Breathing places: Three filmmaking investigations

Abstract

Filmmakers and scholars Christine Rogers, Catherine Gough-Brady, and Marsha Berry each find a connection with place through their video work. In this article, they share their experiences of creating short videos, focusing on their insider experiences of filming and the spatial relationships between themselves and place. Although each of them began with a proposition, they filmed unscripted, allowing themselves to respond intuitively to their environment, allowing space in their practices for fluid and organic change and letting place shape what they filmed, and their final works. Christine Rogers engages with Elspeth Probyn’s idea of belonging as movement as she films Ngāi Tahu (Māori) traveling in dinghies away from her, toward islands where she, an outsider, cannot set foot. Catherine Gough-Brady finds a connection between non-representational theory and documentary film theory, uncovering a landscape that has no eye-line. Marsha Berry explores the seaside landscape, making a constellation with Rebecca Solnit’s lyrical essays about walking and place and non-representational theory as a mooring for her practice, exposing the common experience of standing still whilst looking at the blue horizon at sunset. Each filmmaker finds a unique path through the myriad of elements that make something a place.