Screening Room & Teatro Amazonas
Screening Room & Teatro Amazonas
Screening Room, Dir. Morgan Fisher, 1968/2010, USA/UK, 6 mins
WHO
It’s (wry commentator on the tacit conventions of cinema) Morgan Fisher, again.¹
PROPOSAL
A simple first person, Dundee-specific tracking shot that approaches the cinema/ screen/ space the film will eventually be shown in.
WHY
Brimming with paradox, Screening Room asks you to think about: conventional cinema as the projection of non-site-specific identical films/experiences everywhere, the physical traditions of a cinema space (which should normally be invisible), and the reality of our (collective, site-specific) viewing.
A special version of Screening Room was filmed by Andrew Begg for this screening.
Teatro Amazonas, Dir. Sharon Lockhart, 1999, USA/Brasil, 40 mins
WHO
It’s (the politically astute ethnographic attention and unfazed photographic formalism of) Sharon Lockhart, again.²
PROPOSAL
Investigate first and second order viewership. You are hereby invited to watch and listen people listening to other people (in the same space but out of sight), and to think about that.
WHY
Set in a Brazilian opera house³, a fixed camera gazes at a local audience from the stage: a choir, hidden in the orchestra pit, sings and gradually fades to silence, slowly allowing the sounds from the audience to become increasingly noticeable and eventually merge with the sounds of you, our audience in Dundee. In doing so, the film explores what it is to view collectively (and how even a fixed camera position doesn’t let us see everything) and how that collective can be constructed across space and time, by film.
¹ Morgan’s about for the festival, and his films are interspersed through the programme.
² Come and see her film Lunch Break on Wednesday 24.
³ made famous by Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo