After watching ‘Uncle Yanco’ in class (a great experimental short by Agnès Varda) I decided I really like the playful style of the film and the way that the voice-over dialogue was a bit like listening to somebody have a silly conversation with themselves, meandering through all sorts of different topics and musings while also getting deep and delivering some heart felt wisdom to the audience. This sort of audio dialogue kind of set the visual aspect of the film free in my eyes as the burden of delivering the bulk of the context and content is freed up and Varda was able to get really creative both visually and in the way the visuals were edited.

I wanted to do something similar in my film and had all sorts of ideas about philosophical discussions or monologues I could use as a voice over. I also wanted to capture the same sort of playfulness, artistic and care-free attitude to ‘Uncle Yanco’ that drew me in in the first place. I also really wanted that classic french voice to be the backing for my visuals, only problem is that I don’t know any french people who have the time to sit down and recite all the stuff I would have put in and I didn’t want to do the voice-over myself because I don’t have the right kind of voice so I decided on using a french sounding robot and to create a small segment where a machine asks some of life’s unanswered questions and then states that it can’t know because it’s just a machine and that it’s not even french and has never tasted a baguette or a cigarette. This kinda comes as electronically generated retorts with beeps and colour blips on the screen with simple text in french. I was hoping to put a modern spin on the classical french discussional art-house kind of dialogue while also making a statement about the trivial and hollow nature of technology. For this I used ‘Sound of text‘ created by Nick Pierson.

Continuing on the French art-house influence with a twist, I realised I had filmed the perfect thing to accompany this french sounding robot and that came in the form of my friend dancing around the backyard while smoking a cigarette and wearing a stripy shirt looking like he’d just walked out of a bar in Paris. There’s something really funny to me about watching him dance around to old classy french music in front of a tree full of someone’s undies. It’s a kind of clash of high and low culture and the best part is that it’s all natural, the way he’s moving and the scene that unfolds was all just happening while we undoubtedly drunk for some reason or another (because nobody dances that well sober). I watched it back and was wrapped because it’s the kind of thing you could never expect somebody to be able to act or do on purpose and it just fit my needs so well. I even got a few shots of my other housemate painting while this was unfolding to add to the ‘Uncle Yanco’ vibes…