Dreamers Often Lie from rmit media student on Vimeo.

Synopsis

Dreamers Often Lie, is a dissection of the original play Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare. Taking the three major themes present in the play, love, violence, and youth, we’ve utilized the key techniques in poetic and experimental cinema to reconstruct these fragments into a new way of telling this story, whereby narrative is abandoned for theme and evocation in the aim to fragment, and then reconsider, a story loved and recognised in the cultural zeitgeist.

Process & Gain

Using the three prompts, we each wrote a list of things we related to the word, for example, love – kissing, holding hands etc. Knowing we wanted our piece to be reminiscent of a Korsakow film we started to film each of the items on our list with the idea in mind that each of these shots would be like a mosaic stitched together at random.

However, Korsakow does not allow for clips to play together, and thus our associational approach would not work on this platform. We instead chose to edit together a more traditional, linear film, while still using a grid format as Korsakow does.

Moving the project from Korsakow to Premiere pro meant we could break away from the mold of the grid, taking full use of the frame in parts, in the hopes of surprising and re-approaching our viewers. It also meant we had full control of the soundscape, which runs through our piece as a constant. We were able to control ‘the musical return’ back to certain clips in key moments of the film, and better control the themes and ideas of the piece.

Creator Reflections:

Leslie – Through the process of editing my piece I noticed how each shot placed together differently creates a different way of reading it. It was interesting to see how when I placed one shot next to another shot it changed the way I felt about it, much in the same way as the Kuleshov effect. What I learnt from this experience is the power of the space between images, the space that allows viewers to make their own meaning through the placing of images side by side. 

Juanita – Abandoning narrative while still attempting to convey a mood or emotions, with strict boundaries on the piece, was challenging. As filmmakers, usually we rely heavily on dialogue or narrative context to do the emotional heavy lifting. As a result, I better noticed the ‘cinematography’ of the clips themselves, with no other context to guide me. However, when introducing the clips that play alongside the others, a new context is granted. Watching them back it is striking to see the same clip turn from grotesque to tender, from eerie to comforting, from disgusting to heartbreaking, purely based on the clips that it accompanies. 

Nadia – Before making this experimental film, I struggled a lot with self-enforced barriers on what I could conceptualise and create. When we decided to break down Romeo and Juliet, it allowed me to take a step back and break down my personal barriers, and just let go of the reins. This was heavily supported by my interest to fragment media but also to understand more about what boundaries contain both the filmmaker and their media work. Further, as this was my first time delving into a non-narrative film, I was pushed out of my comfort zone and with the end result, now have proved to myself that I have the ability to make a film of this sort – and many more in the future!