Film.Critics. holds only a few of the reflections that made up the process of research, the final film is merely the tip of the iceberg.
I will discuss the interplay between a reflection on a specific incident during the production phase, and the reflection that occurs as I draw back into the role of reflective practitioner. I should preface this discussion with a couple of notes: the shots I am referring to are not in the final film, yet altered my thinking considerably; and they come from a time when I was experimenting with personifying criticism and creating a performative, fantasy journey that ‘criticism’ took over the ocean with the cinematograph – around the same time that a kind of proto-film criticism was starting to be written in 1896 (Merch 2012).
In this production diary excerpt, I was on an exterior shoot using old postcards of ships from the 1890s to represent the aforementioned journey:
I manipulate the ships; try to get a sense of the beginning of the journey. I move them; my hands are in it [the shot] now. The sun is suddenly brighter – exposure out of control. I use my hand to block a patch of sun, my fingers splayed; it suddenly becomes a mark of authorship. I think of the handprints in the Chauvel Cave, designated as the first signs of artistic authorship by Werner Herzog in Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010). I leave it. The
ship is unseeable now, an outline at best but I move my finger around the image and it becomes like a magnifying glass revealing the nuances of the image. Could I apply this technique to the rest of the film? It’s so important that this film is shot by me. No chance of using stock footage now (21st January 2012).
This type of primary reflection is unhurried, and arguably, imprecise, yet immediate - it has use in the filmmaking process, but in addition, allows a more analytical type of reflection to later return to rigorously continue the enquiry. This later type is the reflection that is then found in the exegesis.
The exegesis acts as a meta-reflection on the primary, or artistic, reflection that occurs during production. A combination of these types of reflection appears in Film.Critics., in the form of voiceover. This stemmed from an act of reflection-in-action (whether this act was script-writing, shooting or film editing). In contrast, the analytic reflection I engage in when I re-watch the film, or write this exegesis – that is, when I focus on being the reflective practitioner – is a reflection-on-action. It therefore becomes a meta-layer for the primary reflection.
However, the effects of simultaneously reading and engaging with theory over the same months as I was shooting the film had an effect on the reflection-in-action. While I was shooting, I had the words of theorists swirling around in my head and these often influenced my own seemingly instinctive reaction to what I was shooting. For example, in writing the production diary entry above, I later considered that I was ‘channeling’ a book I had read by Kracauer on sleuthing (1995). The sleuth-like act of
‘discovering the image’, had been followed by the sleuth-like term
‘magnifying glass’ slipping into the production diary. Upon later reflecting
on the footage and the production diaries (enacting a meta-reflection), this seemed to me an obvious, subconscious, response to my reading on the subject of the sleuth. And so this reflective practice cannot be teased out to consider the filmmaker and researcher as separate entities because these reflections and actions are holistic.
I discussed the acts of reflection and have contrasted my own method of reflecting with that of Gallagher. For me, reflection exists in the cinematographic process in addition to the construction of voiceover.
Gallagher’s reflective onus exists in the edit and the voiceover. This differential points to the essay as a versatile way of being reflexive. Mine is a working process that makes use of the poetic, the performative and the reflexive.
I have discussed in detail the process that led to incorporating the essay film with the reflexive and performative modes. I have argued that this hybrid form provides an appropriate way to explore the role of the reflective practitioner. By conceiving an essay film, I created an opportunity to both experience and express aspects of the dialogue between film critics and filmmakers. As an essay film, Film.Critics. allows a freedom of exploration of the tension between image and word, for example in the techniques of superimposition and voiceover. These are the elements I will now describe in Chapter 3.
Chapter 3: The formal dialogue between image and word
From the previous two chapters emerges a third layer of dialogue. This is a formal dialogue between the images and words within Film.Critics. This chapter will use several films to discuss the relationship between image and word in my film, setting this within the broader precedents of filmmaking practice. It is presented in two sections. The first addresses the visual textures of Film.Critics. I will use Patience: After Sebald (Grant Gee 2012) as a comparative tool to discuss the function of superimposition in Film.Critics. The second addresses aural textures.
Here I will reflect upon the changing approach to voiceover in my production process.
Bazin suggests that in Chris Marker’s essay films 'the primary material is intelligence, that its immediate means of expression is language, and that the image only intervenes in the third position, in reference to this verbal intelligence’ (2003, para. 4). This implies that the essay film has a desire to convey verbal intelligence, or that intelligence equals verbal expression.
I have attended to this issue in my own film practice, by reflecting on the aural and visual textures within Film.Critics., ultimately demonstrating how a formal dialogue developed between image and word.