August 2015

I wake up, read Angela Davis, go to Seattle, Watch Bernie Sanders speak to 15,000 people, lie around naked under a fan, look at the smoke from Washington's wildfires, water my plants, eat a peach, listen to music, go to sleep, wake up, observe the nature of the universe unfolding before me constantly, go to sleep, wake up and continue.
Over the whole month of august 2015 I shot at predetermined times, using predetermined lenses (even no lens for one portion), and the shots had a predetermined length. The schema is that the shots telescope back and forth in length. The shots starts with 1 frame, which goes up in length a frame at a time for each shot until it reaches 24 frames, which is 1 second, and then 1 second goes up each shot a second at a time up to 24 seconds, at which point it does the same thing in reverse only to begin again, cycling like this through the whole month. 24 frames per second, 24 hours per day. I don't have my notes here with me, and unfortunately I don't quite remember the method that was used to pick the times that I would film, but giving it a look now it's not unreasonable to say it may have been that I wanted the film to be 12 minutes (to mimic a day/night cycle, 12 hours visible 12 hours dark) and that may at least have been how I determined how ~many~ shots would be in the movie but that doesn't give the spacing of time between them. My instinct is to say that the distances of time between shots may have been telescoping as well, but I can't say I'd bet my life on it. As far as editing goes, the shots did have to be edited to make sure they hit the exact frame count, but there were no multiple takes taken.
Though I don't believe I've seen anyone use this concept before, a major influence by the Structural filmmaking of Hollis Frampton is easily felt. I would like to think that in many of my films I fuse some of the supposedly contradictory elements of works by Hollis Frampton and Stan Brakhage. While the impact of structure on the meaning is clear, to me there is an interiority and emotive quality to the moments themselves. There is an intuitive emotional and aesthetic narrative that feels more in line with Brakhage than Frampton. The times are predetermined but the shots aren't accidental. I'd perhaps call it Structural-Expressionism. Many of my films would fall under this label.