Film Frame Research Articles

From Domination of the Environment to Stewardship: A Historical Look at Denver Water's Public Communication 1933–2018

When most people think about the water coming from their kitchen faucets, they seldom consider where the water originates and how transporting it to their homes has environmental impacts. Utilities that supply water know the complexity of their systems, but from their position as a “utility,” they view their job as supplying safe water to their customers, not necessarily stewarding the environment. Consequently, when building large projects like dams, canals, and tunnels, utilities regard environmental disruption as a necessary byproduct of serving growing cities with water. Representations of these projects often replicate the “man conquering nature” frame, praising these engineering marvels for their defiance of nature. Denver Water, the utility that serves almost 1.5 million people on the arid eastern slope of the Colorado Rockies, has produced films describing its complex system since the early 20th century, and these films reveal an evolution of values from dominating nature to actively stewarding the environment. This paper reports on a grounded theory analysis of films produced by Denver Water between 1933 and 2018 examining how the films frame human relationships to the natural environment. The results reveal that the films increasingly express stewardship ideals over those of domination, with recent public communication actively advocating for environmental causes. The paper concludes by suggesting that we can learn important lessons from Denver Water about ethical organizational action for environmental stewardship.

History and art pieces in the film “Alexander Nevsky” by Sergei Eisenstein

The heritage of Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein nowadays is a serious subject for scientific research. In the last two decades the original articles and books of the great director “cleared” of Soviet censorship and abbreviations, have been published, and the study of existing and lost cinematic works of the master continues nowadays. The film “Alexander Nevsky” (1938) was shot under the conditions of the already existing order for the arrest of Eisenstein, but the final approval of the film by Stalin actually suspended the prosecution of the director. The problem of including images of Russian and world painting in the film frame in Eisenstein’s works is practically not studied – his films (unlike, for example, the films of Andrei Tarkovsky) can hardly be regarded as those ones with direct quotations of certain works of pictorial art. Despite this fact, Eisenstein, as it will be shown in this article, repeatedly resorted to various methods of including in his films certain artistic images borrowed from very specific paintings. It is “Alexander Nevsky” and Eisenstein’s last film “Ivan the Terrible” that are examples of cinematic works where such intersections of frame structures with the pieces of world art become especially noticeable when carefully examined. “Alexander Nevsky” is not only a “defense film”. The attempt to analyze this film from this point of view is a way to miss the entire historical, symbolic, and philosophical subtext of the film. “Alexander Nevsky” is a kind of an epic film, shot in the format of a fresco-film and containing numerous allusions not only to the events of Biblical and Russian history and hagiographic literature, but also to works of pictorial art. In the frames of the film (not so clearly at the first glance), the world of paintings by Vasily Vereshchagin and Nicholas Roerich, illustrations to the fairy tales of Ivan Bilibin comes to life again. The frame image also shows clear intersections with paintings by Caravaggio and El Greco – one of Eisenstein’s the most valued masters of fine art.

Where Histories Reside: India as Filmed Space by Priya Jaikumar

Reviewed by: Where Histories Reside: India as Filmed Space by Priya Jaikumar Pamela Robertson Wojcik (bio) Where Histories Reside: India as Filmed Space by Priya Jaikumar. Duke University Press. 2019. 416 pages. $109.95 hardcover; $29.95 paper; also available in e-book. As the disciplines of film and media studies have expanded and diversified, with academic publishing following suit, there has been a much-needed decentering of the field but at the same time a tendency toward siloing. While many of us may have interests that align with more than one subfield, few of us read broadly across the plurality of subjects that constitute the larger fields of film and media studies; instead, we tend to focus more closely on one or a few specific areas or approaches, and our cloistered views sometimes prevent us from noticing books that may be vital to our interests. Even more interdisciplinary fields, such as area studies or spatial analyses, can become insulated specialties. A cursory glance at Priya Jaikumar’s book Where Histories Reside: India as Filmed Space might point one to consider it predominantly a book about Indian cinema, mainly of interest to those who specifically focus on the expansive Indian film industry. The Indian case study may lead someone who works on film and space but tends to focus on Europe or the United States to think it beyond her ken. However, Where Histories Reside not only illuminates how India has been filmed, negotiated, misrepresented, shaped, maligned, and celebrated in various cinematic forms but also offers a theorization of filmed space in general. Jaikumar is interested in both filmic space, the space within the film frame, and filmed space, the “captured artifact of an encounter between a camera and its environment.”1 In focusing on India, Where [End Page 204] Histories Reside seeks to displace film theory and criticism from its normative attention to “one (Western) modality of capitalism and modernity” and consider India not as Other but as operating in tandem with Western cultures in “mutually implicated histories of global modernity.”2 Through an analysis of filmed space in India, Jaikumar works to unseat assumptions within film theory, and especially within approaches to space, that take for granted European and American reference points. Offering a critical spatial film historiography, Where Histories Reside breaks down the notion that cinema’s indexicality gives it a privileged connection to reality and dislodges “the centrality, though not the significance, of cinema’s representational space” to focus on the ways in which Indian space and cinematic space are both constructed via “multiple underlying determinants of a moment, not only in time but also in space.”3 More than simply broaching the spatial turn in film studies, Jaikumar brings to bear on her spatial analysis of India other approaches to cinema, including the perspectives of history, the law, government, education, media industries, archival research, labor practices, authorship, and colonialism. Her analysis further draws on prior studies of feature filmmaking, useful cinema, documentary, travelogues, and Indian and European filmmaking. Where Histories Reside shows the deep interconnectedness of the many approaches needed to understand cinema and filmed space as well as the complex interplay between and among “states, institutions, economies, societies and ideologies” that constitute filmed space.4 The book aims to show how space is both a product of and an agent shaping human life and social relations; it further posits the persistence of spatial logics that exceed a normative Western spatial understanding. Overall, it convincingly argues for understanding the situatedness of film in space and synchronically through complex interwoven histories. Where Histories Reside attends to the way in which the colonial imagination shapes perceptions of Indian space. In a chapter dealing with what she calls disciplinary space, Jaikumar shows how educational British geographic films inculcate an “imperial understanding” in school children and highlight intersections between the visual practices of geopolitics and geography.5 Indian Town Series films, intended to teach British children about Indian geography, flatten differences between places in India or places with connections to India that have “distinct roles in imperial administration”— including Afghanistan, Darjeeling, Bikaner, and Udaipur— to focus on “vocation or ethnic types of inhabitants . . . an incongruous range of transportation (camels...

Ida and the Cold War as (neo)modern movies

The subject of the article is the analysis of the latest films by Paweł Pawlikowski in terms of their affiliation to trends in contemporary cinematography. Ida and Cold War are sometimes described as the artistic heritage of the Polish Film School. The article focuses on the hypothesis that these films can, however, be attributed to the current of European neo-modernist cinema. Such a conclusion is based on the study of the author's creative path, the perception of Pawlikowski's work abroad and, above all, on the aesthetics of the films discussed in the article. The theoretical basis for these conclusions are the works by Andre Bazin on the visual side and on the content of the films (ambiguity of the world presented in the films). The article concerns the concept of ‘realism’ in the theory of the French critic. The second basis for conclusions is the work by Rafał Syska on the film trend known as neo-modernism. Paweł Pawlikowski's works meet many of Syska's postulates and seem to represent a poorly described trend present in Polish cinematography. It is a look at Ida and the Cold War that has not been included in Polish film research so far. Pawlikowski's works are in many ways similar to some Polish productions from the 1960s. Such films are classified by Justyna Żelasko as modernist cinema, against the tradition that they are usually associated with the Polish Film School. The composition of the film frames was also analyzed in reference to the nostalgic fashion called ‘lomography’.

Образы советской колонизации в архивном кино: «Евреи на земле» Абрама Роома. 1920–1930–е гг.

At the turn of the 1930s, the Soviet film industry actively released documentary films about life of remote regions of the country, giving its audience an opportunity to make virtual trips across the “sixth part of the Earth.” This phenomenon had a political background: unification of leading creative and scientific forces for creation of the screen image of a multi-structured, multinational, and successfully developing socialist country within the frameworks of state project “Cinema Atlas of the USSR.” The article is to introduce into scientific use an archival documentary “Jews on the Earth” (1927) directed by Abram Room, a film telling about the state program for Jewish settlement of the northern Circum-Pontic region. The socio-political, cultural, and ideological context of its creation is analyzed. The study draws on little-known visual and textual archives, as well as on data of the Soviet periodicals and excerpts from the screenwriter V.B. Shklovsky’s theoretical heritage. Due to specifics of silent cinema, the film “Jews on the Earth” is a kind of cinematic text, consisting of approximately equal number of alternating film frames and text credits written by Vladimir Mayakovsky and Lily Brick. The film story is a sequence of episodes describing agrarization of the Jewish population, its “exodus” from the destroyed miasteczkos to the fertile southern lands. In the course of the research, it becomes obvious that this film is an example of the propaganda films describing the success of early Soviet colonization projects. The method used by Abram Room when working on the “Jews on the Earth” was a creative combination of the documentary and feature film techniques, allowing the film not just to convey dry information, but also to highlight socio-cultural context of the events. The film’s significance was in its contribution to the visual chronicle of the Soviet colonization and to the development of the myth of existence of the Jewish community in the USSR. It is concluded that this film, even overcoming the frameworks of purely propagandistic narration and becoming an outstanding phenomenon of cinematographic art, remains a significant example of the visual anthropology of the Soviet period, as well as a multilayered historical source that has not lost its relevance for modern scientific study.

IN THE MASK OF A MARTIAL ART FILM: A CHINESE FILM ADAPTATION OF WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE’S HAMLET

Abstract: The release of Chinese film director Feng Xiao Gang’s The Banquet in 2006 declares the first Chinese Hamlet film adaptation. Feng chooses to sinicize the play and interweaving cultural elements by framing the play into a Chinese martial art film and by applying Chinese Nuo mask and its variation in his filmic interpretation of the play. The frame of martial art film is heavily featured as the Chinese cultural touch deployed by the director in the transformation of a western play into a Chinese film, which proves to be an effective tool for displacing the western cultural elements with Chinese cultural ideology and principles. The use of the Nuo mask motif throughout the film is discussed with the following examples: 1. The director’s choice of using the Chinese Nuo mask in his adaptation of the play-within-the-play scene in the film, displacing the Mousetrap with its Nuo drama counterpart. 2. The director’s re-interpretation of Hamlet’s hesitation and madness, his representation of the Ghost and his symbolic approach to the building of characters by adopting a white paper mask. 3. The director’s transfer from the Ghost of Old Hamlet to copper carved mask symbolization. 4. The director’s building of characterization by using one’s own face as the mask. The framing of martial art film and the adoption of Nuo mask are the tools of sinicization in the process of the intercultural film adaptation of the western classic. The success of the film has explored the connections between the two cultures and challenged the transfer of Chinese culture into a western play.

‘No better story to tell’: framing anti-colonialism in the aid exposé documentary

ABSTRACT This essay identifies the emergence of the aid exposé documentary, a set of contemporary films that overtly challenge the moral benevolence and economic function of humanitarian and development aid. These films are situated within a broader twenty-first century public critique of aid but constitute an aesthetic divergence from the images of suffering found in the long, intertwined history of visual media and humanitarianism. Against that backdrop, aid exposé films frame themselves as anti-colonial correctives to aid’s structural exclusion, elevating conflicting notions of entrepreneurialism and the process of popular sovereignty. The essay argues that the aid exposé is a malleable genre, mobilised to both consolidate and challenge the conditions of neoliberalism, and thus marks an important popularisation of the ongoing ‘aid debate’.

Cortical network responses map onto data-driven features that capture visual semantics of movie fragments

Research on how the human brain extracts meaning from sensory input relies in principle on methodological reductionism. In the present study, we adopt a more holistic approach by modeling the cortical responses to semantic information that was extracted from the visual stream of a feature film, employing artificial neural network models. Advances in both computer vision and natural language processing were utilized to extract the semantic representations from the film by combining perceptual and linguistic information. We tested whether these representations were useful in studying the human brain data. To this end, we collected electrocorticography responses to a short movie from 37 subjects and fitted their cortical patterns across multiple regions using the semantic components extracted from film frames. We found that individual semantic components reflected fundamental semantic distinctions in the visual input, such as presence or absence of people, human movement, landscape scenes, human faces, etc. Moreover, each semantic component mapped onto a distinct functional cortical network involving high-level cognitive regions in occipitotemporal, frontal and parietal cortices. The present work demonstrates the potential of the data-driven methods from information processing fields to explain patterns of cortical responses, and contributes to the overall discussion about the encoding of high-level perceptual information in the human brain.

Музыкальная цитата как смыслообразующий фактор в кинотекстах XX–XXI веков (на примере Рапсодии op. 79 № 2 И. Брамса)

This research is devoted to quotation of the music of the Rhapsody opus 79 No. 2 by German composer Johannes Brahms in three motion pictures: “Song of Love” (1947), “Le Phantôme de la liberté” (1974) and “De batter mon Coeur s’est arrȇté” (2005). These films, made by outstanding film producers Clarence Brown, Luis Bunuel and Jacques Audiard, pertain to the genres of biography, comedy of the absurd and drama. The article sets the goal of revealing the meanings arising upon the interaction of the musical quotation with the cinematic texts of the films. Analysis of three films proves that the music of Brahms’ Rhapsody placed in cinematic texts that are different in their genres, styles and time period, conveys a unified field of significations, and in one of the examples brings out the cinematic text to a symbolic level. In several examples it is possible to observe a synthesis of the musical quotation with the video sequence, while, on the other hand, in two examples the musical quotation enters into audio-visual and semantic counterpoint with the cinematic texts. In addition, the musical quotation creates intertextual dialogues between the source of the quotation and the cinematic texts, emphasizing a change of the screen chronotopes, reflecting the protagonists’ feelings and thoughts, enhances the recipient’s emotional response of the events in the film frame, focuses the recipient’s attention on the film’s culmination sections, and influences the motion pictures’ compositional structures. Keywords: Johannes Brahms, cinematic text, musical quotation, meaning, cinematograph, intertextuality in cinema, movie music, Luis Bunuel, Jacques Audiard, Clarence Brown.

Framing aquatic life

Just as the film frame is always filled with image, regardless of how few objects might inhabit the space of that image, so too the contents of the aquarium extend to meet its edges, to produce what artist filmmaker Phillip Warnell, in an essay accompanying his film Outlandish: Strange Foreign Bodies (2009), describes as ‘the sea with corners’.1 Like the aquarium tank, film imposes a geometric form on what is by nature expansive, amorphous and, potentially, infinitely continuous, were it not for the containing limits that package its contents for observation. In this essay I move from the entwined histories of aquarium tanks and screen technologies to explore the specificities of the encounter between screen images and other framed visions of aquatic life. I start with a broadly historical trajectory, through an exploration of the mirroring in the development of screen and aquarium exhibition practice. The formal echoes identified...

Stop-Motion Photography Techniques

Stop-motion is an animation technique in which an object is physically manipulated and photographed on a single frame of motion picture film so that it appears to move on its own. The object is moved in small increments between individually photographed frames, creating the illusion of movement when the series of frames is played as a fast sequence. With the advent of digital imaging technology, stop-motion can also be implemented using digital photographic cameras, and not only using traditional cinematographic cameras that allow photographing a frame by frame, which contributed a lot to the spread of this technique, and also facilitated the ability to control the final results of the speed of movement With computer software specialized in combining a set of stills into one video. There are difficulties facing maintaining the continuity of the event carried out with stop-motion because there is absolutely no event at all, as well as the difficulty of maintaining homogeneity between successive frames in terms of exposure, clarity, color and composition, in addition to the difficulty of showing the reality of movement and controlling its rhythm to an already static body. Therefore, in this research we will study all the techniques of stop-motion photography, whether those related to shooting, animating or transition between different shots, in order to find out how to achieve continuity, homogeneity and realism, in films implemented with stop-motion technique.

Female “Lone Wolves”: The Anti‐Social Heroine in Recent Television Series

Female “Lone Wolves”: The Anti‐Social Heroine in Recent Television Series

Monomodal and Multimodal Film Representation of the Metaphor: “Time Passing Is Motion” An Analytical Approach with the Conceptual Integration Model

“Metaphors often allow us to express subtle nuances of thought and feeling that would otherwise be inexpressible” (Ritchie, 2006, p. 2).Inspired by this citation and the latest developments of cognitive science, in this paper we shall attempt to analyse the cinematic representation of the conceptual metaphor “Time Passing Is Motion”. The principle tools in this study are the theory of Conceptual metaphor and the Conceptual Integration model. We will discuss the editing of film frames as ‘montage of mental spaces’ whose interaction and integration leads to the emergence of concepts, ideas and feelings in the spectator. The cases examined are extracts from two films, “The Last Laugh” by F. Murnau (1924) and “I Am Twenty” by M. Khoutsiev (1965), and serve as examples of research that seeks to explain the emergence of time metaphor in cinema. We attempt to give a response to the question how the cinema can communicate abstract signification to the observer. This article argues that the metaphorical transfer of abstract thought is possible in the cinematic medium, by means of image schemata and via the activation of cognitive mechanisms of the spectator. Could the theory of Conceptual integration help us to untangle and understand the process of film metaphor construction, and its impact on the spectator?

A cockpit of multiple measures for assessing film restoration quality

In machine vision, the idea of expressing the quality of a films by a single value is very popular. Usually this value is computed by processing a set of image features with the aim of resembling as much as possible a kind of human judgment of the film quality. Since human quality assessment is a complex mechanism involving many different perceptual aspects, we believe that such approach may scarcely provide a comprehensive analysis. Especially in the field of digital movie restoration, a single score can hardly provide reliable information about the effects of the various restoring operations. For this reason we introduce an alternative approach, where a set of measures, describing over time basic global and local visual properties of the film frames, is computed in an unsupervised way and delivered to expert evaluators for checking the restoration pipeline and results. The proposed framework can be viewed as a car or airplane cockpit, whose parameters (i.e. the computed measures) are necessary to control the machine status and performance. This cockpit, which is publicly available online, would like to support the digital restoration process and its assessment.

Automated Analysis of Ultrasound Videos for Detection of Breast Lesions

Background: Breast cancer is the second cause of death among women. Ultrasound (US) imaging is the most common technique for diagnosing breast cancer; however, detecting breast lesions in US images is a difficult task, mainly, because it provides low-quality images. Consequently, identifying lesions in US images is still a challenging task and an open problem in US image processing. This study aims to develop an automated system for the identification of lesions in US images Method: We proposed an automatic method to assist radiologists in inspecting and analyzing US images in breast screening and diagnosing breast cancer. In contrast to previous research, this work focuses on fusing information extracted from different frames. The developed method consists of template matching, morphological features extraction, local binary patterns, fuzzy C-means clustering, region growing, and information fusion-based image segmentation technique. The performance of the system was evaluated using a database composed of 22 US videos where 10 breast US films were obtained from patients with breast lesions and 12 videos belonged to normal cases. Results: The sensitivity, specificity, and accuracy of the system in detecting frames with breast lesions were 95.7%, 97.1%, and 97.1%, respectively. The algorithm reduced the vibration of the physician’s hands’ while probing by assessing every 10 frames regardless of the results of the prior frame; hence, lowering the possibility of missing a lesion during an examination. Conclusion: The presented system outperforms several existing methods in correctly detecting breast lesions in a breast cancer screening test. Fusing information that exists in frames of a breast US film can help improve the identification of lesions (suspect regions) in a screening test.

Symbolic Representation of Tun Dr Mahathir: Visual Analysis of a Malaysian Short Film

The fragmented frames of a short film which comprise still images and signs can be visually explored in the representation of timing. The significance of such a visual representation can lead to the formation of synchronised discursive structures that reflect upon political and social time summons in the past, present and future. The issue is that the political and social agendas mapped with ideas of a pre-election campaign and synchronised with time summons may indirectly provoke viewers’ perception of a social actor through semiotic implications. Using a single component framework consisting of Kress and van Leeuwen’s (2006) grammar of visual design, representational and viewer network and Hall’s (2006) reception theory, this study explores the way agency is targeted visually towards the idea of a political change with pre-election sentiments of a prime minister. On one hand, through the choice of images Tun Dr Mahathir’s past political successes are symbolically represented. On the other hand, he is signified with message of ‘hope’ for a better future to his country and nation. Keywords: political discourse; short film; symbolic roadmaps; timing; visual representation

Геообразний світ мандрівної літератури Софії Яблонської: сучасна візія

The article analyzes the importance of travel literature in the genre of belles non-fiction for shaping the geographical images of countries and nations. In this aspect, the travel prose of the Ukrainian writer, cinematographer, and photographer Sofia Yablonska (1907–1971) was used. Genetic types of sensory verbal geographical images, in particular visual, audio, kinaesthetic (based on smell (odoriferous) and touch (tactile)) are distinguished using the travel novels “Charm of Morocco” (1932), “From the country of rice and opium” (1936), and “Far horizons” (1939) as an example. The artistic syncretism of geographical representation of S. Yablonska is noted (verbal images are harmoniously supplemented with photo and film frames, drawings). The wide spaciousness of the author’s thinking, which extends from specific places to oceanic and celestial infinities, is revealed. The content of S. Yablonska’s travel literature, which is essentially the author’s autobiogeography, is demonstrated by the mega-metaphor of home – the global world is like a native home for her. The natural and anthropocentric parallels of S. Yablonska’s literary texts employed to create geographical images are identified; the author’s accentuation on chronicling the sensations related to the natural features of the lands depicted (depiction of the sun, sea expanses and coasts, mountainous regions of China and volcanoes of Malaysia, etc.) is emphasized. The realism of verbal geographical images is highlighted. They are placed in specific geographical coordinates and characterized by completeness, diversity, grasp of the essential features of the phenomena depicted. The talent of the author’s thinking capable to see the general in each individual case is shown. The combination of descriptive and rational approaches (comparative as well as cause-and-effect methods) for creating cultural images of cities and people is noted. Author’s attention to the negative consequences of the European colonization on the autochthonous culture, the mentality of the enslaved peoples, and the promotion of their liberation in the future is emphasized. The conclusion is drawn about a harmonious blend of the Ukrainian and high-culture European civilization, in the personality of S. Yablonska who enriched the European culture with the ideas of openness and tolerance. The geographical images of exotic countries created by the writer are analyzed in the context of modern humanistic philosophy of travel, the concept of aestheticism, the natural and ethical concept of happiness, and the concept of environmental behaviourism. Key words: travelling literature, geographical image, geographical visual, geographical audial, geographical kinestet.

Cinematic Representation of Chinese-Indonesians’ Trauma in Jason Iskandar The Day The Sky Roared

This research analyzed a contemporary independent Indonesian film entitled The Day the Sky Roared (2015) that was directed by Jason Iskandar. This 10-minute silent film talked about the anxiety of Chinese-Indonesians through the eyes of a mother and her daughter regarding the historical trauma of the May 1998 tragedy. The fact that the film was produced about 17 years after the tragedy suggested the director’s awareness that the trauma remained due to the absence of reconciliation and closure. This research would show how the short film frames the incident and trauma of the Chinese-Indonesians. The research was a combination of trauma studies and film studies that focuses on the visual analysis of the film’s cinematography and mise-en-scene to show the cinematic representation of Chinese-Indonesians’ trauma. The findings show that the portrayal of Chinese-Indonesians still strongly suggests unrelieved psychological discomfort, albeit, at different levels, that is closely related to the traumatic past and the pervasive stereotyping of Chinese-Indonesians.

Traditional ethnocultural communities in Soviet cinema: «Hunting and reindeer breeding in the Komi region»

Introduction. Visually-anthropological experiments in Russia have more than a century of history, reflected, in particular, in the corpora of Soviet ethnographic films in the 1920s – 1930s. This article, based on textual and visual materials, introduces information about the ethno-film «Hunting and Reindeer Breeding in the Komi Region» (1927) as a multi-layered visual-anthropological document. The paper considers the specific features of film history on the evolution among Komi hunters and reindeer herders during the period of cultural and economic transformations in the USSR in the second half of the 1920s, created in the mentioned film, in the context of the Soviet film production. Materials and Methods. Due to the specifics of silent cinema, the final film «Hunting and Reindeer Breeding in the Komi Region» is a kind of cinema-text consisting of approximately the same number of film frames and text captions interspersed in the narration. That is why the method of analyzing the film as a visual-text work was its research transcript – presentation in the form of a film text. Results and Discussion. Based on the archival data and published works of contemporaries, the authors traced the evolution of the film project in connection with parallel processes in the state national-cultural policy and in ethnographic science. Conclusion. Considering the film in the socio-historical context, the authors conclude the phenomenon of ethnographic film as an effective form of research knowledge, which allows fixing the cultures of what is being filmed and shooting, and broadcast in time not only actual events, but also their so important for anthropological study emotional context; as well as the potential of cinema as an informative historical source.

The Cornish Knitting Pattern Series film charts

This visual essay appraises the film charts (shooting diagrams) used in the production of The Cornish Knitting Pattern Series in 2016. The film charts are a surprising key element arising from this period of film practice, being as they were a pragmatic part of the preproduction planning. However, through analysis of my films after production the charts have become a major source of visual thinking, notation, documentation and a significant aid to reflection on the work carried out. The Cornish Knitting Pattern Series is a collection of 16mm animation landscape films that use a single frame production technique to translate Guernsey knitting patterns into film, and in doing so set up a structural relationship between that of a knitted stitch and a frame of film – drawing out analogies between both forms of production. In this visual essay the charts' roles will be considered in the translation of the Guernsey knitting patterns in terms of preproduction visualization of the knitting patterns; notation documentation during the pro-filmic event; and retrospectively as a record of processes and production. To do it will illuminate the film practice relationship to mistakes, and the location as the editing system process that is a key aspect of the film series processes – wherein gesture, landscape and film are 'knitted together' in the film as a material object.