FilmProcess 27th April

The Creative Process and chance discoveries.

By writing about every step during the making of Four Heartbeats, I am also documenting the creative process and hoping to learn how this process may mean that writing a script and then directing the script is not a particularly helpful process for me. The connections that I am finding to the project are currently on high alert, and I'm finding that by consciously writing them down, I'm aware of what influenced and inspired the thinking behind each new direction. Filmmaking after all, is a series of decisions that are made in order to communicate something.

An example of how wide the influences for this project are, and how open I am to unforseen, new possibilities happened yesterday. On a whim, I popped into the auction, and saw a painting that I liked, placed a commission bid, and no one else bid on it, so I won it.

The artist is Christopher Day, and searching for him and his other works didn't get me very far, but it did throw up another Christopher Day, an artist in Australia, who had been selected as a group of 15 artists to reimagine SUNBAKER an iconic photo by Max Dupain taken in around 1937, in a 2017 exhibition Under the Sun

I was drawn, firstly to the exhibition graphic as I am working with circles over still images, and recreating sun on beach, using vintage imagery. The document was designed by Elle Williams.

Browsing through the catalogue, the reimagined works are diverse and fascinating, and the one that most resonates to me for this project is Khaled Sabsabi's 229, a multi media installation, where he 'subverts the iconic photograph and what it signifies by expanding the creative possibilities of the politically loaded gesture of appropriation and inversion. Reframing the image and playing with the essential codes of the photographic medium, Sabsabi has recreated the negative of the Sunbaker. Multiplied, hand-painted and digitally animated, the photograph resonates loudly and deeply as a symbol of the 229 years since colonisation. Visceral, 229 challenges the representation of race by inverting black and white, forces us to question the imperceptible alterations that disappear with endless recurrence, and interrogate notions of copyright and origin – ultimately asking the viewer to be actively engaged and socially responsible.'

229, 2017. Three-channel videowork with sound 3.49 mins, hand-painted laser prints on transparency and C-type prints, Courtesy the artist and Milani Gallery, Brisbane. (from catalogue).

I would like to be brave enough to create one image like this for the one where Cécile is lying on the beach. Perhaps this is what I'll do for the next one.