Well, here we go.

I've officially started working on a new project.

(It doesn't have a title yet, but for now, I'm calling it any number of variations on "The Compendium Project" or #codewordcompendium.)

It's difficult. It's pulling me in deeply sometimes wherein I write, create images and research in a very pleasant frenzy; and then at others, I question the momentum and timeline behind the whole thing and feel like a complete, useless waste of space that will never be able to realise any of it to a standard where it might meet an audience.

I think one of the major difficulties in getting a foothold on the project, and simultaneously one of the great things that's drawing me in with such excitement, is that I'm working in a form I've never previously engaged in - that I've never previously even imagined in. Or rather - not allowed myself to imagine in. That's an important distinction.

Of course, it's all variations on a form: moving image with some nature of narrative (however oblique), the juxtaposition of images; their transmission either digitally via your screens or luminously projected onto a larger external surface; their publication in physical form on paper in ink - these are all mediums that I have to greater or lesser extent worked with in the past.

But it's not just these grosser forms - these artistic machines - that I'm varying the use of this time around. I appear to have conceived of this project in a way that breaks with the huge swathes of storytelling convention that have been imparted to me in one form or another over the years.

At the moment, I'm toying with the structure of filmic essays - fictionalised. Stay with me if you can: hybrid photographic essays with image montage, tableaux and dramatic scenes, married with text spoken as voiceover - sometimes in relation to, and sometimes divorced from what is seen on screen (or on the page). Et cetera, et cetera. By which I mean - I think that's just the tip of the iceberg.

If that all sounds very confused and confusing - believe me when I tell you it's no more lucid in my brain yet. But the closest way in which I can describe these encounters is as "poetic video essays".

Which of course makes me immediately recall the work of Chris Marker.

You know, I find it remarkable that what so much of contemporary popular culture has taken from Marker's La Jetée is the content - the story - the narrative premise of the work.

Far more interesting to me is the form. Still images. Voiceover. One of the most seminal time-travelling science fiction films told with what must have been, ostensibly speaking, a tiny budget. And coming in at roughly 30 minutes? Pure, crystallised brilliance. Boundless artistic and cultural value.

But I think I have always been interested in this kind of formal play; deviant poetic structuring - even from a very young age.

Perhaps this is why Hal Hartely's Flirt - which I think I first saw when I was about sixteen - still really remains one of the most influential works for me.

Its episodic nature. Its experimental triptych form where the plot mattered far less than the discoveries found in-between repetition and variation.

(I want to watch a film or a work of theatre where I know I am watching a film or a work of theatre - where my disbelief is not necessarily so suspended that I can't see behind the scenic flats or catch a glimpse of the boom at the edge of the frame - I'm using this as a metaphor of course.)

What happens in the place between the linguistic sign and the visual one? Can we see the writer's - the filmmaker's thoughts? Can we see our own?

What happens in the place between one element and another that is largely unrelated?

A line of text in one scene, and then the same speech in another completely seperate chapter?

And then, what happens when you repeat it? Reverse it? Pull it apart and reassemble it?

What happens between the gesture of a hand and a breath that comes as a complete surprise?

This is not to dismiss plot out of hand. But to put plot second to meaning created by allowing the shape of the work to reveal what it must.

Finally, a word on this from Michelangelo Antonioni (who else?) from an interview with Pierre Billard in 1958:

What people ordinarily call the 'dramatic line' doesn't interest me. One device is no better than another a priori. And I don't believe that the old laws of drama have any validity any more. Today stories are what they are, with neither a beginning nor an end necessarily, without key scenes, without a dramatic arc, without catharsis. They can be made up of tatters, of fragments, as unbalanced as the lives we lead.

From "Blow Up" (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1966)

in-between fragments

a tree yearns for the stars

Ground Rules