Framing film as research

I've been struggling to frame my recent film, Shoes That Walk Alone within a research framework, but after advice from Professor Virginia Heath, I wrote this:

How can one small moment from a walk, captured incidentally on film, be expressed within a wider narrative to form a fiction, and what does this tell us about the truth of this moment, in terms of what we see and what we are told?

A walk can last for hours, and any part or moment of that walk can be isolated and re-framed within a different context to give new meaning. In Shoes That Walk Alone, I was struck by the potential dichotomy of a momentary vision; a floating, motionless woman, and how this could be read in opposition to the reality, which was that we were both in a playful, relaxed and happy mood.

The ‘murdered woman’, as an introduction to detective narratives is commonplace. She is frequently seen bound, naked and violently sprawled. Through a female gaze, my ‘murdered woman’ is portrayed differently – there is no face, no evidence of violence, and she wears a swimming costume that has been chosen for the purpose of swimming, not glamour.

But there is a kind of erotic tension inherent in the play of sunbeams shining through the water, the extreme slow motion that shows you above and below the water at the same time, the weight of the body hanging in the lake, and the David Lynch inspired music, which hints at another world.

The spoken story never mentions a female character, just a pair of ‘red high heeled shoes that walk alone’, and the viewer is left to connect the missing elements of what they listen to and what they are looking at.

I like the fact that 'the female gaze' that I read and blogged about last night has found a place in the narrative, and that my research is crossing over itself, in influence and ideas.