IN PROCESS The Master of Film, focusing on Artistic Research in and through Cinema, is a process driven programme. Its focus on process is a necessary counterweight to a professional film world that is extremely product or production driven and can understand process only in terms of necessary preparation for a product — to be quickly forgotten once the film has been realised. Such a waste… Because there’s so much in an artistic process that’s worth taking note of, worth exploring and worth sharing, that disregarding the process means losing out on potentially surprising and valuable ideas and insights.
INTRODUCTION
That the researchers graduating this year have chosen to connect their presentations, films in progress, installations, books and lecture-performances under the theme of ‘in process’, thus signifies their profound understanding of artistic research as an attitude. An attitude that privileges questions over answers, experimentation over mere execution and long-term gain over short term effect. Artistic research is a necessarily open-ended process, with no fixed end goal, no predicted result. There’s just the journey and the questions, needs and desires that propel that journey. And that journey doesn’t end with something like a graduation… This year’s Artistic Research Week then is an homage to the practice of process. Using the language and tools of cinema, the eight graduating filmmakers and visual artists researched the parameters of cinema and the cinematic process to allow us and themselves to see and create new connections. Not interested in just telling a story, but in asking how we tell stories and whose stories we’re telling, all of this year’s research projects are, each in their own way, deeply political. Political not in the sense of politics with a capital P, but political in the sense of a politics of everyday human relations. THE GRADUATES AND THEIR RESEARCH PROJECTS Diego Arias Asch from Costa Rica carved out his own scriptwriting method for deepening characters and storylines, focusing on the technique of ‘emulating different perspectives’, summarized in the title of his research ‘Milk the farmer, drink the cow’. The result of this singular method will lead to a feature length animation film for which he in the process of creating a short prologue, We Are (working title). British visual artist Sam Ashby is driven by the desire to uncover hidden stories of homosexual life and forging a connection between that hidden past and the present. Cruising the archives like one cruises a park for sexual encounters, he came across the Eagle Street College, a 19th Century working class male literary society in rural England, discussing the poetry of Walt Whitman. His film treatment, The Eagle Street College, explores socialism, sex and spirituality at a moment in history when the notion of homosexual identity was first conceived.
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