Category Archives: reviews

Week 04: I Love Your Work

‘I Love Your Work’ is an interactive documentary by filmmaker Jonathan Harris. The film explores the lesbian porn industry in New York City.

What interests me about this project is the constraints set around it – the filmmaker spent 10 days with nine separate women, and filmed 10 seconds of footage of them every five minutes. What results is a series of raw and intimate clips – 2,202 of them, in fact – which force us to think about intimacy and the realities behind fantasies.

I didn’t actually view the entire documentary, but I watched the five-minute trailer and the preview section of the website which shows you what to expect. The viewing process is also another interesting constraint of the film – you must purchase $10 tickets which grant you access to the documentary for 24 hours. However, only 10 viewers are allowed per day. I think this is a really deliberate move by the filmmaker to challenge our concept of instant gratification which is so prevalent in our modern lives (not to mention in the world of porn, too).

There is about six hours of footage in total. The interface through which you chose from the 2000+ fragments is very interesting, as you get to choose between three modes:

1) Tapestry interface, where you can scroll through the days/times and it tells you which person’s video you will watch.

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2) Timeline interface, which shows the beginning time and end time of each person’s day.

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3) Talent interface, which gives you a grid of all nine women from whom you can pick.

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I wonder if a project with these kinds of constraints, content and design would ever be able to be produced using software like Korsakow.

Week 03: Gaze

This week I watched the k-film Gaze which I found on the Korsakow website’s showcase section. 

The film is about how we encounter strangers in our day to lives, without ever knowing their story or their experience of the world. There are twenty fragments to this piece. Many of these fragments have internal-monologue-like voiceovers of the male strangers who see a woman walking through the city. The content of their discussion seems to provide an insight into the predominant ‘male gaze’ with is ripe with desire and objectification.

I like how you can select either a low, medium or high quality viewing of the k-film, as this means that if you have a slow internet connection, you’re not penalised. However, what I found interesting was that this is the first k-film I have seen which stitches together its video fragments with cross-fade photographs as opposed to videos.

All of the fragments have been edited to black and white, with the exception of spot colour on the lips and scarf of the main protagonist: a woman who is seen walking through the city.

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Each time you click the red woman, you are given a viewing window of her with three preview windows on the right hand side showing three men’s faces you can choose from. When you select one of these, it takes you to an interface with a viewing window and two previews below, and eventually one of these previews becomes the girl. When you click on her it takes you back to the original interface. It goes through this cycle about three times until finally you arrive at an end SNU of the girl finally talking and giving her perspective of how she is perceived by strangers.

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The feeling of the film becomes quite eerie as you get deeper in to it. There is a background track which plays the entirety of the time you are in the k-film, which also adds to the somewhat sombre mood.  The footage comes across as almost obsessive, and I found myself starting to feel sorry and sympathise with the girl after each clip. I think the filmmakers have made a very effective piece which highlights problems with femininity in our society, and the inescapable reality of voyeurism.

Week 02: Gaza Sderot – Life in Spite of Everything

Gaza Sderot is one of my first personal encounters with an interactive non-linear documentary. The user experience is very exciting for me. I like the interface of the film because it denotes the physical divide between the cities of Gaza and Sderot, and helps place me in an appropriate mind-frame to consume and process the content which is to come.

The clips are quite visually pleasing tome, as they give an insight into two cultures through the personal lens of the residents. The film shows footage of their daily livelihood, intercut with interviews and music. I find that this makes the Palestinian-Israeli conflict very personal and emotive.

One of the first things I noticed was that when one city’s clip finishes playing, the remaining city’s clip autoplays. I still am unsure how to think about this function, as Seth pointed out in our labs that autoplay can be very counterproductive in an interactive piece as it reduces the audience’s physical participation. However, in this instance, it also helps give the artefact a sense of flow and rhythm (which, in my opinion, ends up being one of the positives of the piece).

The short two-minute clips hold your attention for just the right amount of time. Viewers are given the opportunity to continue the story by character, date or city. There is also an option to browse clips by ‘topic’ which is like a thematic tag cloud of various keywords.

I read on SBS that the producers of Gaza Sderot created a television documentary from the videos afterwards, but it was not as well received as a linear version didn’t have the same impact. They quote, “it’s great to see online work that really uses the uniqueness of the medium to tell what can feel like an old story in new ways.”

I think it is great that this type of documentary is archived online and remains here into the future. As the world evolves around us, perhaps one day this will be looked back upon as a very sensitive look into the tenuous times in Israel and Palestine. Because it is immortalised online, we are able to continue interacting with, commenting on, and sharing the footage. For me, this harks back to the point mentioned in the first week of IM1, that interactive documentaries are designed to be grazed on. I think I will enjoy revisiting this work in the future and gaining a different experience from it each time.