Centre for Ideas - Theses
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ItemResounding cinema: exploring misconceptions of the nature and obligation of nonfiction film through the challenges of the ‘music documentary’( 2015)This research analyses how nonfiction cinema might best elucidate abstract attributes of music and its practice. The word ‘documentary’ as applied to film connotes and is typically understood as a representation of actuality. As a musician and filmmaker, I argue that Music, with its propensity to elude representation, requires a cinematic approach liberated from documentational forms. This paper maps a conceptual framework for nonfiction cinema that conveys abstract ideas via sensory cognition. It illustrates a difference between documentational moving image formats, whose primary concern is representation, and modes of cinema whose primary concern is to seek knowledge through Idea creation, aesthetic construct and the sensorial and transformative qualities of cinema. Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy of concept creation provides a framework through which to understand nonfiction cinema as a mode of thought and sensorial creation. I argue that meaning is not to be found, but created, and that the significance of such nonfiction cinema lies in its capacity to reconstitute thought and agency. This research is conducted through stages of the production and assembly scene edits from 170 hours of footage for a feature film I am making with master guitarist, Bill Frisell. The creative component is eight scene assembly clips (provided on DVD), with a total duration of 104 minutes. I produced, directed, shot and edited the material, which has not yet been professionally sound mixed or colour matched and graded. I approach this material with the particular combined experience of having worked as a full-time professional musician through thirty-three countries over fourteen years, and eleven years full-time as a film director-producer and cinematographer. Through a rhizomatic layering of cinematic, musical and philosophical ideas, and my own practice and experience, I hope to revalue the role of creative construct in nonfiction film.