Act 1, Act 2, Act 3, Act 3, Act 3, Act 3: De-centring the Climax as the Terminal of Dramatic Meaning Making in an Interactive Film.

 

Presenter: Michael Keerdo-Dawson 

Registration Number: 010

Institution: Tallinn University, Estonia 

Abstract: As part of my PhD, I am conducting artistic research into interactivity and filmmaking and reflecting on how interactivity opens possibilities and restrictions for the creative process. This paper will examine how interactivity and film dramaturgy complexify the meaning-making process. Playwriting guides, creative writing handbooks, and screenwriting manuals are replete with guidance on how writers should express their themes, as a reoccurring idea that underwrites the entire story through what the characters learn or how they change, proving their position on an issue, etc. But the majority agree that the theme is most clearly expressed at the climax of the story. The climax is where theme, character, and the narrative’s result often converge in the terminal of dramatic meaning-making; if the theme is established and elaborated on during a film, then its climax is where the film’s author expresses their position on the matter through the narrative’s result or a lack thereof. As part of my PhD artistic research, I have written and directed an interactive film, The Limits of Consent (orig. Nõusoleku piiril). The film follows a tree structure where the narrative splinters at the end of the second act and presents four nodes with two options, and thus five separate climaxes for the film. Each climax is significantly different in its character focus, action, tone, and, crucially, its expression of the film’s themes. The meaning that a film expresses may be transmitted in concert but received differently, the author of a story affects the perception of their audience through a communicative act that is narrative; this effect might be exactly what was intended, or it might fail completely, or it might land somewhere in the middle. There is, however, an entirely new dimension to a film being potentially taken to different thematic statements during different viewing experiences depending on whether one or more of the film’s climaxes are explored, effectively offering a more explicit opportunity for the co-construction of meaning. The Limits of Consent has many themes, but as the film’s title makes explicit, the grey zone of sexual consensual practice is one of those themes. The selection the viewer makes at the nodal junctions effectively change the film’s thesis on this issue (e.g., the consequence of a consensual violation can be overcome or forgotten; the consequences cannot be overcome and continue as maladaptive schemas, etc.). The nodes present clues as to what the character will do next if one or another branch of the story is selected, allowing, within limits, for the thematic expression to be chosen and meaning-making to be diversified beyond ambiguity or interpretive possibility by adding interactivity. In this paper, by examining how the thematic portfolio of The Limits of Consent was established and then elaborated on in different ways depending on the selected ending, I will explore the implications of this difference between a traditional film and an interactive film.

Bio: Michael Keerdo-Dawson is an artistic researcher at the Baltic Film, Media, Arts and Communication School (Tallinn University). After ten years of working in the British film and television industry in a variety of roles, including as writer and director (his output includes a feature film and two award-winning short films), he moved to Estonia and began a career in academia, completing a MA in 2018 in Literature, Visual Culture and Film Studies. He is currently in the second year of his PhD in Audiovisual Arts. His areas of research include interactivity, screenwriting, sexuality, the Romanian New Wave and epistemic violence. His first academic article was published last year in Studies in Eastern European Cinema on the Romanian film Tuesday, After Christmas, where he analyzed how the film’s poetics undo any potential epistemic violence the film might commit.

Pin Up! The Interactive Documentary: A Shared Authority.

Presenter: Kathleen Ryan

Registration Number: 007
Institution: University of Colorado Boulder, USA
Abstract: Interactive documentary (i-doc) provides a space for renewal and transformation of filmic conventions. Instead of a linear three-act structure (beginning, middle and end), the i-doc encourages user agency, deconstructs narrative, and erodes directorial authority. Pin Up! The Interactive Documentary offers dozens of potential story paths in its exploration of the intersectional feminist legacy of the pin up. Through clickable on-screen elements, this film excerpt demonstrates one approach to i-doc’s transformational potential.
Pin Up! The Interactive Documentary uses oral history to explore this international subculture. In it, women and men adopt vintage style and advocate for social and political change. Specifically, they use the subculture to advocate for anti-racists practices, to call for body positivity, and to lobby for full equity and acceptance of GLBTQI subcultural members. These advocates do this against a background of historical racism and sexism, which is sometimes echoed in the contemporary subculture.
The i-doc both accepts and attempts to represent the intersectionality present within subculture, and the push-back that some subcultural members feel for their progressive stances. Thus, embedded in the project is the notion of “shared authority.” Within the i-doc itself, as well as in its associated social media projects, the project engages with its subcultural narrators to cede authority from the director to the people who know the subculture best, asking them to tell and interpret their stories within their own terms.
Specifically, the subculture’s experts have been invited to take over the project’s social media feed, at times offering a pointed critique of some of the choices we’ve made in sharing posts. They’ve also been asked to offer feedback on edits of their individual stories before the i-doc went live, and their comments and insights have been incorporated into the project, ranging from doing a minor revision of an edited story to include better b-roll to re-editing a story to reflect a White pin up’s growing recognition of the problematic choices she had made in the past.
This i-doc intentionally uses non-professional storytelling tactics (vertical video, online video recordings, strait to camera interviews) as a way to transform notions of a proper “aesthetic” within the documentary genre. This paper argues that actively approaching the i-doc as a shared authority demonstrates how emerging formats, gamification of storytelling, and non-narrative structures can result in a sense of subcultural authenticity on film—a way to use the documentary format as a way to provide agency to both members of the subculture featured in the project as well as to audience members.

Bio: Kathleen M. Ryan is a documentary filmmaker and oral historian. Her works focus on transformations in storytelling due to shifting media technologies. Her hybrid projects deal with issues of gender, self-identity, visuality and user/participant agency. She is an Associate Professor at the University of Colorado Boulder. Her books include Pin Up! the Subculture (Peter Lang, 2020) and her films include Pin Up! The Movie (2015) and Homefront Heroines: The WAVES of World War II (2013). She released an interactive documentary on pin up subculture in 2021 and has an edited collection under contract with Routledge on decolonizing practices in interactive documentary.

Short of Breath: A Narrative Podcast Series.

Presenter: Dustin Morrow
Registration Number: 015
Institution: Portland State University, Oregon, USA
Abstract: My presentation will detail the production and content of my four-part narrative podcast series Short of Breath. As a filmmaker, I had to rethink narrative structure and media production to tell this story in the podcast format, using elements of filmmaking, radioplay, and new media strategies.
Set in the days leading up to the election of Donald Trump, the series follows Olissa, a single mother in her early 30s who loses her factory job in the series’ first scene. It’s terrible luck and even worse timing. This event, which happens at the end of a shift on a Friday (as layoffs so often do), starts a ticking clock for Olissa. A judge refuses to postpone a custody hearing for her young daughter scheduled just three days away. Olissa is trapped in an all-or-nothing, last-chance scenario. She has only that weekend to find a decent job and clean up her act once and for all, or risk losing her daughter. Although she means well and tries her best, Olissa is one of those people to whom bad stuff is always just happening. It’s always one thing or another with her—drama just seems to follow her everywhere she goes. She’s missed hearings and appointments in the past and has demonstrated other irresponsible behavior, and the system is now past caring. Complicating her situation are her battles with addiction and with terrible asthma, made worse by years of abusing her body. Her inhaler is never far from reach.
I conceived this series in response to the challenges faced by working Americans following the election of Donald Trump. I was influenced in part by the Dardenne brothers’ film Two Days One Night (2014), in which a pending deadline presents potentially devastating socioeconomic consequences for its protagonist. I also thought a lot about Kelly Reichardt’s film Wendy and Lucy (2008), in which a traveling woman on the brink of homelessness loses her dog after her car breaks down in a city with which she is unfamiliar. What I responded to in that film is how sympathetic everyone is toward Wendy, but how few people can actually help her. This is a version of the world we rarely see in narrative media, one in which people are basically decent, but must grapple with the limits of how much they can assist someone else when they probably need a little help themselves. That was the reality of 2016 among an increasingly desperate working class, and it seems only to have gotten worse in the years since Trump’s election.
As we struggle to recover from another recession, this time brought on by a worldwide health crisis, I believe Short of Breath is a prescient series—an urgent series. 

Bio: Dustin Morrow is an Emmy-winning filmmaker, bestselling author, film programmer and professor based in Portland, Oregon. His films have won numerous awards and have been shown in venues around the world. He has received grants for his work totaling more than half a million dollars. Before re-entering academia, Morrow was an editor and director of short-form projects and series television in Los Angeles, for such clients as Sony Pictures, MTV, FoxSports, the Discovery Channel, and for such filmmakers as Spike Jonze, Michael Apted, and Steven Soderbergh. He continues to operate his own independent production company, Little Swan Pictures, for which projects have taken him as far away as the Aleutian Sea. Among his recent works are the book Kathleen Turner on Acting: Conversations about Film, Television, and Theater, a collaboration with the iconic actress that was published by a division of Simon and Schuster. The book was endorsed by Oscar-winning filmmaker Sofia Coppola and was featured on Larry King Live, CBS Sunday Morning, Good Morning America, and in The New York Times Book Review. Prof. Morrow also recently finished Black Pool, a feature-length thriller that he wrote and directed, which tells a taut revenge story set against the backdrop of the political conflict in Northern Ireland. The film was shot partially in Dublin and Belfast, and was picked up at the Cannes Film Festival for worldwide distribution. Learn more about that film at its website, www.blackpoolfilm.com.

VIDEO-ISLAND: Performing Environmental Imaginaries and Agency in Honey Island

Presenter: Roderick Steel
Registration Number: 005
Institution: University of São Paulo, Brazil

Abstract: How do performative bodies alter perceptions of the world through cinema in order to activate personal and political change? This film-essay will present a running academic commentary of especially edited excerpts from the feature film Ínsula, made as part of practice-based research at the University of São Paulo, in Brazil from 2017-2021. The presentation will discuss how this film was developed in partnership with a group of 8 women at the ENCOSTA Artist Residency, on Ilha do Mel (Honey Island), steeped within a political scenario that has mobilized hundreds of artists and activists in the movement to “Save Honey Island” from a project to build a new port in its immediate vicinity. In partnership with dozens of NGOs, tourist agencies, and university research agencies, this movement has organized public debates, intervened in governmental actions and produced dozens of videos which feature contributions by some of Brazil’s best-known public figures.

The film is driven by the main issue that oriented the PhD thesis in Media Studies, centered around the challenges of creating audiovisual documentation of contemporary performance art. The ephemeral nature of the body, transformative and immaterial elements generated by presence and ritual, the specificity and nature of site are elements of performance art traditionally deemed to be undocumentable. This practice-based research has led to the formulation of the notion of “cine-performance,” which brings together three normally independent bodies, that together have the creative potential to transform performance art. Central to the construction of this knowledge is the notion of how the body of the performer (body-performer), the body of the filmmaker (cine-performer), and finally the body of an audiovisual work (film-body), intertwine concepts and problems specific to their languages. Cine-Performance creates a knot, a membrane, an experimental artistic device or dispositive, within a set of films that have expounded on experience with documentary filmmaking and performance art.

Bio: Roderick Steel is a visual artist, photographer, performer and filmmaker. He has a bachelor’s degree in Film from Boston University and a master’s degree in Film from the University of São Paulo’s College of Communication, where he will shortly complete his PhD. He has worked with documentaries in the US, England, and Brazil, where he was born and currently resides. His work orchestrates entanglements between the human body, objects, and images within different temporal and spatial systems, to propose and reveal critical interactions between performance practices and the audiovisual image. He is interested in the journey images take within other images, and he explores how we construct images of ourselves and project these into diverse territories. He participates regularly in ethnographic film festivals, experimental video and contemporary art exhibits. He has made a series of documentary feature films on Afro-Brazilian religions, and currently experiments with artistic devices that propel performance art and audiovisual performance into unusual circuits and feedback loops.