justintdorsey

[justintdorsey]

THANK YOU PROF. TAJIRI! & THANK YOU BOONE!

[justintdorsey]

Final cut

[justintdorsey]

#boonedoc

[justintdorsey]

[justintdorsey]

#boonedoc

[justintdorsey]

#boonedoc

[justintdorsey]

[justintdorsey]

The hardest part to filmic editing may be sound. In the end of our film “Home”, Boone talks via Skype with one of our interviewers. The sound isn’t the best, Skype is to blame. But I like the quality: it’s worth rendering. I’m harkening back to “In Defense of the Poor Image” by Hito Steyerl.

[justintdorsey]

[justintdorsey]

On Procrastination & Art

In “Home”, Boone Nguyen mentions--what I found to be the heart of his story--that he is afraid of not being able to collect the stories (particularly of his mother & aunt; the rest of his people are included by context and extension) because of time and that inevitable human passage: death. He cited procrastination as a serious problem. 

This makes time and all of the things that happen within time vital elements to his thought and approach. By the time I’d talked with Boone via Skype, he hadn’t made it to his aunt’s village yet. He had to attend and act in a specific capacity for his nephew’s wedding. Boone may or may not have reservations about not getting to the rural area yet. But, I hope he sees all of that which leads up to collecting the stories as background to his narrative, artistic and personal.  

[justintdorsey]

I’m always looking for was to employ the convention of detournement in films. Here I used the message board between me and Boone after our Skype call had ended, likewise the interview. Mis-using this medium accomplished a feel of openendedness as if to have left Boone within the medium for a later conversation. Although the conversation went dead, the possibility of reconvening was alive and possible--of course this is the way we assume things will be. We defer to and rely on mediated connectedness. Fascinating.  

I should say that I used this space to roll credits. It was never used for the final cut. But it was there as experimental b-roll. 

[justintdorsey]

Curation was a theme we sought to explore but the documentary took us in another direction. However, just as the reclaiming qualities of land and body are rather fresh in the way we receive art, so is the manner in which art is packaged and seen.

[justintdorsey]

Family is the comprehensive theme of Nguyen’s work. There is something to be said about how body connects to land and the rejuvenating qualities of flesh and earth.

[justintdorsey]

On location with MAs and Alex, shooting Lipka’s exquisite film. I’m sort of like the DP.

[justintdorsey]

Fragment of an interview with the esteemed Boone. It’s been terrific covering his work and persona.

[justintdorsey]

Filmmaking is Always in Beta

I realized that the hardest part of documentary is finding the stakes, what exactly can be lost, what is at risk. What is contingent on what. That is the defining line, the guts of documentary. It is what separates shit from roses. 

[justintdorsey]

During class, a colleague said recently that we’d be able to namedrop Mehrnoosh Fetrat’s name in future conversations. Such bragging would look something like: “O, we went to school together. She was my classmate.” I totally agree. But, the fact that we have the opportunity to write and talk about Fetrat’s increasing body of work presently is even more fulfilling. 

America, Fetrat’s most recent film seems to fall somewhere in the Cinema of Sensations. It is a film that begs of the viewer to keep up by using his/her faculties. It is multilayered and presents a variety of characters--all bound together by fate and circumstance. All of the characters are humanly flawed and there are no purely bad guys. This allows viewers to identify with whomever. 

There is a feel of the dreamlike that asks one to shuttle back and forth between this confined but comfortable lived-in Iranian bourgeois space and the ‘place where dreams are made of’ (or made to appear that way), America.