FilmProcess June 2nd

CONFERENCES!!

I have proposed the film FOUR HEARTBEATS at two conferences and both have accepted it. The first is Evolving Forests, at Dartington. In fact, this was the main impetus for making the film and finishing it on time as I proposed it in about November. There is no paper associated with it, it is just a film on a reel with other films that play on a loop over 2 days. The conference is about forests. I am making the connection with lovemaking in the forest. I hope there is enough of a connection now that I have 'finished' the film. My 80 word biog and 250 word statement are:

Annie Watson is a BAFTA nominated filmmaker, academic and PhD candidate. Prinicipal Lecturer, and Head of Film Production at Sheffield Hallam University, her research focuses on adaptation and reimagining words as images. As part of this research, Annie also works with poets to make filmpoems. A separate, pedagogical area of interest is in walking with students and colleagues as an act of learning and making in the beautiful Peak District as well as exploring urban, industrial Sheffield.

Four Heartbeats, cinematically reimagines a scene from Françoise Sagan’s 1954 novel BONJOUR TRISTESSE, where teenage protagonist Cécile recalls lovemaking deep within a Mediterranean pine forest. Through the adaptation process, I have created a structural model with three clear elements; a recollection, a reconstructed memory, and a feeling of ‘being in there’ in the moment. This three part structure moves through black and white photographic images, into an abstracted technicolour notion of what it feels like to relinquish an ordered version of reality and give in, instead, to sensation.

Using still photography, no actors and an experimental soundtrack, FOUR HEARTBEATS focuses on rhythm, sensation, structure and atmosphere as tools for adaptation from words to images and sound, placing the viewer inside the mind of the teenage protagonist.

This is one of a series of reimagined scenes from the novel I am completing for my PhD.

I sent in an abstract to the 2019 Literature/Film Association Conference: Reboot, Repurpose, Recycle in Portland, OR, USA, and have got it accepted. This feels like quite a jump up for a number of reasons. It's the first time I will deliver an academic paper on my own (without being in a pair or a group), although I did present the SOLAR project at Psychogeographies in 2016. There is the possibility of it being published in Literature/Film Quarterly. It's in Portland, which is a 13 hour flight away. I haven't written the paper. It feels like I'm moving into an academic world and I've previously been surviving in film festivals. The abstract I wrote is this:

Four Heartbeats. Cinematically reimagining a scene from BONJOUR TRISTESSE through a female viewpoint.

I propose Four Heartbeats, a 3 minute film and associated paper, cinematically reimagining a scene from Françoise Sagan’s 1954 novel BONJOUR TRISTESSE, which examines the question of authorship and identity through a female viewpoint. Sagan’s teenage protagonist, Cécile is an intradiagetic narrator, (she is both narrator and main character of her own story) and she often changes the course of the narrative when she is ‘inside’ a memory, recalling it differently. It is this complexity of viewpoints that, through experimentation within the adaptation process, has been simplified into a structural model with three clear elements; a recollection, a reconstructed memory, and a feeling of being in there in the moment. This three part structure that moves sequentionally deeper into abstraction, differs from the traditional 3 Act Structure of beginning, middle and end, reaching instead an electrifying, abstracted notion of what it feels like to be here and now, right inside the moment.

There is a strong rhythm in the writing, both in form and content, replicated in the film, through timing and edits. The senses are heightened, particularly the internal abstracted feeling of being kissed on a Mediteranean beach under the scorching sun. Otto Preminger’s 1958 film version positioned the viewer at a distance, watching the entwined legs of the couple hiding their modesty under a beach umbrella, but my reframing of the scene, positions the viewer inside Cécile’s mind.

Using still photography, no actors and an experimental soundtrack, FOUR HEARTBEATS focuses on rhythm, sensation, structure and atmosphere as tools for adaptation from words to images and sound.

I am going to be in Croatia for the next week, and am going to start writing the paper. I have no idea how long it needs to be to read out for 16 minutes (including 3.30 minutes for the film). I'm reading Helen Sword's Stylish Academic Writing, and both critical guides to BT again.