Credit: Film still from Love Meetings by Pierre Paolo Pasoloni, 1965
“No actors were used in this film. It was lived by men and women who gave a moment of their lives to provide an experience of cinéma vérité.” Such was the voiceover that accompanied the opening scene of Chronicle of a Summer by Jean Rouch and Edgard Morin (1961), featuring scenes filmed in post-industrial Paris, late at night and at dawn. It is then followed almost immediately by a discussion at a dinner party. One man clarifies: “What Rouch and I want is to make a film based on the question: How do you live? […] We will start with you and then ask other people too.” In the next scene, we see a woman walking around the streets with a microphone in her hand, asking people if they are happy.
For the fourth (# 4) and final event in the ‘Precarious Film Practice’ series, Eva la Cour and Mia Edelgart will examine the vox pop format as a precarious method used together with live editing by inviting viewers to what will be by definition an unpredictable, collaborative and polyphonic interview. With video and audio transmitters on their backs, Edelgart and La Cour will take to the streets, while an editor back at Art Hub will edit the broadcast live. Their potential meetings and interviews with people on the street during rush hour will be edited together with selected excerpts from film history, in which vox-pop elements feature. Once again, their use of the term ‘precarious’ is intended to imply a common interest in an ‘aesthetic of potential’ - an aesthetic that embraces both technical obstructions and social impulse.
The live stream can be watched at www.arthubcopenhagen.net
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MORE ABOUT PRECIOUS FILM TRAINING
In this series, the artists Eva La Cour, Mia Edelgart and Joen Vedel set out to use live editing as a method of articulating issues of representation, historicity, temporality and technological agency in training and the ‘nurturing’ of affective sensitivity and attention. Live editing is a form of cinematic practice in which the sequence of images is not arranged in a pre-established narrative and temporal structure, but instead is performed in front of an audience in new combinations of live recordings and existing material. Live editing thereby paves the way for new groupings that hover between thinking and image, archive and social process. In this context, as a performative and situated cinematic expression, the film’s technological conditions and visual expression encounter bodies, time and space.
ABOUT TESTING GROUND
Precarious Film Training is part of Art Hub’s ‘Testing Ground’ programme series, in which artistic researchers can put their ideas and methods to the test. It is a forum in which they can try out their artistic process in front of an audience or their peers. Artists can validate relevant themes and share their research in a new, experimental space, in a region somewhere between academic and artistic practice, between studio and exhibition space.
