View from Laira Bridge through the defunct railway bridge to a moored boat on The Laira. The red pops on Kodachrome.
4 March – tidal
3 March – the ascent
Great shot of an angler climbing up from the rocks below West Hoe. Strangely I can’t recall seeing this in 31 Days but it must be there!
2 March – grainy granary
The granary in Millbay Docks seen from the sea front – now demolished. It always looked like a particularly stern church.
1 March – follow the sun
Travelling shot from the rear of a car travelling back from Brighton.
One Second a Day
Daily, starting from the 1st March, I will select a clip from my Super 8 archive that was digitised at Deluxe Soho for the Marjon-funded research project Freeing the Archive. Each day I will skim the library in FCPX, stop on a frame and append one second of video to the timeline. I won’t look at the growing edit until it is finished. By April I will have a 31 second edit to put with the other 3D3 students’ One Second a Day video diaries.
Jem Cohen – A Day in the Lives
Close Up Film Centre, Hoxton, London
https://www.closeupfilmcentre.com/film_programmes/2015/jem-cohen-a-day-in-the-lives/
Nineteen Hopes for an Activist Cinema
By Jem Cohen
1. That it tells me something I don’t know and questions as much as it answers.
2. That it holds a mirror to the broken world.
3. That it takes a new shape, somehow unlike that of the movies before it, especially those within its own genre.
4. That it not dehumanise or take cheap shots.
5. That it comes as a shock, even if the shock is that of discomfort or joy.
6. That it not look like a music video, or smell like an advertisement.
7. That it is somehow mysterious, ambiguous, strange.
8. That it is somehow funny.
9. That it inspires me to rage.
10. That it inspires me towards peace.
11. That it not be guided by the Hollywood Commandments (Film as a Business, Movies as Commodities, Worship of Celebrity and Spectacle, Life in three Predictable Acts).
12. That it is more than propaganda.
13. That it avoids sentimentality.
14. That it speaks truth to power.
15. That it speaks truth to the powerless.
16. That it picks at the scabs of history.
17. That it makes me want to get to work.
18. That it strives for honesty.
19. That it blows my mind.
Jem Cohen is a filmmaker. This text is taken from the programme for his festival Fusebox, at Ghent in 2005.Vertigo Volume 3 | Issue 3 | Autumn 2006
PhD Start
Today is the first day of my AHRC-funded PhD centred on my collection of Super 8 films.
Cinematic City
Cinematic City is a film commissioned by Plymouth Arts Centre. It had its premiere with two outdoor screenings next to the sea at Plymouth’s Hoe Lido on 15 & 16 July 2011
The following proposal was chosen by the commissioning panel at Plymouth Arts Centre
strategy
Using audio material from SWFTA films, such as the Westward Diary local news programme, I will create a montage of sound to capture echoes of the past. The archive has, for example, episodes of Westward Diary featuring the narration of Kenneth MacLeod, which ran on the ITV channel in the South West from the late 1960s. I intend the sound elements to act as a springboard for exploration, filming the urban built environment in Plymouth using digital SLR technology – a Canon 5D MkII camera that produces an exquisite visual aesthetic, a hybrid of ultra-high quality still and moving images that enable the work to be viewed on a small screen and as a large-scale projection onto the exterior of buildings.
I will make a moving image artwork of 3 to 5 minutes duration which will be delivered to audiences on urban screens, including the Plymouth Big Screen, and online via Vimeo, YouTube or iTunes, and using portable devices. The film will work effectively as an installation piece, or projection where the image is foregrounded, but will also have a richly textured soundtrack to be enjoyed on headphones or during cinema projection.
context
I have recently been developing a personal film–making practice by focusing on the remediation of archive material through the process of digitisation, which allows for new meanings and contexts to be created. In 2009 for my postgraduate studies I made the film Sea Front from my personal archive of Super 8mm source material of Plymouth. The silent filming was mixed with contemporary, but not contiguous, sound recorded on location. Sea Front received the Trick of the Light Award from the London Short Film Festival and a Media Innovation Award in the Independent Film category. In the same year I worked with artist film-maker Kayla Parker to produce the short moving image artwork Teign Spirit which used archive material collaged with new audio and high definition digital imagery.
The Cinema City Artists’ Moving Image commission will enable me to develop my area of practice further, and to explore my connection with the city through the long–forgotten sounds of local television from the 20th Century. The audio is evocative, partly because it is very much ‘of its time’ both technically and sociologically, but also because it was produced to be heard in a domestic environment accompanying the images on the small screens of the day. The TV station was truly local to Plymouth, with its purpose–built Derry’s Cross studios situated right in the city centre – its transmissions permeating the urban landscape, but also reflecting the city back to itself.