in an apple. Through the worm’s fortune, the family grew wealthy until they could assume royal power, built a fortress on top of a hill and transferred the worm there. The worm’s fortune made the fortress unassailable. King Ardeshir, the founder of the Sassanid dynasty, sent two armies to Kill the worm and destroy the fortress. The assassination of the worm is believed to have sealed a permanent curse on the city, which caused drought, and the city would eventually be destroyed.

The current view of the fortress does not relate much to the glorious Persian empire. Now it is a pile of dust. In contrast to the belief of many young residents of the region, who consider the fortress a giant dune, the elders and great-grandparents believe that it is the grave of a worm-like monster whose hatred has caused the city’s current situation, which is drought and scarcity.

Through a digitalized speculative aesthetic, Walking On Sol asks: what happens when disregarded beliefs and repressed regions are recalled and thought of differently? And by simulating an abstract 3D environment through digital software, the work asks: what aspects of the Future can be imagined and constructed by technology? By juxtaposing the digital and physical structure of the region, Walking On Sol intertwines an aesthetic form for the Future of the Past with the imagined Future.

Paper short abstract:

Offering case studies from two documentary films currently in post-production, we will discuss how turning away from direct cinema can show human experience beyond the visible and beneath the knowable.

Paper long abstract:

Korean-Russian-American is a poetic journey across New York and Jersey City in the times of COVID-19, guided by the voices of the Russian-speaking Korean Central Asian diaspora. Using 16mm film, soundbites from oral history interviews and soundscapes of labor, transit and community gleaned across the city, this feature film at the boundary of ethnography and speculative fiction pieces together disparate stories of displacement and immigration, and glimpses of life experience to suggest a shared imaginary, based on historical and cultural kinship.

Flying Lessons is a film that started as an observational direct cinema project about tenant rights' activists in Manhattan's Lower East Side, and ended up as an unlikely story of love, death and artistic fellowship in times of political, cultural and economic fracture, between protagonist Philly Abe and director Elizabeth Nichols.

Our presentation will discuss how each of these films evolved from the intention of observation to the possibility to imagine a different world than that which meets the eye.

Paper short abstract:

Through a practice-based research mode, Reyes-Retana examines a transboundary phenomenon of acoustic violence that draws attention to an intricate site, wherein the complexities of the US-Mexico border intersect with the rising infrastructure of outer-space industrialization.

Paper long abstract:

This article looks through the lens of speculation at a scenario connecting the US-Mexico border complexities with the industrialization of outer space. Based on an art-oriented and multifaceted research process including fieldwork and conversations with Playa Bagdad’s residents, the scrutiny of SpaceX environmental impact assessments, and attendance to several Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) public hearings; this compilation of ideas investigates the subjectivities intrinsic to the coexistence of Playa Bagdad (Tamaulipas, MX) and SpaceX (Texas, US) through the social and political implications of sound.

In this scenario, the noise produced by the launchers’ engines will not only act as mobilizing force resonating in the form of intense acoustic shock waves with the capacity of affecting materiality —including the biosphere and the body—, but as a cultural weapon nurturing an already existing ecology of fear. All of this amid a hybrid geography where the radical asymmetries of neoliberal policies fuel a regime built upon necropolitics which intersect with the rising infrastructure of space exploration.

Ironically, the confrontation between Playa Bagdad and SpaceX remains in silence, as an under-seen techno-political spectacle in which a community lacking political recognition stands in the front row to witness passively the consolidation of an economic zone that promises to delimitate a new cosmological dimension; one perpetuating the validation of progress, exclusively, through hyper-technological advancement.

Paper short abstract:

Dragonfly Eyes transforms CCTV footage into narrative film, using voiceover to construct continuity. The methodology posits that this disciplinary technology is fluid and indeterminate. The film tests the limits of observation and considers the sensuous and relational moments captured by this gaze.

Paper long abstract:

Dragonfly Eyes (2017) by artist Xu Bing, explores surveillance society in China through the transmutation of CCTV footage into a narrative film about a tragic love story. It uses voiceover narration and editing to give a sense of continuity, splicing together over 10,000 hours of real surveillance material from dashcams, video chat rooms and cameras in factories and train stations capturing accidents or workers on a clandestine smoke break. It is clear that the film’s fictional main characters, through their transformations and iterations caught by surveillance cameras in constant flux and motion, have no stable identity beyond the instructed reading decided for us through the narration. The film demonstrates the absurdity of the whole surveillance enterprise, exposing the cracks in its gaze, especially as it is most often centered on the visual, to the exclusion of sound (allowing for easy dubbing of the film with the AI narration). These gaps are gaping enough to encompass an entirely fictional narrative. Through this re-appropriation of material, Bing suggests a fluid and indeterminate reading in response to a technology used to control and discipline. Through a convergence of methodology and content, Bing’s work can be conceived of as an ethnofiction that simultaneously tests the limits of observational knowledge, in the most literal sense, and offers a generative space of speculation and a close consideration for the sensuous and relational aspects of humanity that pass before this surveillance gaze.