what i gained from my bibliography

Susan Hiller's exhibition (Tate Britain)- from this exhibition i gained a deeper understanding of space and concept within an exhibiotn setting. i also learnt to appreciate film and video much more than before. i was inspired to create my own films and this is what led to my final piece. this exhibition i think was the most useful out of all the research i did for my FMP because i also got inspired by her J Street project which trigeered the intiial idea for studying the holocaust as my final project.

Never the Same River - Simon Starling - From this i learnt to appreciate the boundaries of time an elemtns of time. I also experienced artist such as Mike Nelson who use found objects and installation, also lements of identity in his work which led me to question concepts and themes that run throughout my project such as change in place, and associations of place.

Everything is Illuminated  This Film allowed me to relate to the personal side of my project as mentioned in my Porject Porposal. I wanted to explore the micro scale of the vicimts and get to know them, feel more connected and this helped me to understand individuals as identities rather thasn victims as numbers.
Decasia
Saatchi Gallery
Not In Fashion - Mark Borthwick
Studio - Paolo Roversi
http://the-artists.org/artist/Christian-Boltanski
National Geographic
Oh Comely

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3TWBSMc47bw
G-d said, be happy
Martin Gilbert - Auschwitz and the Allies

VOB to quicktime files

So after my final cut pro induction today i am ready to spend all day on my film tomorrow.

there was a problem so i couldnt start today, apparently macs don't open VOB files so just in the process of converting them into quicktime files. while i'm waiting i'm writing poems about holocuats related thoughts and feelings and making canvas pictures, sorry about bad webcam quality, being a bit lazy, have a look:

in college - monday, getting started on the film

i had tonsilitus last week so after a wasted week of being in bed i'm now about to start working with my films.
i was meant to start on thursday but i missed the induction because stupidly i was bed bound. i've never used film before and although i am completely unfamiliar with the idea i decided that i needed to be brave and experimental in order to achieve the best reults. i'm writing some ideas of which shots and clips of the fottage i have that i'm going to use.

after thoroughly familiarising myself with and watching the black and white wedding video, i thought it was an interestng viewpoint to convey a success story, a struggle and a survival and the idea of a battle won. and then also having films from 60's and 50's from their children, the twins, which makes the concept of continuation and rejection or persecution more relatable. their descendents are their rebellion in a sense.

i showed the wedding film to my grandma also as she hasn't seen it in over 50 years. i invited the rest of the family over to view it with her also as i wanted to place and capture all her ancestory and the seeds she has sown, so to speak, the measure of her success is only tangible, visible or even obvious through her descendents. i videod and recorded her reactions.

she was more concerned with telling her audience (the family) who people in the film were and what they're doing now, whether they're alive or dead and what they meant to her, both now and at the time.

i think it worked quite well and was an appropriate way of documenting the transition process between now and then by having recorded her reactions. i may also interview her and find out her feelings and document them in writing, this also could be a useful way of finding out how she feels about the entire process (of life and survival).


the footage and sound i have of her and my family laughing and talking over the film corresponds time wise to the film itself, so when she shouts at something like ''oh there's uncle harry. shame about him not being here'' it might create a nice correlation if i overlayed the two pieces of gathered information, it could be a detailed account in her words, the protagonist, of the footage itself. i think this may be a suitable method of adding sound to the silent cinefilm, rather than finding seerate pieces of music and audio clips to layer over the film.

at first i wanted to use german music in parts where there was dancing in the video but without sound, and maybe even speeches made in germany during the 1940's but although this is also an appropriate use of audio i feel like the effect it creates is not as subtle and thought provoking and cosequently ''powerful'' and it may also be slightly too obvious as it leads the viewer/listener straight to the point, rather than them having to engage with the material to form a relationship with the subjects and form an opinion/emotional connection.

so, to start with i'm going to filter through parts of the film and decide which of the 14 minutes i want to use.

the first few frames/seconds of the film is a very scratched and bitty filming of the sign on the synagogue wall where the wedding ceremony took pace, it reads, '' if g-d lend thee wealth, exalt not thyself above thy fellow...for ye sleep together in the end.''

the composition of the shot coupled with the interpretation and age of the film give it an eerie nature of wholesome goodness whilst also referring to life and death itself, it's quality, or lack of, adds to the message, where the edges have disintergrated and decayed, there are connotations to the death and destruction of culture and history.

to start the project with such a powerful image, piece of film, i feel like from there there has to be a certain 'pace' set. i don't want the film to run at normal speed, the speed at which it runs on a cine-projector, i'd like to slow bits of it down and allow the audience to extract as much character from the subjects as possible. 

the next frame or section could possibly be a more livelier one but so much so that it also creates a larger than life itself feeling. if possible i want to find out if i can use final cut pro to slowly layer the ends of the two frames so that the first piece blurs out to slowly reveal the second which will be the end of the weddding video which also has this crackled and decayed quality of the husband and wife kissing. 

i'd like to possibly experiment with playing this part backwards and maybe adding in ''scartches'' of my own to make the image stutter and repeat at places, like in the music video i found on youtube of a band call s amp.

because the nature of the footage is of such a personal nature, i feel as though the most successful method would be to inject as much distance as possible, by manipulating the footage as much as possible while still conveying a timeline - a form of narrative.

i also want to play on the idea of the footage being ''old'' and found, again manipulating the concepts of decay and damage, mirroring and contrasting with the notion that none of the people present in the videos were directly harmed by the tragic events of europe, although a part of the overall ''plan'', in contrast, that they overcame and survived. this is the story that i think the audio overlayed on top of the footage conveys. 

there are more ideas still to come but my induction for FINAL CUT PRO is starting now. be back soon.

some mock 1940's

using expired and out dated films i've been trying to create the feeling of old found images from european jews of the 1940-50 period. i didn't want to convey sadness, tears and crying etc, i wanted an uncertainty/insecurity and subtle childish vulnerability to enable me to used the image is a variety of layering experiments.

i wanted their hands to be in the images, to create a sense of personality, to keep them ''alive'' with a childish yet naive playful nature.

do we look jewish?

i had some photographs i took form the beginning of the project developed. this was part of the study into the aryan race and stereotypical portrayals of jewish people. based on vaught's practical character reader book (aforementioned - 1902) and the german view of facial features and pigment (blonde hair, blue eyes) these two 19 year old jewish girls do not fit into any bracket (facially), or none that i can put a label on.

TO DO list

right. i have a load of stuff i really need to do so i'm writing this list so i do not forget, or skip any of it.

- get the good stills from cinewedding film printed out onto 1.5 ft by 1.5 ft paper, so can dylom image- maker them onto canvas.
and with them you must:
~ layer them with pencil drawings of sketches from inside death camps,
~ layer them over the fingerprints camnvases
~ layer them over the dot canvases/line canveses to convey figures . person = dot/line
~ layer them over photographs of people nowadays

this list will be added to during the course of the day. when i remember stuff, have ideas etc.

amen

6 million

the paper clips project was a project started initially to try convey the sheer figure and mass of the 6 million jewish people killed during ww2.
to make the concept a more tangible one, the need for an outlet, or physical comparison becomes necessary.

artists such as sam winston have also experimented with the idea of conveying and converting huge figures of death/birth into a more tangible piece of work, to digest easily.
this is some of the information/quotation taken form his website:

''By the time you’ve read this sentence three people have been born into the world.
By the time you’ve read this sentence two will have passed away.
By the time you’ve lived through this twelve-hour day there will be 100,000 more children on the planet. And in the same twelve hours 70,000 people will have died.

Birthday is a work which sets out to record every individual birth and death over a twelve-hour period. Initially imagined to be realised in real time, marking the beat of each life with a small circle. But I immediately realised it was impossible to keep up with events and it would take many months to graphically capture the rhythm of life and death.

I find it interesting that we use numbers to quantify things yet once we pass a certain amount, scale slips away and it becomes incomprehensible. I wanted to understand what a 100,000 physically was – and for me that entailed marking out that number in pen and pencil.

In my mind I am still unable to comprehend such a figure but at least I know my body now holds a memory of the event."

i said at the beginning of my study of the holocaust that i wanted to try as best i could

to create a personal kind of emotive outcome. this word personal is what's now being challenged, even though each individual circle in actual fact has been considered and drawn and has been personally attended to, the overall picture does  not convey a personal account or closeness to the victims or protagonist involved, it is only the artist as aforementioned by winston that is aware of the notion and concept of the number, amount he's dealing with, be it 100,000 or 6,000,000.

this is something for me to think about, in my final piece. and which i'd rather address; my connection with the victims or the audiences'?