Breathing Still 2020

Breathing Still 2020 is a 10-minute documentary essay film constructed primarily through stills and a pocket camera. In the cinematic mediation of memory the essay film may usefully cross tenses between the past and present to create the layered narrative-structure of a poem rather than a linear narrative. It may also portray, self-reflexively, “meditations on, the world […] at once confessional, and investigative of both the world and the enunciating self” (Rascaroli, 2009). The film takes the form of a voiced letter by me addressed to Rosa Luxemburg, a revolutionary Marxist who was assassinated in Berlin in 1919 during a left-wing revolution in Germany. The film is located in Berlin at the time of a general election in September 2017, when the far-right AfD party won significant numbers in Parliament. The film links the rise of the AfD in Germany to the rise of the fascist Freikorps in 1918 and the resulting Holocaust. It is conceived as an audio-visual warning to the spectator of the dangerous results of doing nothing. It is constructed through still images shot on a pocket camera and found footage from YouTube, shot on a smartphone; My methodology is that of a bricoleur; I suggest that the bricoleur does not work to a pre-conceived rational plan but constructs a database of material and then experiments with various different arrangements of elements to see if they will ‘work’ or not. This releases the bricoleur from perceived constraints in the conventions of mainstream filmmaking through genre, or the requirement for consistency in production values of images and sounds; the bricoleur therefore has the freedom to construct works through the transformational convergence of disparate elements to construct new meanings. This freedom extends to my choices of screens; Breathing Still may be shown in a black box in a single viewing or looped to play continuously on a monitor or screen in any choice of site.