Encounter journal

I attended the presentation of Robert Schaller’s films on Thursday, September 25th. In a world of digital filmmaking, this was a whole different experience. Schaller uses his own “handmade techniques”, truly using his environment to create a narrative. My Life as a Bee was filmed with a pinhole camera, creating a realistic experience of a bee in flight. Several of his films contained images of nature (trees, sun, mountains), and his love and respect towards it is evident. To the Beach, were images created on hand made emulsion. Similar to David Gatten’s, “What the Water Said”, and Vanessa O’Neil’s “Suspension”, this process takes the camera out of the picture and creates a narrative based solely on the content of the film strip. On Friday, I attended Robert Schaller’s workshop, where we mixed our own emulsions, and exposed images of physical objects we placed directly onto the film strips. This reminded me of “Mothlight”, in which Stan Brakhage placed actual objects (moth, leaves, flowers) onto his film, which created a fluttering of images in respect to the moth and nature around it (find out later, Stan taught film at the University of Colorado, where Robert Schaller attended school).