I’ve been going about this all wrong.

The week felt like a pile of bricks was dragging behind my every step. It made the group discussion harder to navigate and I was so disappointed how much I struggled to articulate my thoughts cohesively. Nonetheless, the process was therapeutic and although I left feeling scrambled, my thoughts have eventually sorted themselves out.

The relaxed group discussion with Paul and the 3 other students revealed how vast everyone’s ideas are. Both the simplistic or complex nature of each idea is exciting and I look forward to hearing these initial concepts develop. My concept was centred on abstract cinema and how this form can still achieve an audience response and or interpretation without a narrative structure. After fleshing out why I was focusing on this, an epiphany came when Grace highlighted how I am “running away” from a narrative or story that will always exist, even in abstract cinema. And there it was. The realisation that I’ve been going about this all wrong. Abstract cinema is not what I’m interested in, it’s the interpretation or response the viewer can produce! It has been through ‘abstract’ cinema’s ability to realize this that I’ve been leading myself down the wrong path.

I’m fascinated by how each person can find different meaning in the same piece. The way we project our current state of being onto what we watch. How one viewer may notice a prop, a character’s minute reaction and another viewer may miss or dismiss something. How you might view and read a film differently from one day to the next.

After reflecting deeper on the group discussion and taking on Paul’s feedback, I have also been reminded that it is OK to not have a plan. And as much as I resist, there doesn’t always need to be a reason behind everything we do.