I just got out of a Skype lecture with Anna Broinowski the Sydney based director and writer, known particularly for Forbidden Lie$ (2007) the documentary investigating accusations that “Forbidden Love” author Norma Khouri made up her biographical tale of a Muslim friend who was killed for dating a Christian.

I found this documentary one of the best I’ve seen and it was amazing to hear Anna give us an insight into what went on behind the scenes.

She is such an interesting and inspiring character… Something she said had a huge impact on me and it think will certainly have a long lasting effect on my work.

She told us about the third eye she has, that sort of floats above her as the cameras are rolling…She said when someone is screaming at her right in the face she’s thinking ‘is this blowing out the sound level, have I got enough battery for this’ …all the while the third, rational eye doesn’t allow what the persons saying to have an affect and let her be broken down. Not sure if this makes any sense but its definitely something I’ll be conscious of in the future.

Speaking of future work, project brief three was revealed yesterday. A self-portrait on someone we know. I have some ideas already and will be trying them out soon on someone I have in mind.

I’m interested in playing around with the 70-30% found footage spectrum we have to adhere to. Keen to start testing the limits of what kind of meaning, emotion and communication the found footage can offer. Start splicing together bits of celluloid… thinking of the found footage as a kind of ancestral lineage…orphaned footage… emphasising the contrast…letting disjointed things be brought together through the editing practice giving it a kind of metaphorical enallage.

Rachel gave an interesting example…say there’s some old historical footage of how not to chop your hand off with a piece of machinery, what is interesting to us now is the trams going past in the back ground…the context is ignored, it has an evolving meaning. That’s what we have to do. We have to have a particular attitude to the kind of material…use it in different ways…creative appropriation.

Bruce Conner’s video A Movie is a 1958 experimental collage film in which he cuts together snippets of found footage, taken from B-movies, newsreels, soft-core pornography, novelty short films, and other sources…It has a kind of political edge to it in terms of using the randomness to re-contextualise and subvert the footage, swapping back and forth between cowboys chasing native Americans and then the opposite. Cool stuff.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4FMjBtvsx2o

Another example below I found really effective and emotional…will definitely try incorporating some techniques into my own clip.

https://vimeo.com/77062487