Experimental Filmmaking with 'In Between Places' and Personal Moving Images

A year ago I was walking down the street to test, for the first time, how long it would take me to walk from my village-home to my town-centre studio. (An hour it turns out). I was recording an audio note for

Elizabeth Hammond

, reflecting on our recent game of Exquisite Corpse.

We had recently seen a drawing made by Frida Kahlo and Diago Rivera using the ‘Exquisite Corpse’ method. It was in the Surrealism Beyond Borders exhibition 2022. (You may know the game, did you ever draw a head then fold the paper to hide your drawing, pass the paper, and have someone else draw the torso? And keep folding and swopping?

Well Elizabeth and I had recently revived the game and co-drawn a dreamscape at her kitchen table. I was remembering this, and specifically how the action of folding the paper was ‘breaking’ a thread of thought and joining it to another.

I became interested in the crease, the way that the imagination fell into the fold, and re-appeared in someone else’s hands. It seemed to me like the crease became a fold in time: connecting other places, moments, and ideas. Like ‘a cut’ in a film; joining us in acts of visual time travel.

Now it’s September and the autumnal chill is seeping into sun-gold afternoons. I am playing a game of exquisite corpse again, but this time as part of an Experimental and Personal Filmmaking course with Rouzbeh Rashidi at The Berlin Art Institute.

I have created a sequence of moving images (shared with you here), and these will be joined with other 2 minute submissions that are being made by other students on the course to create a single stream or ‘exquisite corpse’ for our reflection.

I’m not going to say much about the moving images I’ve shared here. I will enable comments on this post instead so you can tell me what you noticed and felt when watching the video.

I will say that I found myself reflecting on how it feels to try and express myself verbally.

And what I think of the ways in which I (so-called-)succeed and (so-called-)fail to communicate. And I took great pleasure in collecting all the pauses from a 60min video of me talking to camera and returning them to the silence where there is no need to use words. The movement does the ‘speaking’ and generates an image.

The In Between Place that I am learning to inhabit more fully is after the thought and before the utterance; after the idea and before the form; during the dream and before the dreamt; it is after leaving and before arriving.

Do I catch you now, between things?

And in the spaces here, watching my film, what emerges in your consciousness — in between the images — and with the experience?

Let me know below / in the comments.