kagablog

53minutes
hdv & mobile phone generated quick time files
sweden
2008

director of photography - lajos varhegyi
sound - anders ljud
editor - anders klip
music - mind control hands, martin bladh, amit sen, tomoko mukaiyama, yellow6, illusion of safety, african noise foundation, virgins, j.s.bach, gyorgy kurtag, friedrich nietzsche, g.f. handel

i asked myself the question: “is it possible to make a film that consists only of interruptions?”

is that philosophically possible? what is it that is getting interrupted?

is that cinematically possible? a colleague director fumed when he watched a rough cut. “it keeps on beginning again and again”, he complained, as if that was a problem.

in the four months that i spent in sweden researching, shooting and editing this film, august strindberg kept on cropping up. the swedish theatre seems not to have recovered from strindberg, his influence is everywhere. so i chose to get influenced by his dröm spelet (dream play) and made my own dream film.

because i never rehearse it was interesting that the swedish word for “rehearsal” is “repetition”. repetitions are something that i do a lot of. repetitions are something that i do a lot of.

the backbone of this collection of interruptions is a “lecture” that i gave the class of first year film students at malmö university where i have been visiting professor of new media and film for the past four months. it turns out that there is an entire stream of contemporary education theory that propagates this kind of “lecturing” - it’s called “active learning”. basically i just asked the kids all the questions about film that i still don’t know the answers to and filmed their answers. it got them thinking and it got me this film.

i asked them all “what is film?” and i asked them all “what is a dream?” and then took it from there.

director of photography lajos varhegyi got me using a tripod again for the first time in 12 years. so this film doesn’t shake as much as most of my other recent stuff.

the research idea that the film was based on was an attempt to marry hdv footage (very hi-res) with lo-res mobile phone footage. to find a project that would successfully and organically integrate these different image carriers.

at first i struggled a lot because i had bought the wrong phone! per-anders hillgren was kind enough to expose me to the best mobile phone for shooting moving images at the moment - the nokia n95. once i had purchased this instrument the experiment could start.

the way that the integration works in the film is that during the interview sections the students being interviewed are also filming themselves at the same time - with the mobile phone. But this footage cannot be viewed in the projection version of the film. Only when the film is watched on a computer, when it is broadcast on the web, can the entire, expanded version of the film be seen. When the mobile phone scenes are being screened, the computer viewer can click on the mobile phone icons and then gets to see the point of view of the mobile phone camera simultaneously with the hdv camera that lajos is operating.

in this way an unfinished film, that consists only of interruptions and false-starts, finally gets “finished”. Obviously this process is a metaphor for the way that mobile phone filming has finished the cinema as we know it. all the old aesthetics and principles that have governed film making for a century, principles derived from the theatre, the novel and painting - have been thrown overboard.

mobile film filming is an entirely different way of constructing space. the imagery shot on mobile films is not conceived of from the painter’s frame, but from the eye of the masses. it is a “democratic” medium in the sense that is is vulgar and lacks a conception of itself historically. mobile film imagery is now. only now. and that is enough.

whether one rejoices in this development or not is actually quite irrelevant. having being trained classically as a 35mm film maker i have bridged the analogue to digital period in my film making career. the mobile phone film period is startlingly different from mere digital video. and i am not even all that sure yet exactly why. but my intuition tells me this is so.

dröm film repetition is a film that doesn’t finish because film is finished. mobile media killed the movie star.

aryan kaganof