Kino Project

When I heard about this project for the first time I was a bit confused; a two screen film was for me something new and I could not see its potential in that very moment. How can two different films on two separate screens create one piece and still make sense? I understand the idea and the meaning, but I could not imagine it before I saw with my own eyes at TURNER PRIZE 2018.

The first three screen piece I have seen was Two Meetings and a Funeral by Naheem Mohaiemen. The topic of this film did not catch my attention too much because I was not very familiar with the political situation of that time. Even though it was not "my cup of tea" it was interesting to see how this installation works. Coincidences between screens created different points of views on the topic presenting not just one but I could see many different films thanks to more images next to each other at the same time. Seeing it gave me inspiration for my own work.

My favorite piece was Tripoli Cancelled also made by Naheem Mohaiemen. The man in the abandoned building (later I discovered that it was an abandoned airport), who was acting like it was still functioning, created an interesting contrast and evoked a mixture of feelings.

I arrived during the part when the main figure was dancing in the spacious room, which was obviously ruined and not functioning for a long time. I thought that this man is hiding from the war outside or he just got mad and is enjoying freedom after he gave up on the modern stressful life leaving all unnecessary sorrows behind. My favorite scene was when the man was using a demolished phone box trying to call someone and pretending talk with an imaginary operator. Later on I was reading the description where I found out that the director was inspired by the real life situation when his father lost his passport and was trapped at Athens' airport for 9 days. In my opinion the whole piece was managed in an excellent way and left me with thoughts about the importance of life.

John Akomfrah’s piece named Vertigo Sea was the last work we saw that day and definitely the strongest one.

It is maybe irrelevant to compare this work to the three screen piece from TATE because of the different content and professional footage from BBC involved in Vertigo Sea, but Akomfrah’s work fulfilled my expectations of a three screen film much more. Maybe because of the content, maybe because of the quality, or maybe both. I was sitting there quietly, absorbing every minute of this incredible cinematographic experience. Despite being a fan of history and familiar with this topic, the three screen installation brought to me a unique and unforgettable view on this darker side of our heritage.

For my own three screen project I came up with couple of ideas. As my first plan I wanted to make a two screen piece where I compared the Christmas rush in the cities to gypsy families living in sheds and garbage outside of civilization.

I needed to consider some complications as for instance: I could not film the gypsy community or people from these communities would be interacting too much with the camera which would corrupt my footage and it would be not usable for the purpose of my film.

As my plan B I wanted to stick with the same concept (comparing Christmas preparations) but instead of a gypsy community I would film a small society living in separation in the nature and symbioses with nature following Slovakian traditions and folklore.

New Breath

When I came to Slovakia and started with deeper research nothing went according to my plans. Finding locations and contacting people was pretty difficult and cost me a lot of patience. I needed to cancel both plans immediately after finding out that all Christmas events which I wanted to include in my project already happened before I came.

Contacting groups of people living out of society led nowhere and communication with members of their group was hard thus their unwillingness to cooperate. I did not have another option but to come up with new plan.

Since I was still in Slovakia, the topic of my project needed to be about the environment I was situated in. At first I started thinking about the political side of the project, which was not that complicated. Slovakia has been through many different political situations which offered loads of opportunities for my work. I decided to point out Slovakian heritage through original architecture, folk songs, clothes, living, and more. The right screen is also presenting strength and the strong will of Slovak people who stood their ground even throughout thousand years of repression of their soul and culture.

On the other side I tried to include two points.

One is the communist era and architecture which came through this regime; the never ending blocks of flats, square shaped buildings, and faded dull colors of those times. These buildings are often times situated in the areas where they ruin the atmosphere of that place and in my opinion bring sadness and unpleasant feelings. When I walk around these buildings I feel squeezed inside and think about the times without freedom even though I was born during a new regime.

The second point is that a lot of the Slovak people and government are disregarding our heritage and do not care about the look of our country. Almost everywhere around the country you can see half-demolished or unkempt buildings either from the communist or pre-communist era. Some of the buildings are reconstructed in a way which is destroying its original beauty and turning the historical architecture into weird modern shapes which does not fit with original design. Sidewalks are often demolished, there are rusty lamp posts, crumbling bridges, several years old adverts on the billboards, and many more have bad impact on the overall look of the country. Ugly, tall and square-shaped buildings are standing like monuments of socialism and are also unkempt reminding us that Slovakia still has a long way to go to become more modern and tempting for visitors.

Filming

During filming itself I met with several complications. My biggest problem was the weather as most of the time I spent in Slovakia it was raining and clouds were covering the sky for most of the days. Finding the locations and events was pretty hard and time consuming since I often need to travel very long distances just to get the necessary footage. The whole project is filmed on my micro 3/4th Panasonic G85 so when it came to exposition and light I had some limitations since these sensors cannot absorb that much light which caused grain and unsharp footage.

Everything is filmed handheld in order to keep the feeling of personal experience so there is some shaking or loose speed of camera movements.

Editing

Choosing the right footage took a long time since a lot of clips were corrupted by flickering (most of the footage from the folk event with dancers and musicians) caused by bad room lighting or difficult exposition because of the weather. To use more of my footage I came up with the idea of overlays which would hide some of the bad exposition and also create a nice effect. I used overlays to save some videos but most importantly to create different and unusual moods of separate clips as for instance the tank memorial together with a graveyard are suppose to create the feeling of a still living memory of past events.

As I mentioned before it was hard to get good exposition because of the lighting so I needed to fix the colors and exposition of all the videos in the software and try to achieve the look I wanted.

Most of the clips needed more contrast and less exposition but it was not that simple. Since the clouds were reflecting too much light, the sky of most of the videos looked too bright compared to rest of the video. I solved the problem with the masking tool and set different lighting for different parts of clip.

I have written the timeline of the first video onto paper which helped me to navigate throughout the video and fit the cuts of the next screen in the order I wanted. Some of the clips are cut in the same time to mirror but some of them I timed differently to create coincidences which brings more content and different points of view to the film.

Another challenge was sound. I wanted to use the original videos' sound what turned out a bit confusing because there was too much happening in the background which did not work with what I wanted to achieve.

Example

I came up with the idea of using traditional Slovak songs and make the video more nationalistic.

The problem was that using the whole song made the project look like a music video which was not the point of my work. After some time I decided to use pieces of traditional songs; I cut just instrumental pieces and put them together. The usage of these songs was easy because there are no copyrights on our folk songs.

Example of the song:

Some of the bits I used as repetition to dictate the mood and fit the video; I was aiming to create nice effect and add some drama into video.

For the rest of the first video I have used just a few seconds of the original video in the beginning and a Slovakian national instrument for most of the video. For the end I have applied the same sound as in the beginning of the film for the same purpose.

For the left screen I used a speech from an almost 30 year old American news report about the Czechoslovakian liberation attempt to separate from Russian power and socialism. These were very tough times for our nation and the power of the speech adds seriousness to my work which was my point. The beginning and end of the video consist of the same sound which was used in the right screen film.

Submission of my work

Left screen

Right screen

Two screens together