


SMÅLAND

Most people can relate to how differently memory can manifest itself compared to the actual experience. In my experience this becomes even more distorted with dreams as they are already a kind of displaced reality. Remembering a dream or trying to restage it can be very complicated and can easily strip the image of its charged state and emotion rather than bring out what the imagery touches on. To realize the true time-pressure I had to resort to my movement practice where the storage space had been explored but to find a way of incorporating it into the film process.
For the scenes with the clothes I decided to do this by shifting to working with a steadicam which meant that I was able to circle in and around the image and move with its rhythm (fig. 12, below). Instead of directing my performers through the initial concept of a restaging, I asked them to explore their own relationship to the state I had created through set dressing and by playing the soundtrack I had made. This became a way of meeting with the original dream storage in that present moment of shooting through my movement practice and felt sense of time.
The landscape shots came to me slightly differently as I decided to visit a place in Sweden (Småland) where I spent time in my childhood thus becoming a big part of my settled time. I chose to record most of these shots in a static position because I wanted the viewer to be able to have a sense of the whole frame and to convey a specific quietness that I associate with this settled time.
I found that with the black and white combined with the stillness of the scenery, there was a certain sensation of unsettledness or infinity of memory that became the visible time-pressure. Working this way in both cases discussed, clothes and landscape, I found a way of thouching on the invisibility of memory and storage through my movement practice and time-pressure.
The specificity of form possible in film means that there is a danger of trying to literally or metaphorically document the invisible and consequently fail to outwardly convey it, rather it is desirable to touch upon it through a mix of instinctive and deliberate decisions. Småland is an exploration of doing this relating and interchanging this with my movement practice.
Trailer for Småland