JOHN ADAMS
HINDSIGHT
Research contexts
The ExCiSM concept of expanded cinema draws on the multiple-screen
environments that increasingly characterize contemporary sites of work and
leisure. The project assumes that these play into spectator sensibilities and
viewing practices, and that this developing sensibility in turn creates an
implicit challenge to the expectations, conventions and form of the singlescreen cinema. A related point of reference is the ubiquitous multiple frame
within digital single screen media (TV, website design), and the increasing
connectedness of media forms (intermediality). Historically, the project
connects with large-screen works provided by pre-cinematic installations
(expanded cinema) and multiple screen films (Méliès, Gance, Figgis) which
have been a part of cinema history from 1895 to the present day.
Research aims
The research consists of two inter-connected elements: the ExCiSM
platform, and a fictional screenwork entitled HINDSIGHT through which to
explore temporal and spatial characteristics of the ExCiSM form. Taken
together they provide the basis for an investigation into ways in which this
concept of expanded cinema might extend and challenge conventional
cinematic structures and dynamics.
The Expanded Cinema for Screen Media (ExCiSM) platform
The aim was to develop a flexible, high-quality audio-visual platform and
screening environment in response to the evolving requirements of a creative
screenplay and screenwork. This provided the means through which to
explore and model ways in which an expanded cinema environment might
offer a new dimension to the experience of cinema in terms of screen
configurations, aesthetics and spectatorship in ways that differed from the
contemplative spaces of cinema. A subsidiary research element centred on
the technical configuration of the media platform.
HINDSIGHT
Within the wider ExCiSM project, HINDSIGHT is a practice-led creative
research project designed to explore elements of the aesthetics of a narrative
film in a multiple-screen environment with spatialized sound. It consists of a
screenplay and a screenwork, each addressing a set of research questions.
Through the screenplay, the first area of aesthetic inquiry centred on the
creative possibilities and constraints of narrative structure and dynamics; the
second on ways in which ideas and meanings embedded in narrative might
be extended (or sometimes countered) through forms of montage. The issues
arising from the screenplay were further developed and tested in the
screenwork, with reference to: constructions of space and place; character
and embodied meanings; spatial disposition of events within and across
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screens; development of high- and low-intensity audio-visual cues (drawing
attention to particular elements on one or more screens); a spatialized
acoustic design; picture editing, with reference to modes of montage;
interaction with other media forms.
Research practice
Screenplay and screenwork together provided the means for the empirical
investigation, developed in interrelated phases. Before and during the script
development, research was focused on: concepts of narrative and montage
within film aesthetics; screenworks that made use of multiple screen
environments and split-screen formats; works and concepts relating to the
foundation story (Orpheus and Eurydice).
Emerging ideas were developed through seminar discussion, practical
experiment in student workshops, and consultations with academics
(particularly in film and computer science) and professional practitioners. This
fed into the development phase for the emerging screenplay, which moved
backwards and forwards between scenario <> action script <> storyboard
<> shooting script. A significant aspect of this process was the selection of
locations; the filming of the screenwork <> development of the sound design;
picture editing, CGI and completion of sound design; mixing the spatialized
sound. It is important to emphasize the flow backwards and forwards
between these phases.
Film and the Body
These reflections arise from the story of Orpheus and Eurydice as a
metaphor for the process of filmmaking centred on acts of dismemberment.
Film starts with an existential proposition that recording the image of a
person is an execution (in the sense of both accomplishing an act and the
death of an individual). Only iconographic traces of the body remain, fixed in
image-events, a record of the presence of the individual actor in time and
place, through which the operations of cinematography continue the work of
disembodiment through dismembering the body. The close shot is, of
course, a form of decapitation that foregrounds the (mask of the) face as the
site of signification (expression and articulation). In HINDSIGHT, the lecture
on Orphic rites connects with both a series of close shots of the characters
and the headless skeletons located by the archaeologists at the site in
Thrace. Through this process of disembodiment and dismemberment, the
mechanisms of film lead to the act of perception in the cinema, the moment
in which the body transcends the flesh as the transfigured, immanent agent
of narrative, values and ideas. Extending from the intrinsic reflexive quality of
film form, images of the mediated body pervade the screenwork in digital
movies, photographs, reflections, silhouettes, shadows.
Space and Time
The audio-visual spatial constructs in HINDSIGHT assert the temporal
rhythms of place, that time and place are inextricable, and that place persists
as an invitation to desire - an intractable challenge to reconcile past and
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present, presence and absence, embedded in the material traces of those
who pass that way. The locations are public environments in and around
Bristol with particular qualities, practices and meanings for those of us who
live here; geography and place names resonate in a local context. But Bristol
is also a generic city, an urban environment in which flow is determined by
the contingencies of history, regulated by signs, ciphers and conventions,
framed by architecture: the city as cinema frames.
…
… and structured by transitional places (paths, railway lines, canals, streets),
each of which persist from yet reconcile a different moment in time.
On the horizons of the cityscape, the countryside …
… a liminal space of rural practices where the urban myth of landscape
conceals the incessant demands of agrarian life and where, amongst
dilapidated barns, uneconomic crops and abandoned machinery, live the
dreams of compulsory purchase, releasing
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capital locked in the land for car parks, housing estates, theme parks
…
More distant, the landscapes of Bulgaria and evocations of ancient Thrace,
alive in memory and myth …
The city at night, the soft city where shapes and certainties dissolve in
silhouettes and shadows, images and reflections as a prelude to the
enchanting practices located at the interface of the real and the imagined,
the referent and its representation from which emerges a shadow world of
histories, memories, imagination, story and myth, permeating the intractable
materiality of place (Bristol, Somerset, Thrace) with a sense of other worlds
(Hades, the Styx) from the imaginings of folk culture and European artists Cocteau, Monteverdi and many others …
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