This week’s reading by Frankham discusses the fragmented form of documentary, including a broader definition of montage, and the construction of lists, and how it is being used to create a means of expression that further includes the audience. The ideas she presents can directly relate to Korsakow and how it works to create non-linear works.

Realtional asethetic (Nicholas Bourriaud, 2002) refers to how the asethetic of the work itself creates a space that allows the audience to connect and respond to it. This can be related to how Korsakow films rely on the audience’s involvement in order to be viewed as it relies on the audience clicking on the possible videos presented as previews on the main frame. This brings the audience closer to the work as they create their own meaning of the associations formed between clips by choosing which clip they would like to view next.

She also discusses how categorical links are used in poetic documentary to draw relationships between elements. This is also evident in Korsakow films as they require the makers to categorise their clips by using in and out keywords to create patterns and form relationships between vision that may not be normally associated.

In her discussion of associational form she demonstrates how relationships are created through “conceptual alignment, emotional impact, visual similarities and territories of gesture” going on to say that they create relationships between elements that are more emotional than logical. This reminds me of last week’s Matt Soar reading in which he states that he believes the patterns (keywords) in Korsakow films should describe the meaning of the clips rather than their aesthetic. With saying that, how would we as media practitioners create emotional links between our ‘noticings’ rather than grouping them in a logical way? Would it require more planning when making a K-film, rather than the find and shoot process that we used for our sketch films? Would we plan what we would film, or just plan the keywords to reflect an emotion? Or would we centre our K-film around a particular emotion?

The questions that these ideas raise suggests to me that if used in this way, we would be thinking more about the audience and how we want them to feel while watching our K-films. This contradicts Adrian’s point that we should be making our films for ourselves and not have the audience in mind. It also contradicts the idea discussed by Frankham (and has been mentioned by other academics aswell) that the audience would be able to form their own meaning from poetic documentaries and the relationships created by patterns in K-films. “The potential for a more keenly felt and critical engagement may be enabled by relinquishing absolute control over the way the work is read” (Frankham) – describes just how K-films allow the audience to engage with the work in their own way and take their own perception from it.

Another interesting point I took from the reading was Philip Rosen’s belief that a documentarian should transform raw artefacts of the world (he calls them documents) into meaningful constructions. This idea touches on the way in which we have been using Korsakow to film ‘raw artefacts’ and give them meanings through the way we construct our K-films and SNUs. As Frankham says, “in a poetic approach to documentary, the issue becomes one of finding the balance between offering a definitive, unquestionable single pathway at one extreme and presenting a loose collection of raw documents at the other. It is a process of centralizing and restricting meaning, making knowledge accessible through the ordering and contextualising of material. In effect it is the organisation of complexity.” This is evident through Korsakow as if you link your clips with keywords that offer no order or no clusters of similar clips, then they become more randomly generated and forming meaning from them can be difficult. However, if you link clips with keywords that create clusters of similar clips, more meaning can be formed by the patterns observed.

Frankham also states that poetic documentary “is a process of curating, selecting, ordering, sequencing, connecting, providing context and signalling intention.” This description can be matched to the processes we went through when making our K-films as we discussed in our tutes and is a good way to track the progress of your film.