a WOMAN

So, as I mentioned in a previous blogpost, Joey and I have watched an experimental film called Meshes of the Afternoon in the past during a film viewing at an art museum.

One of the directors, Maya Deren, a revolutionary experimental filmmaker, wrote many essays about her work describing three essential components to experimental film making.

Joey and I watched a video on youtube that briefed us on these components, and we took notes on Deren's film philosophy! And, we watched Meshes of the Afternoon once more too for good measure (and because it was just a really cool film).

Now, what I loved about everything we learned about her film philosophy is that her three major components support us going through the struggles we are facing from the corona pandemic. 

Amateurism, with her encouragement of "freedom to experiment" without the constraints of commercial success, is something we could easily follow (however I think we are still a little held back by the fact it is a graded project). And, with the struggles I know we'd face with audio as we're filming in two separate locations, having less talk and more movement and time sounds good to me.

I would love to explore the whole "body" aspect. "Freeing" ourselves of equipment would be easy, because well, we don't have any.

Reality would also be something cool to incorporate (what a weird sentence out of context). The narrator of the video made sure to remind us as well that Deren was not advocating for realism, but rather using reality as a foundation of manipulation to create our OWN reality. They even specifically highlighted her use of action matches to create sudden changes in scenery. Super cool.

She really is masterful at her manipulation of time and space to capture a feeling or tell a story. I remember when I was studying in art history, our teacher would especially point out every time there was a female artist on our 250 artworks to study because not many of them were. It is great to be able to study such an amazing female director that contributed so much to cinema! Go women!!!