by Jamie Stuart
Over the past four years, my work has been based around what I often refer to as a "perversion of reality." Usually, this involves shooting some form of actual documentary footage, occasional filmmaker interviews, and then crafting fictional narratives around that footage, frequently repurposing "reality" to give it another context. My work is not journalism, nor have I ever promoted it as having any journalistic intentions. It is narrative filmmaking.
The perversions have taken many forms: an audience member at a George Clooney press conference levitating out of his seat and flying past the actor; a tiny space alien who sneaks into the red carpet area for an awards show, only to be stepped on by an unknowing Roger Ebert; even Sienna Miller inspiring murder simply through her beauty. The celebrity footage is always shot professionally with credentials and permission -- and it's rarely pre-planned, usually improvised. What I then do with it during editing is my creative choice. I never intend anything personal or negative, nor do I seek sensationalism or cheap shock -- I simply follow my creative whim.
Are there boundaries to the liberties that can be taken with public figures? In a purely pragmatic, observational opinion: I don't know. It would seem to me that late night talk shows and online gossip blogs do far worse than anything I've ever done on a daily basis -- the latter of which regularly presents fiction as if it is reality, promoting lies about people's lives as if it were the truth. (The absolute antithesis of what I do.) Talk shows and gossips make no pretense at creating art.
For my latest short film, In Spring, I decided to use as a model Luis Bunuel's surrealist documentary Land Without Bread, which I had seen only once about a dozen years ago. Normally, I try to avoid direct references as much as possible, but in this case I liked the idea of reaching back to what might be the oldest legitimate descendant of the form I've been toiling with. Land Without Bread is a 1932 short film that mocks the documentary form: The narration is cold and unemotional, often delivering unreliable text, and the picture also includes scenes that were obviously staged, such as the death of a goat falling off a cliff. In addition to this reference, I also chose music from other contemporary Bunuel films -- namely, Un Chien Andalou and L'Age d'Or. The former gave In Spring its title, appearing as the final title card in that film.
In Spring is centered around an interview I conducted with Werner Herzog for his new film Encounters At the End of the World, which is the best film I've seen so far this year. (It's a sort of inverse 2001: A Space Odyssey, traveling to the furthest reaches of Earth) It was the second time I've shot Herzog, and I even painted his portrait (see above) as part of a slow-going series I've been working on for a few years. Ironically, Herzog is well-known for employing fictional episodes and tactics in his own documentaries, and in the real interview he even discussed how he employed such techniques in his new film.
The interview was shot at the New York office of THINKFilm, which served for the setting as Las Hurdes did for Land Without Bread. At one point, I considered creating a fake name for the office, but decided against that because the short was satire, and satire only really works when it takes place in a definable reality.
An excerpt from Bunuel's 'Land Without Bread'
Of the roughly fifty shots that make up In Spring, only half a dozen are staged -- the rest is legitimate documentary footage. What I did with the documentary footage, however, was to alter its perceived meaning through the use of an unreliable voice-over. While the documentary imagery is completely banal (hallways, lights, cubicles, doorways), the voice-over is telling the viewer of off-camera antics that include drug use and pedophilia, none of which is substantiated. This technique creates two simultaneous texts that are at odds with each other. Which one is to be believed: What you're seeing or what you're being told is happening?
During one of the brief staged moments where we see some insert shots of a dead cockroach on a plate that is then picked up and brought toward an open mouth, there is nothing in the voice-over that acknowledges what's being seen; the voice-over is simply remarking about the color the kitchen walls are painted, seen in the preceding shots. Furthermore, these inserts were shot two days after principle photography, during editing, when cleaning my apartment I found the dead insect behind the refrigerator and realized it could be added into the cut. Now, if you watch the edit closely, you'll realize there is nothing to suggest the roach shots are taking place in the THINKfilm kitchen -- they are obviously staged and, existing as inserts, showing no surrounding context. All we're left with is the visual juxtaposition of a kitchen and a roach that might get eaten, though we'll never know, since the edit occurs before the roach enters the mouth (like everything else in the short, it's all subliminal) -- while the narrator discusses something unrelated.
Once I'd edited the short up until the Herzog section, I made the decision to continue along the tract I'd already established by creating a fictional identity for Herzog: Gunter Merkwurdigeliebe, Chairman, CEO and President of THINKFilm. (The last name is German for "Strangelove.") My reasoning was simple: Tonally, the short was already so over-the-top that no intelligent person could reasonably infer any of it to be true.
I must point out that it was not my intention upon conducting the interview with Herzog to alter his persona or the context of his comments. It was a straight-forward interview, and there was no intentional deception practiced. What I did with that footage and its context was purely an editorial (i.e., creative) decision made well into post-production. And, as far as I'm concerned, on a creative level it made the short film, standing as the apex of its conceit.
Once again, the documentary footage is being juxtaposed with a voice-over that does not connect with what we're seeing. In one section, the voice-over tells the viewer a story that Merkwurdigeliebe apparently related to the film crew interviewing him, yet we never actually see/hear Merkwurdigeliebe/Herzog confirming any of this through his dialogue. None of this bothered me because the related story was astonishingly absurd, and I knew the Merkwurdigeliebe wall would be broken once posted online -- anybody linking would immediately see it as featuring Herzog, and also, he's credited as himself in the closing titles.
From an aesthetic point of view, I decided to maintain the grainy black & white celluloid look of the old Bunuel films. Realizing this, and subsequently trying to match the sound design, was very technically demanding, taking just as long to accomplish as the actual picture edit. Once again, I went with this look to play into the artificial "reality" presented: It was shot in 720p as purely digital files.
To create the look, I first used the 3-wheel color-corrector in Final Cut Pro, as I was editing. I started by removing the picture's color, and then heightening the contrast. In some cases, I even applied a soft-focus filter to specific shots. Once I locked picture, I sent the timeline into Color. In Color, I went shot by shot adding vignettes and highlights. This part was so labor-intensive that I wound up going back and forth from FCP to Color six times until I was happy. Certain shots were then imported into Motion where various compositing techniques were applied to create rough frame edges, among other things (the titles were also created in Motion). Once this was done, I used Compressor to create a single ProRes 422 file of the edited timeline. I needed this single file so that I could apply the old film filter in a manner that maintained continuity throughout the entire picture, rather than on a shot by shot basis. Even the old film filter required multiple adjustments, shifting variables such as picture grain, scratches, trapped hairs, etc.
In the end, I found In Spring to be one of the most successful shorts I've made. In its own way, it's a summation of everything I've been doing these past four years. It doesn't have a meaning in terms of a message -- its meaning comes from its juxtapositions of images and verbal text. To quote Roger Ebert (who, in his review of Un Chien Andalou, relates the story of how Bunuel kept stones in his pockets at the premiere in case the audience revolted), written in defense of Federico Fellini's 8 1/2:
"A filmmaker who prefers ideas to images will never advance above the second rank because he is fighting the nature of his art. The printed word is ideal for ideas; film is made for images, and images are best when they are free to evoke many associations and are not linked to narrowly defined purposes."
'In Spring' is currently unavailable for public viewing. For more information, click here.
Filmmaker Jamie Stuart has developed shorts for several years through his production business, The Mutiny Company. Working almost entirely on his own, Stuart has carved out his own niche in the film community, documenting the festival environment with experimental shorts for Movie City News, Filmmaker magazine, Focus Features and others. In this series of columns, Jamie examines the way that new technologies have aided his personal adventures in filmmaking. Read his last entry here .