Sans Elle or (Alone and Palely Loitering)

Date of Submission

Winter 2019

Academic Programs and Concentrations

Film and Electronic Arts

Project Advisor 1

John Pruitt

Project Advisor 2

Jacqueline Goss

Abstract/Artist's Statement

The representation of dreams and memories is most eminent towards internal visualizations and enforces a desire to externalize these visualizations. A photographic process is established to replicate the internal visualization of one in order for another to share the experience of a viewfinder: through this viewfinder may we discover internalizations formed by the artist. This process of creating impossible moving images (due to the unattainability of other minds) had been a prime goal through my cinematic development. In relation to dreams and memories, one could only possibly experience such through possibly closest form of perception into the mind, a moving image with 23.97 frames per second. The exploration of distinction between the two comes off through this past narrative of possible reality.

In working with my advisor John Pruitt on crafting a script which would be able to attain both a dream and commemorative quality of history, the viewer may experience the distortions that occur of our own dreams and our own memories through time. As the protagonist travels through his poetic landscape that he is bound to, he rekindles moments with figures of his past, both negatively and positively. In loosely adapting from John Keats’ La Belle Dame Sans Merci through his dreamlike imagery utilized to have the protagonist exist as being controlled by the landscape, discoveries on myself and my history were made of which were not directly initially apparent; most predominantly my projections of my memories and experiences with romance forced implicitly into the narrative. In working with two actors, of which were in a genuine relationship outside of the space of the film, further distortions of mine and their relational understanding became evident.

In the visual cinematic style used for the project, I used a distorted 20mm lens (with a vignette and fisheye effect) for all of the wide masters in order to create a further feeling of dissonance from reality and distortion of memory and inversely for all the longshots I used an 85mm lens and edited them together one after the other to produce a combative effect for the viewer.

The atmosphere surrounding the protagonist is implicitly expressed as a narrative element as it contrasts the events occurring to him, the environment: serene, while the experiences: bizarre. Furthering the attempt towards thrill and unnaturality, nearly all sound used is drastically disparate from expectation: as the dream occurs, the audience experiences sound through animals, bamboo, and trains, the ladder of which meant to enforce an idea of movement through space and time. The protagonist is essentially meant to be constrained to fall into the following sequence, just as the dreamer may experience a forcefulness of their dreams.

Through dreams we may find our desires and through memories we may find our truths grounding us to those desires.

A creator may only attempt a replication of such.

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Open Access

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