EXPERIMENTATION: Island Romance scene fragmentation

This experimentation was born out of my continued interest in multiple screens/fragmentation and my research on avant-garde films. This then became my presentation idea and in the development of this, I realised that I was most interested with how avant-garde and experimental editing techniques fragment the viewer’s perception of space and time, sometimes for narrative gain, sometimes for the aim of anarrative or anti-narrative. This was in my mind as I was doing my experiment in preparation for presenting in class. I also had at the back of my mind Martin Arnold's use of found footage in his work, which for me employs fragmentation for a jarring and unnerving affect. I started by taking an old film starring my grandmother called Island Romance and then chose one scene from it that I wanted to manipulate through the editing software. Now that I had my content, I just began to play around with my clips in whatever way I felt, which tended towards layering and repeating the images within one frame. The fragmentation of video that I thought previously could only produce a jarring and out of place effect seemed here to create something calming and serene. The multiplication and repetition became almost expected and soothing rather that the jarring quality that Arnold's work creates. I would potentially, in future experiments, be interested in shortening the repeating patterns or even repeating frame by frame to see if that could create an alternative effect on the viewer. From this experiment, I have solidified my idea of exploring fragmentation through layering and repeating images but now would like to develop this further by playing with sound fragmentation, which I hope will allow me to explore the themes of discontinuity and anti-narrative a little more.