Embracing complexity, ambiguity, and contradiction

Two days after attending the masterclasses with Dr. Ersan Ocak, I found myself in Bucharest, a case study in the GREEN-INC project. Poised with the unfamiliar and deeply urban, but without question – intensely rich and complex cultural and political backdrop –  there I was, confronted with this fresh city canvas to start thinking about how to apply the techniques we had just been introduced to — Prof. Tuna Taşan Kak captures the great take aways we got in her post.

As a postdoctoral researcher, I am still honing and refining my research lens, so methodological choices become critical. Therefore,  what does it mean at this juncture to explore this medium, understood by most, either mainstream but even arthouse productions, as a largely artistic production and instead consider applying  it in a research context? This was one of the first provocative statements that Ersan raised, audio-film, try it : Name the first film you think of!  

What was it? Likely feature length? Likely fiction? Possibly even from the occidental world?  

The Essay as Form

Film as a methodology in research can open up new lines of inquiry in academic work. Essay film making can enable us to move away from the purely textual production of knowledge to visual and audio knowledge and open up new epistemological bodies. Drawing on what Theodor Adorno in his 1958 essay argues in “The Essay as Form”, the essay does not pretend to offer complete, systematic, or final knowledge. Instead, it explores ideas tentatively, associatively, and self-reflexively—often refusing to settle into linear argumentation or firm conclusions. This stands firmly in contrast to the academic scientific tradition and plays with the otherwise rigid constraints of academic forms (like the treatise or scientific paper) embracing complexity, ambiguity, and contradiction. And indeed this feels far more faithful to the experience of landing into Bucharest at the end of March.  Eager as I was to observe and reveal the nuances embedded in the research, there was a sense, essay film making or otherwise, of being unleashed into the field and face to face with the enormity of both the visible and invisible processes at play – finding patterns admist this complexity became the task at hand. Ersan Ocak had spoken to us about this exact point, that essay film making is a form of storytelling through a mode of reflective, non-linear, and often fragmented exploration of urban life and experience. Through it, the image and sound, we encounter, these very sensory enriched and layered moments of urban activities to decipher the capturing of our subject and object, the urban fabric and all its contradictions.

Indeed, on some of the early calls to set up these classes, Dr Ersan Ocak described how the film acts as the convener, the container spanning the research interests and bringing them together into frame, literally and figuratively. Those of us in the masterclasses; masters students, Phd & postdoctoral researchers and professors alike, each with different methodological approaches and widely different research topics in relation to the urban context, can use essay film making as the intermediary across these focuses. Of course, with mastery, essay film making can serve also as a dissemination function for research or artistic representation, and with a developed technical ability, playing with focus, light, tone, and repetition enable the interrogation of the conceptual, giving shape to what we see and how we interpret it.

Regen

Mastery of the film essay was shown to us on Day One of the masterclass, Dr Ersan Ocak introduced us to the extraordinarily powerful and poetic (and of course city relevant) Joris Iven documentary, Regen (1929). It takes place in Amsterdam and follows the journey rain takes, a subject that any Amsterdammer knows more about than they care to, and follows it across infrastructure and drainage sewers, to touching moments of parents hurriedly taking shelter and yanking their children through the wet streets. Finally to moments only for the birds on the canals as every one has scurried intside and it is their moment with the water. It could not be a more relevant piece for me as I engage with the realities of a changing climate and how nature-based climate adaptation measures are shaping cities, investigating the differential and often uneven impacts on people but also challenging the human centric urban lanscapes we have built.  This essay film therefore did many things for me, enabling reflection in a way only a 1920 visual aethetic and soundtrack can, both also merging the historical with the present that pose critical questions for the future. 

Young Farmers, 1914. August Sander

The power of geometry

Delving further into the power of geometry within the visual , Dr Ersan Ocak, in a moment of Kandinsky inspired artistry took the Young Farmers (1914) by August Sander and traced over the image to highlight to us the different proportions that make the image so striking: the placement of the canes, the angles of the hats, the positioning of the individuals relative to each other. Revealing how this shapes our understanding of their characters, their relationships to each other as well as hinting at multiple narratives embedded in the photo.

In another example of the visual and formalism par excellence, video essayist Kogonada  demonstrates Wes Anderson’s fidelity to perfect symmetry. So, while we consider the technical proportions that set up the image, we can also take this literal abstraction of two halves and consider it conceptually in terms of a formulation of the binary in subject matter. Saussurean structuralist theory considers binary opposition as the means by which units of language have value or meaning. They can be a pair of related terms or concepts that are opposite in meaning, wikipedia gives examples such as light/dark, good/evil. But in urban planning terms we work with the Urban/Rural, Circular/Linear, Private/Public and Wealth/Poor.

Typically, within these binary oppositions, one of the two opposites assumes a role of dominance over the other. Interrogating these conceptualisations are central within our work, realised and also sometimes not. Film essays therefore can emphasise or conversely challenge these categorisations and forces the researcher to play with the depiction and underlying assumptions in our projects and research topics.   

Audio

Lastly, but no less critically: audio.  There are many ways to think of urban sound, but if drawing on the binary concepts as highlighted above, and we are immediately prompted to conjure up sounds of the urban, we might think of traffic and city noises. Think of rural, and we might say birds and nature stirring sounds, punctuated by silence. The audio function of the film essay plays no lessor of a role nor commentary and also raises and presents different questions and can perform in helping to stitch the narrative together.

On Day Two of the classes, we were introduced to several examples of the city symphony tradition. When watching ‘The Man with a Movie Camera’ (Человек с киноаппаратом), an experimental 1929 silent documentary film, with no story and no actors by Soviet-Russian director Dziga Vertov, edited by his wife Elizaveta Svilova, we experimented with the overlay of different musical genres and explored the effect of these different soundtracks. Audio is this sense can be used to create atmosphere and emotion, but is also dependent and determined by the subject matter and the piecing together of the visual to bring out different moments of tension or dialogue within the images. The audio of the city itself however conveys so much.  an afternoon of a in the Parcul “Regele Mihai I” Bucharest, captured for me so many thoughts and feelings.

So, returning to my initial question, as a postdoctoral researcher and stepping a toe into creative methodologies, what does essay film making do for research, to the researcher? So much. As Dr Ersan Ocak said, he asks students to make a video essay before they make a dissertation, because it forces you to ask the question: why am I here? It forces you to look at your research topic and location in an entirely different way, literally, with different eyes and ears. Already, this immersion of these two masterclasses into the practice and art of essay film making has opened new lines of possibilities and intrigue. And as our phone cameras became increasingly more sophisticated, this research tool is always on hand. I encourage you* to experiment as I will. Watch this space…