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usnewsaggregator-blog · 7 years ago

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Film made using only public surveillance footage

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Film made using only public surveillance footage

This movie takes “The Truman Show” to a whole other level.

Chinese film, “Dragonfly Eyes” by Xu Bing, was created using only surveillance footage he found online. An indie film, “Dragonfly Eyes” has been making the international film festival circuit, debuting in the United States at the New York Film Festival in early October, after which it will head to Colorado for Denver International Film Festival.

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The film, in its trailer, claims to be the first feature film without actors, actresses, or a camera crew. Instead, Xu uses voice actors to dub over the silent surveillance footage from live streams, webcams and CCTV footage to tell the story — bringing the idea of a (dragon)fly on the wall to life.

According to the YouTube description, ‘the “plot” of the film centers on a female protagonist named Qing Ting, which means dragonfly, who undergoes cosmetic surgery. Meanwhile, her love interest gets jailed trying to please her, and when Qing Ting changes into someone else, he changes into her.

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In order to craft the story, Xu and his team poured over about 10,000 hours of public surveillance videos to make the 81-minute movie. The screenplay was written by poet Zhai Yongming and writer Zhang Hanyi.

Xu, who is the vice-president of the Chinese Central Academy of Fine Arts, isn’t a filmmaker and this is his first film. He is a printmaker and installation artist who was born in Beijing but lived in America for 18 years before heading back to China.

Still from the trailer for “Dragonfly Eyes” a feature film made up entirely of surveillance footage by Chinese artist Xu Bing.

(Xu Bing via YouTube)

The film includes many of the horrific events often caught on security tape: cars falling into sinkholes, people committing suicide, car crashes and even someone getting struck by lightning, using many of these moments to emotionally connect with the presented narrative.

The film deconstructs the ideas of Big Brother, constant surveillance, plastic surgery, privacy and internet fame while exploring a new way of making a film.

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Some of Xu’s previous work includes his most well-known work, “A Book from the Sky,” an installation featuring books and hanging scrolls using faux Chinese characters.

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nofomoartworld · 7 years ago

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Hyperallergic: Cobbling a Movie Together from Surveillance Footage

Dragonfly Eyes: Qing Ting Zhi Yan, direct by Xu Bing (image courtesy TIFF)

TORONTO — Chinese artist Xu Bing has made a career out of appropriating and recontextualizing objects and cultural artifacts, while playing with a viewer’s sense of recognition of such materials. His first major work, “A Book from the Sky” (1987–91) was an installation of what looked like traditional books and scrolls, but the writing on them, while looking like Chinese characters, was completely meaningless. In 1990, for “Ghosts Pounding the Wall,” he made rubbings on the Great Wall. He authored Book from the Ground, a novel written entirely in symbols, meant to be understood by anyone in the world.

Now, Xu has premiered his first feature film, Dragonfly Eyes, at the Toronto International Film Festival. The movie tells a story of love and obsession through footage culled entirely from videos uploaded to Chinese streaming sites. While there are clips from vlogs and dashboard cameras, most of the images are from personal, consumer-bought surveillance cameras which stream 24/7. The result is an omniscient, omnipresent, voyeur’s eye view of the world. We sat down with Xu and a translator at the festival to talk about how he put this film together.

* * *

Dragonfly Eyes: Qing Ting Zhi Yan, direct by Xu Bing (image courtesy TIFF)

Dan Schindel: What are these Chinese sites where users post surveillance video, of all things?

Xu Bing: There are maybe four or five big websites that stream the content of security cameras. People can buy these cameras and set them up to stream to the sites, and everybody can watch the broadcast. They started to appear in 2015. There are lots of people who are willing to share their lives or footage this way.

We went to meet some of the people who posted videos we used in the film, to ask their permission. [Depending on privacy settings], some streams have GPS locations, and we can go to find them. We were surprised there was a stream from a Buddhist temple, for example. The reason they do this is to make an advertisement about them, so that believers will come. Also, it shows the practice of Buddhism, like prayers and rituals, to outsiders.

DS: Did you start with a script and then find the footage you needed for it, or did the footage you find dictate the story as you made the film?

XB: From the streaming channels, we knew what kind of locations we could have, and so the writers [Yongming Zhai and Hanyi Zhang] wrote the script based on that. There was a lot of footage from the temple and a milk factory, so we used those as main settings.

When they started to write the story, the main idea was to make it about plastic surgery. They knew that there would not be one real person in the streams to follow — we needed to have several, maybe ten. So we had to change the face of the main character a few times.

When we started editing, we had the script, which was written the same as any normal feature film script. But we sometimes couldn’t find the “actors” performing what the script needed, so we changed it based on the footage we were able to find. So it was really a collaboration between the script, the streams, and the editor, and changing all the time. Sometimes new footage would appear on a website that was good, so we’d try to put it in the film, adding new scenes or dialogue.

Dragonfly Eyes: Qing Ting Zhi Yan, direct by Xu Bing (image courtesy TIFF)

DS: What is an example of such a change you’d make?

XB: What is very complex is that in all this footage we find, these people are not acting for us, but we need to match our dialogue to their lips and their emotions, facial expressions, things like this. In hours of footage, we need to find maybe the two people in a frame who are matching the dialogue of the scene and the physical gestures of the characters. When we found a good part, we’d adapt the written dialogue to better sync to their lip movements and expressions.

DS: You incorporate footage of accidents – a woman falling in a river, a collapsing construction site, a plane crash – that aren’t part of the story. What was the purpose of your inclusion of that material?

XB: Action like this is something very specific to surveillance camera footage. These cameras are rolling 24 hours, so they are able to record these types of events, which take place in one or two seconds, which normal film crews cannot catch, not as easily. Seeing all these accidents, it made my vision of the world change a bit. It shows that as a society, we cannot control everything. Anything can happen at any minute. This film is about a very classical, intimate love story between two people. I wanted to put that story inside this dangerous world, and see how all this danger can have an effect on this simple love story.

DS: A lot of your work involves appropriating and cobbling together material. This film seems like an extension of this.

Dragonfly Eyes: Qing Ting Zhi Yan, direct by Xu Bing (image courtesy TIFF)

XB: The work of mine I compare it most to is Book from the Ground. With both Dragonfly Eyes and Book from the Ground, I started out on them working with material that was not very mature at the time. During the 10 years of making the book, the use of emoticons exploded. They were everywhere, and now in all of the countries, we are using mostly the same emoticons.

With Dragonfly Eyes, it’s the same, I think. When I started in 2013, there wasn’t much surveillance footage one could find. And then in 2015, all these streaming websites appeared, and we could get a lot of material.

DS: What effect do you think this self-recording has on people, on society?

XB: The connection between people nowadays and surveillance cameras is very different from how it was during the Cold War. Until recently, surveillance cameras were all controlled by the government. But now individuals, citizens, can use them for themselves. That’s something very new. It’s a way for them to express themselves and prove themselves to the world — a way to put a mark on the world. Nowadays, we’re like a post-surveillance civilization. You can say that Dragonfly Eyes is a post-surveillance film.

DS: If everyone is doing it, then it’s not surveillance; it’s a new level of reality.

XB: In Chinese, the word for surveillance is jiānkòng. Jiān means “watching,” and kòng means “control.” So when people stream their own surveillance footage, they feel they are in control.

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Xu Bing’s Dragonfly Eyes will continue to screen at the Toronto International Film Festival through September 17. Check the schedule for specific showtimes.

The post Cobbling a Movie Together from Surveillance Footage appeared first on Hyperallergic.

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foundintranslationagain · 7 years ago

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May Huang - Final Portfolio Excerpts

Introduction (abridged)

The bolded poems are the ones I will discuss today.

The nine poems I chose to translate for this portfolio reflect the ways I have been introduced to poetry, as well as the kind of poems that speak to me as a writer who is interested in work that is inherently ‘bilingual,’ influenced by both English and Chinese language and culture. The portfolio begins with classical poems that I read as a child and concludes with contemporary poems that I will likely encounter most in the future as I engage with Hong Kong’s contemporary literary landscape. In between are works that reveal literary exchange and influence transpiring between Chinese and English poetic traditions. The range of poems posed formal and stylistic challenges that deepened my understanding of translation—in theory and in practice.

The portfolio is organized somewhat chronologically: it begins with two classical Chinese poems from the Song Dynasty, “Staying in the Bo Xian Temple on a Snowy Night” by Su Shi (the one after which I was named) and Partridge Sky by Li Qingzhao. It then segues into “Waiting for you, in the rain” by Yu Guangzhong, a Taiwanese poet who studied in the U.S. and incorporated elements of Western poetry into Chinese poems written with a classical undercurrent.

The three pieces that follow were written by authors who were significantly influenced by the work of Western poets; Zhai Yongming was heavily influenced by Sylvia Plath, Zang Di wrote “The Society of Digging into Fresh Soil” as an elegy to Seamus Heaney, and Ya Xian wrote “Chicago” based on Carl Sandburg’s poem of the same name.

The next two translations are of Chinese poems that were written in Western forms, an Italian sonnet by Feng Zhi and a sestina by contemporary Hong Kong poet Zhong Guoqiang. I finally conclude the portfolio with “Mosquitoes,” another work by Zhong Guoqiang, ending on a note close to home.

_____________________________________________

1) 雪夜獨宿柏仙庵

蘇軾晚雨纖纖變玉霙，小庵高臥有余清。夢驚忽有穿窗片，夜靜惟聞瀉竹聲。稍壓冬溫聊得健，未濡秋旱若為耕。天公用意真難會，又作春風爛漫晴。

Staying in the Bo Xian Temple on a Snowy Night

Su Shi

Night rain turns into sleet, fine as jade while pure winds blow on temples aloft Suddenly, something pierces my window mid-dream, startling me awake Yet the only sound I hear in the quiet dark Is the bamboo leaves’ quick cascade Hardly past a winter cold myself, how will fields recover from the autumn draught? Heaven’s intents are hard to guess, For soon again the spring breeze will blow Color and brightness into our days.

2) The Society of Digging into Fresh Soil

Zang Di —In Memoriam Seamus Heaney, 1939 – 2013 The Ireland I love. Far enough But never foreign. Every time I dig up the orchids of Ireland, my spade sinks into fresh soil, finding beautiful strength in lonely words. Deep green tips of leaves can sway an attentive heart. How might the stamen, swaying in the wind of our words, already the prisoner of poetry, look upon human life? Only the sweat of our brows can fill the pit We dig into the ground. And in this age of hardship only such a pit can deepen the trust between us. So pick up the phone and ring up your reflections— They have persisted for far too long In the scenery of scenery. Love is ice. If you do not believe me, give it a try. The last day of August went by like an elephant. Don’t look at me like that. I am now a blind man. A bottom line like this needs a blind man like me. Delmore Schwartz, after whom Bellow modeled Humboldt in Humboldt’s Gift, once said, with much sorrow— “For like a gun is touch.” The situation is indeed grim but you, who persisted in opening the forge’s oily shop curtain, taught me to strike like the hammer, to trust every touch.

3) Sonnet 25

Example of 1st stanza: 案頭擺設著用具，架上陳列著書籍，終日在些靜物裡我們不住地思慮；

Àn tóu bǎi shè zhe yòng jù, jià shàng chén liè zhe shū jí, zhōng rì zài xiē jìng wù li wǒ men bù zhù dì sī lǜ;

Tools placed on a table top, Rows of books arranged on shelves, Such still life around ourselves All day long lost in thought; Speaking voices do not sing , Routine motions do not flow; Blankly ask how birds should know To soar by flapping wings. Only in the still of night Will bodies breathe meter and rhyme, Feel the air at play inside, Salt water play with blood inside— And maybe hear, in a dream, The sky and sea calling out our names?

4) Mosquitoes I don’t know when we began eating at the nearby restaurant not wanting to trouble mother on New Year’s and other family gatherings until the time we spent in the old house grew shorter and the mosquitoes swarming in from all directions grew fiercer, forming a herd, ready to risk everything, so close I could see the space between their fuzzy antenna and empty stomachs I slap, slap the empty air without pause. Mother goes about her daily chores, utterly indifferent to the house full of mosquitoes About time to go, mother. Massaging her belly, she walks out and says no, face dimmed by lamplight, because of an upset stomach Perhaps because, seeing the white hair on her temples, she ate some of the vermicelli left out since breakfast this afternoon Why wasn’t it warm why didn’t we microwave it before she took a bite? Mother stayed home on the night of the winter solstice, refusing our company I saw a sky of mosquitoes slowly, slowly land on walls of the old house, the kitchen counter, the chairs, the desks, the cups, the bowls, the chopsticks… Time belongs to them, now. Over the phone, father says don’t worry, Mother is asleep, and my head starts to ache on the West Rail Line As if I were in the old house with mosquitos invading my skull over and over, thin wings quivering at high frequency, piercing through a pain I had forgotten

案頭擺設著用具，

架上陳列著書籍，

終日在些靜物裡

我們不住地思慮；

#mayhuang #week10 #bilingualpoetry #foundintranslationagain #submission

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