I’ve just watched Michael Haneke’s Funny Games as recommended to me by the head of the course. A psychological thriller where one character is aware of the audience and sometimes talks to them and also at one point rewinds time. Everyone dies horrible deaths for no apparent reason and it ends with the killers beginning the same process all over again.
I’m trying to work out what this has got to do with my work and then just as I begin to write this the penny seems to have dropped. We were talking about me creating a continuous process that causes itself to be repeated creating a cycle of pointless activity.
In this film the inflicter’s of torture seem to have no motive for their actions. To them it is a game. They have nothing against the family. They seem to simply want to occupy their time. One character who is aware of the audience refers to creating the film when they leave the family alone which will make it more dramatic. It would then seem that there motive is to create a film and that torturing and killing a family is just the process that they have chosen.
It seems odd to align this with my activities; making paper to document making paper. Does this make me a psychopathic paper killer? Any paper will do, and the decisions made about how the paper is destroyed will depend on the qualities of the material. The process may well have to be extended in order to create the document. Now the document like the film take priority over the subject.
Last week, or by now two weeks ago I held an event in my studio where the document took priority over the activities. Some students visiting the space asked whether I found that I was doing things in order to document them. I thought this was an interesting question. Does being aware that you are being watched change your behaviour? Sure it must. Having not much in the way of tripods we spent many hours setting up cameras and changing the space we occupied to create the document.
This was not always the case. Have cameras lying around at all times there were moments were we just pointed and shot and these created interesting and truthful clips unlike the carefully thought out shots where the viewer was in mind.
These ‘gaps’ or differences was something that my tutor identified when I spoke with her on Friday. She suggested I ask about the different between staging and re-enacting. And how my performing a act differs from the original. There are so many things I need to analysis here. And I really just want to get on with making the work.
