Abstract
Screened at 2010 Visions du Réel as part of a curated program of Tracy Emin’s 25 short film oeuvre. It is further discussed in two essays printed in the festival catalogue and to Koppel’s invitation to sit on the Jury Regards Neufs.
This work is a 55 minute filmed interview with Tracy Emin in her Fournier Street kitchen, as part of a curated program of her films for 2010 Visions du Réel, Switzerland – one of the most esteemed international documentary film festivals in Europe. The interview is by Professor Jean Perret, Head of Cinema at Haute École D’art et Design, Genève Geneva University of Art and Design. The third collaborator in this project was Kathleen Bühler, curator at the Kunstmuseum, Bern. Emin’s film work is immersed in questions of self and locating the artist film maker within the film work – at once creating a link with an idiom of documentary film which reflects on and interrogates its own making process and eventual form. This is perhaps significantly marked by Dziga Vertov's ‘Man With a Movie Camera’ (1929). The film’s compositions are graphic and carefully structured to consider the vertical and horizontal planes, giving a formal and somewhat alienating quality to the image. This is juxtaposed with moments of sheer intimacy and sensuality. In his manifesto The Council of Three (1923), Vertov writes that ‘the main and essential thing (of cinema) is the sensory exploration of the world through film’ (Vertov 1998: 53). My first question in this research output was whether the intimate and sensory aesthetics suggested by Vertov could be translated to the filming of Emin’s interview to create and evoke a relevant quality of non-verbal articulation. This output forms part of a broader and on-going interrogation of the supposed boundaries between the notion of documentary, which claims an assumed objectivity, and a film which declares a personal and subjective view - what one might term an artist film.
This work is a 55 minute filmed interview with Tracy Emin in her Fournier Street kitchen, as part of a curated program of her films for 2010 Visions du Réel, Switzerland – one of the most esteemed international documentary film festivals in Europe. The interview is by Professor Jean Perret, Head of Cinema at Haute École D’art et Design, Genève Geneva University of Art and Design. The third collaborator in this project was Kathleen Bühler, curator at the Kunstmuseum, Bern. Emin’s film work is immersed in questions of self and locating the artist film maker within the film work – at once creating a link with an idiom of documentary film which reflects on and interrogates its own making process and eventual form. This is perhaps significantly marked by Dziga Vertov's ‘Man With a Movie Camera’ (1929). The film’s compositions are graphic and carefully structured to consider the vertical and horizontal planes, giving a formal and somewhat alienating quality to the image. This is juxtaposed with moments of sheer intimacy and sensuality. In his manifesto The Council of Three (1923), Vertov writes that ‘the main and essential thing (of cinema) is the sensory exploration of the world through film’ (Vertov 1998: 53). My first question in this research output was whether the intimate and sensory aesthetics suggested by Vertov could be translated to the filming of Emin’s interview to create and evoke a relevant quality of non-verbal articulation. This output forms part of a broader and on-going interrogation of the supposed boundaries between the notion of documentary, which claims an assumed objectivity, and a film which declares a personal and subjective view - what one might term an artist film.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Place of Publication | Film Festival |
| Publisher | Visions du Réel |
| Size | 20 minutes |
| Publication status | Published - 17 Apr 2010 |