#Nas Correntes de Luz da ria Formosa | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

jonjost · 7 years ago

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In 1996 I received two digital video cameras, after having worked in film (celluloid) for 33 years. I understood immediately that this was an entirely different media and I wished to learn about it as much as I could. One of the differences was cost, and its effects. Film, which is costly, did not allow me to go film whenever I wished or felt the impulse. Digital video did not have this quality and I told myself that I needed to retrain my instincts, and gave myself the “job” of going out every day to shoot a minimum of 15 minutes or more. Previously when shooting I had a kind of economic counter unconsciously in mind, a discipline that kept me from shooting unless I was “sure” – DV relieved me of this but I needed to break my life-long habit of being concerned about the costs. Nas Correntes de Luz was the result, an unintended film. The camera I used was a Sony VX700, their first consumer DV camera. It had a peculiar focus quality which I found immediately attractive, though apparently other people were so bothered by it that they pulled the camera off the market within a year.

Nas Correntes de Luz da Ria Formosa

1997-1999 | Digital Video | Color | Sound | 112 minutes

Camera, edit, and concept : Jon Jost

Music: Carlos Paredes, guitar, very much altered on computer. Shown at Rotterdam 1999, Festival dei Popoli, Florence

Nas Correntes de Luz da Ria Formosa (In the Rays of Light of Ria Formosa) is a kind of documentary shot over a period of 3 months in summer of 1997 and then edited over the next 2 and a half years. It utilizes the aesthetic nature of DV, and in this case of the particular quality of a specific DV camera, the SONY DX700, a camera which was withdrawn from the market quickly owing to apparent complaints about its focusing system. LUZ willfully uses this “problem” as the basis of its aesthetic: it is all a little to very much out of focus, which with this camera also produces a kind of aura or bloom in areas with brighter light. I liked this quality very much and shot about 12 hours of material in the small town of Cabanas, Portugal, and a bit in nearby Tavira. The work is a spiritual portrait of a place and time. It is, as is Cabanas, willfully slow, meditative, passive. It has no evident narrative, though I hope I was able in my editing and other choices to impart a kind of slowly developing momentum which functions vaguely like a narrative, or like the melodic line in a piece of music. Finally LUZ is about light, and philosophically about life, and our place on this planet, and its place in the universe.

Nas Correntes de Luz da Ria Formosa, along with London Brief, represent liberating breaks from the economic pressures and constraints of the film business, and are a direct effect of the existence of a new media capable of extraordinary aesthetic and technical range for utterly minimal financial costs. Need I say neither film would have been funded by the usual production sources and would not exist if done in a media which required the kind of financial resources the same works would have incurred if done on film.

LUZ was edited on a Pentium II based computer with Adobe Premiere editing, and a Miro DV300 DV card. Its production budget was well under $500.

“Nas Correntes de Luz Ria Formosa is a tour de force in which Jost employs a defective camera for a sublimely distracted variation on the city symphony film. The defective camera yields a range of out-of-focus images which emerge in the film as semi-abstract landscapes with blurred lines and edges. The images look more like paintings than photos, although movement, sound, a sense of off-screen space, and the sensation of stray, suspended moments in time contribute to a multi-dimensional effect that seems to transcend both painting and photography. Human figures pass through some of the images, but they play only transient and marginal roles in the overall narrative. The scenes and shots are evocative of city life, but with soft outlines that suggest settings of an entirely different sort. The implied author of these images seems caught up in a distracted gaze, one that is both averted and diverted – turning away from both the familiar and the dramatic, and finding a curious kind of peace in a sort of domesticated strangeness.”

Peter Hogue, Senses of Cinema

[For the full article covering other digital films of mine, see this.]

https://vimeo.com/ondemand/123730

In the Streams of Light In 1996 I received two digital video cameras, after having worked in film (celluloid) for 33 years.

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