thesis_The Sandcastle

The Sandcastle by Wolfgang Hastert

Master of Fine Arts in Experimental and Documentary Arts at Duke University Date:_______________________ Approved: ___________________________ William Noland, Supervisor ___________________________ Joshua Gibson ___________________________ Alex Harris

Thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts in Experimental and Documentary Arts in the Graduate School of Duke University 2013

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ABSTRACT The Sandcastle by Wolfgang Hastert

Department of Master of Fine Arts in Experimental and Documentary Arts Duke University Date:_______________________ Approved: ___________________________ William Noland, Supervisor ___________________________ Joshua Gibson ___________________________ Alex Harris

An abstract of a thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts in Experimental and Documentary Arts in the Graduate School of Duke University

2013

Copyright by Wolfgang Hastert 2013

Abstract

THE SANDCASTLE

Paper about the process and the theoretical influences for the making of the poetic / experimental film The Sandcastle and a reflection on post-screening critiques of the finished work at Duke University.

This essay describes the genesis of the film The Sandcastle. It highlights the theme, tools, and processes of shooting, developing, and editing the film in a context of theoretical influences. Further, it describes the influences of audio recording, story “finding� and storytelling for the piece. The paper includes an analysis of elements of the philosophy of the ongoing moment and ideas about beauty and the sublime as they relate to the film. The analysis closes with brief interviews and reflections based on individual critiques after the premiere screening. The text intermixes still images from the original film footage, brief excerpts from an audio narrative, and interview transcripts which were part of the material used in the making of the film.

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Dedication

For Blair and Otto

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Contents Abstract............................................................................................................................................... iv Contents .............................................................................................................................................vii List of Figures..................................................................................................................................... ix Acknowledgements ........................................................................................................................... xi 1. RECORDING TIME...................................................................................................................... 1 1.1 Approach to research .......................................................................................................... 1 1.2 A life with cameras ............................................................................................................... 2 2. PROSPECTUS FOR THESIS FILM.......................................................................................... 12 2.1 The film's theme and back story...................................................................................... 12 2.2 A wealthy man .................................................................................................................... 13 2.3 The film's concept ............................................................................................................... 15 2.4 Early concepts for montage.............................................................................................. 16 3. GENESIS OF A FILM TITLE.................................................................................................... 17 4. TOOLS- a walking one-man movie studio ........................................................................... 17 5. PROCESS....................................................................................................................................... 20 5.1 Shooting film ........................................................................................................................ 20 5.2 Conducting interviews ....................................................................................................... 22 5.3 Recording location sounds ................................................................................................ 25 5.4 In the dark room.................................................................................................................. 25 5.5 Editing sound and image................................................................................................... 28 6. THEORETICAL INFLUENCES .............................................................................................. 30

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7. STORY FINDING VERSUS STORYTELLING ..................................................................... 33 8. THE SUBLIME ............................................................................................................................. 36 8.1 The case of The Sandcastle .............................................................................................. 37 9. CONCLUSION ........................................................................................................................... 43 Appendix A -

Location and time.............................................................................................. 45

Appendix B -

A pre-screening introduction ........................................................................... 48

Appendix C -

Post- screening critiques ................................................................................... 51

Meeting with James Benning.................................................................................................... 54 Meeting with Mark Anthony Harris ...................................................................................... 55 Meeting with Alex Harris......................................................................................................... 57 Works Cited....................................................................................................................................... 60

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List of Figures Figure 1: Edward Hopper in front of Studio, photograph by Arnold Newman.................. 3 Figure 2: still from The Picture Man................................................................................................. 3 Figure 3: still from The Picture Man................................................................................................. 4 Figure 4: still from Aloha Shirt Tales................................................................................................ 5 Figure 5: excerpt from artist book Days at Home......................................................................... 7 Figure 6: excerpt from artist book Days at Home......................................................................... 7 Figure 7: Amber, from series Juxtaposse ......................................................................................... 8 Figure 8: Jolene, from series Juxtaposse ........................................................................................... 9 Figure 9: students, from series Juxtaposse.................................................................................... 10 Figure 10: view of Kline and Hopper houses from The Sandcastle......................................... 12 Figure 11: view of "Hopper landscape" from The Sandcastle .................................................. 14 Figure 12: Konvas camera............................................................................................................... 18 Figure 13: neighbor Marty Rosenbaum......................................................................................... 22 Figure 14: group of neighbors portrayed in The Sandcastle ...................................................... 23 Figure 15: characters from the film The Sandcastle..................................................................... 24 Figure 16: 35mm film loaded on developing spools ................................................................. 27 Figure 17: ocean view, Cape Cod bay ......................................................................................... 30 Figure 18: detail of ocean shot, 16:9 ratio................................................................................... 32 Figure 19: still from The Sandcastle................................................................................................ 36 Figure 20: still from The Sandcastle ............................................................................................. 37 Figure 21: seascape by Hiroshi Sugimoto.................................................................................... 40 Figure 22: still from The Sandcastle................................................................................................ 41

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my thesis committee.

My professors William Noland, Joshua Gibson, and Alex Harris have supported this project in a very generous manner. I am thankful for their inspiring guidance and mentoring throughout all phases of the making of this thesis film.

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1. RECORDING TIME

1.1 Approach to research

I work at the intersection of the photographic narrative, cinema, and experimental/ documentary practices. It fascinates me when groups of images are brought together resulting in a "picture story". The images I make alternately live in HD video projections, flicker in 35mm hand-developed films, and/or rest sequentially in photographic books.

My works have always been rooted in photography – precise framing, qualities of light, texture, etc.. At the same time I have restlessly tackled the relationships existing between the still and the moving image. I explore fractions of a second, where things we can't quite see become visible through the exploration of subtle, chosen, increments of time— the extended time of a pinhole exposure; slow motion carefully articulated as a product of film and/or video; and/or the juxtaposition of highly considered still and time-based qualities. Above all else, I aim for the "ongoing moment", for the sliver of time between the still and moving image to be made palpable in my work. These concerns have become the center of my production and research.

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1.2 A life with cameras Since I was 14 years old I have recorded imagery. I began by photographing the world around me with a Nikon 35mm camera in increments of 1/125 of a second. For years that was my time frame. Occasionally I would expose film longer. Sometimes I set my camera down on a tripod and made long time exposures to see the effect of a firework or the movement of a person crossing the frame. What would become a pattern for my "life with cameras" started at age 16: I made my first Super-8 film. Both the still and the moving image continue to intrigue me to this day.

Based on my interest in perceptions of time, I record time in a variety of modes across media as single images or in the context of moving imagery. The short moment of a flash, the extended time of a pinhole exposure, or the 24 frames per second of a film are my ways to discover, engage with, and document the world around me.

My interest in photography, my education as an image-maker, and my professional experience as a film camera assistant prepared me for my first career, documentary filmmaking. In 1993 I became a freelance producer and director for German and French television stations ZDF/ Arte , making documentaries on painters and photographers in the US by creating portraits of their works and lives. These films ranged from a docudramas about Edward Hopper to a film on Appalachian photographer Shelby Lee Adams, to a film on James Bidgood, the maker of the Super-8 spectacle Pink Narcissus, to name only a few of the network documentaries I made.

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Figure 1: Edward Hopper in front of Studio, photograph by Arnold Newman

Each of these films employed elements of mixed media and experimentation.

Sometimes I shot with 16mm film and mixed in Super -8 footage. At other times I shot on professional video format Betacam SP, mixing it with passages created on black and white film or even on High 8 Video. In one of the productions for ARTE, Aloha Shirt Tales,

which I produced in 2004, I shot the entire film on color Super-8 film and

interspersed it with portions of black and white film sequences that I had handdeveloped in a bucket.

Figure 2: still from The Picture Man

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I have always worked in an experimental mode, trying to incorporate a variety of media and materials with the goal of telling the story in the best possible way .

Sometimes the low light recording possibility of a High-8 video camera was the right tool for a given sequence such as the dreamy floating imagery in The Pictureman (1997) where I followed my subject through a dimly lit basement apartment.

Figure 3: still from The Picture Man

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Figure 4: still from Aloha Shirt Tales

At other times I used black and white Super-8 film. For example, I shot and hand-developed film for a sequence portraying an indigenous man on the island of Hawaii. In my film Aloha Shirt Tales, the images of the man glow in grainy shimmering black and white. I was able to depict him and evoke a feeling of bygone times - but at the same time honoring his legacy, the Hawaiian Hula tradition and the rough beauty of the island in the middle of the Pacific .

This spirit of working across media, shooting mostly with analog film, using alternative processes and low-tech cameras carried through to my teaching assignments at University of California (2000-2011) in San Diego and continues to permeate my artmaking to this day.

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In 2008 I started studies with Arno Rafael Minkkinen and Christopher James in a low residency graduate program at Maine Media College. There I concentrated on photography, taking elaborate pinhole and toy camera images which I then assembled into sequences in artist books. It was a continuation of my interest in the still imagery and alternative process. But at the same time, working on books kept me engaged with storytelling and cinematic sequencing . I had once again arrived in the area in between photography and filmmaking.

I enjoyed the sequencing of images and working on narratives. For my book Days At Home (2010), I engaged in making an account of different perceptions of time.

My work was loosely based on the writings of Alan Lightman in his book Einstein's Dreams. I utilized color and black and white analog photography shot with pinhole and Holga cameras and even incorporated scans from Super-8 still frames for the story of my parents back home in Germany. I observe single and ongoing moments and tell about a range of perceptions of time in this book: Various chapters highlight among other modes of perception the "mechanical time" of daily routines juxtaposed with what Alan Lightman refers to as "body time" when "one listens to their heartbeat and to the rhythms of desire".

In making this book I became fascinated by lens-less photography and by the simplicity of exposing film in a little self-made coffee can pinhole camera. It fascinated me to see what a simple tool was able to record on film. And I enjoyed that I could record the passing of time for the long exposure of sometimes five, or ten, or even twenty seconds. Working on Days at Home was significant for me. It gave me a way to

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deal with the passing of my father. The time I spent at home with him has now become a memory but is also tangible, printed, and bound in an artist book that I can share.

Figure 5: excerpt from artist book Days at Home

Figure 6: excerpt from artist book Days at Home

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I left the program at Maine Media College in 2010 with a finished piece of work and was fortunate enough to transition into the inaugural class of the program in Experimental and Documentary Arts at Duke University.

In August 2011 I began my graduate studies in Durham, North Carolina. I continued my explorations in perceptions of time but I gave my research and imagery a new theme and focus. I embarked on an investigation in portraiture and perceptions of time in my new environment and started working on the still photo series Juxtaposse.

Figure 7: Amber, from series Juxtaposse

From the outset of my studies in the program, I engaged in a systematic collection of juxtaposed portraits of my peers in the MFA cohort and a group of faculty members of our department. It was my interest to find out about my portrait sitters’ lives. I wanted to know how they perceived time and how they engaged as imagemakers with the elusive and intangible qualities and the mystery of time and memory in their own practices.

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The images in Juxtaposse have a peculiar effect. I paired two different sets of photographs: pinhole long exposure portraits in relation to short exposure portraits of one person shot in the same location and during the same session. In these shots there seems to be the trace of time passing and the story of combined narratives about the sitters’ memories. The people I photographed became collaborators and social actors during the long exposure time of the pinhole shots. They were able to participate and perform. I created different narrative combinations when I set images against each other in postproduction. In order to have narrative material for a book project, I also recorded interviews with some of the participants.

Figure 8: Jolene, from series Juxtaposse

The work on Juxtaposse came to a halt in the Spring of 2012 as a result of animosities within the cohort of the MFA program. I felt that it would be hard to continue taking pictures as a collaboration with some of the students did not seem attainable at that time. However, my interest in this project has not stopped. I plan a continuation of the series for the time after graduating from the program. I could imagine making a short film and a book project based on some of the imagery. I would 9

take pleasure in creating a piece of work that reflects on my experiences participating in this MFA EDA program at Duke University and on the memories of living in North Carolina and in the American South.

Figure 9: students, from series Juxtaposse

At about the same time during the Spring of 2012 I started planning an alternative project for my thesis. I had already been working with 35mm movie film and experimenting with film materials and hand-developing at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University. In the months leading up to the summer I did camera check ups and repaired camera gear and also worked on elaborate tests runs developing film materials in the black and white darkroom. By the summer I was well prepared with new tools for an exciting adventure.

In July 2012, I was ready to return to the place where many of my previous film and photo works had originated, the town of Truro on the coast of New England. I have been coming to this area ever since 1993 when I worked on a documentary about Edward Hopper for the German and French Television station Arte. In 2012 I worked there on my newest film The Sandcastle.

In many ways, The Sandcastle employs the elements of analog photography and expresses my interest in alternative processes. I worked with 35mm film. My choice of 10

material was, as in Juxtaposse, black and white film. I shot on a high-contrast material that produces a unique and shimmering kind of virtually grain-less image. As with Juxtaposse, I did intensive fieldwork within a small community of neighbors where I recorded the interviews. I also made use of the landscape in combination with portraiture. The only element in my approach that changed was that I used a 35mm movie camera and that I worked with moving imagery.

The backdrop for The Sandcastle, the town of Truro, is a small community next to Provincetown, Massachusetts, in the dunes of Cape Cod where I have been fortunate to spend my summers. The scenery, the people, and their stories have always inspired me to make new artwork. Each summer since my first arrival I have returned to the Cape and I have never failed to bring several cameras for experimenting and documenting.

In the summer of 1997, I remember, I shot on Kodachrome film and was able to capture our son's first steps on the grass in front of the old cottage in glorious bright colors. Another summer was the time of many pinhole camera experiments. And one summer was devoted to shooting ocean vistas with 16mm film. Every summer since then I have recorded our life and that of the community and neighborhood in the dunes with different tools. Some summers are more casual than others. Some summers I get really serious with a particularly ambitious project.

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2. PROSPECTUS FOR THESIS FILM An experimental/ poetic/ disjunctive film inspired by a legal battle in an idyllic beach town on Cape Cod

Figure 10: view of Kline and Hopper houses from The Sandcastle

2.1 The film's theme and back story

In 1993 I came to the town of Truro, Cape Cod, to make the film "Edward Hopper: The Silent Witness" for European TV stations ZDF / ARTE. It was a docudrama combining recollections of Edward Hopper from various longtime residents with imagery of the Cape Cod Landscape, and re-enactments of a small selection of Hopper’s paintings. During the filming, community members became my collaborators and I became part of their community. In recent years I have watched an idyllic serenity give 12

way to tension around the small town, the Hopper house, and the landscape. More and more wealthy people have come to town. A real estate bonanza began.

2.2 A wealthy man

When wealthy Florida developer Donald Kline purchased land in Truro with plans to build his dream home, he might simply have meant to enjoy one of the most sensational waterfront views left on the Cape. Many of his neighbors, however, looking down on his newly purchased property and his blueprints, had a different perspective.

The developer was not new to the town and was already known as a manipulative force with the cash to combat any real estate law or covenant standing in his way.

Violating town laws and donating money here and there, the multi-millionaire somehow managed to erect an 8800 square-foot trophy mansion on the open land adjacent to the cottage that served as painter Edward Hopper’s summer studio and home. A court challenge to the construction of the house is still working its way through the legal system. At this time, the house still stands. However, it cannot be occupied.

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Figure 11: view of "Hopper landscape" from The Sandcastle

The small town of Truro has long been home to a tapestry of characters: locals and weekenders; artists, writers, New Yorkers and fishermen; the rich and often famous, brushing shoulders with the humble, in a delicate balance of mutual dependency and suspicion. The residents of the town love or loathe Donald Kline's building in the dunes for their own reasons. The illegal construction of the Kline trophy home on what has been considered by some as the “Hopper Landscape� has created a controversy that pits public sentiment and the law against individual liberty, property rights, and the pursuit of happiness.

This conflict offered an interesting starting point for my work on the film. The set of characters and neighbors involved in this case ranges from well-to-do landowners who summer in this beautiful and coveted place to out-of-towners and local residents who can barely afford the high property taxes in the area. I knew from the beginning that my film would be a portrait of mostly rich characters who would be flaunting their 14

wealth and others who try to caution against over-developing the land and or try to enforce the rules of the town laws. What crystallized was a portrait about sublime nature set against an exciting contrast: the experiences of greed in a battle with cautionary community-minded thinking.

2.3 The film's concept

For every documentary there are at least three stories that intertwine: the filmmaker's, the subject's, and that of the audience. These stories may answer the question: "what is this film about?" The audience is aware that the film comes from somewhere and is made by someone.

In the past I pursued network financed high profile documentaries under a tight schedule for a large European TV audience. For my new film, The Sandcastle, I revisited my neighborhood in Truro to make a poetic and experimental short film. From the outset on I accepted a smaller type of audience that attends national and international festivals.

My film can be considered a very low budget production. I managed to produce this film because I had free use of equipment from Duke University and easy access to the locations and people in the small neighborhood were I made the film. I was also independent from any crew members since I chose to work alone, take my time, and limit myself to only two tools which I could operate by myself: a Russian-made 35 mm movie camera which I loaded with a specific film emulsion that allowed me to shoot the 15

black and white high-contrast images. The other tool: an audio recorder to capture location sounds of nature and animal life in the dunes and brief intimate conversations with my small group of local subjects.

During production, I carried the heavy and somewhat clunky camera and the sound recorder into the dunes. I composed and shot deliberately silent images of the ocean, the landscape surrounding the houses, and filmed still portraits of a group of neighbors. Part of my story in making The Sandcastle is the process of working with this heavy 35mm movie camera and of walking with it through the landscape. The heavy gear functioned in this context as a conversation piece. I brought a machine of old cinema magic to my subjects and we could reminisce about the differences between analog cinematography and digital image making, and about the qualities of handmaking a film with old technology. I believe my subjects appreciated the fact that I put myself through something like an endurance test of carrying heavy equipment, working within the limitations of a small budget, but also honoring the awe-inspiring landscape with a classic and analog way of recording imagery.

My film is an account of meeting up with neighbors, filming them, observing the landscape, and watching from their houses what goes on at the unwanted trophy house on the dune.

2.4 Early concepts for montage

From early on it was my intention to juxtapose the moving silent images of the landscape with the silent portraits of the neighbors on the dune. I planned to use sounds 16

of nature and to include the content of the audio interviews with my subjects. Within the film my social actors would function on par with the other elements as I would arrange them into associations and patterns. This would allow me to experiment and make a poetic film that breaks up time and space.

3. GENESIS OF A FILM TITLE Title choices for this film changed twice during the production phase. I started this project with an idea to make NO TRESPASSING the title. This title felt almost immediately limited and had bad connotations- even though it fit the topic. The second title was more poetic and allowed for a more emotional approach to the topic. VOICES IN THE DUNES described some of the elements of the film very well, as the interviews with my subjects are the narrative backbone of the film. However, this title seemed too descriptive. I settled on the title THE SANDCASTLE. This title is appealing at first as it sets up summer romance, children's play, and the topic of a sandcastle in the dunes. It turns out to be an ironic title that also suggests the expected destruction of the castle (a man's trophy mansion) by nature's forces.

4. TOOLS- a walking one-man movie studio Tools and materials I work with can often determine the working modes and rhythm for making my art works. In many ways the duration of time and interaction

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with the camera became an integral element of the film's production during the summer of 2012.

My companion for the very hot summer of that year was an old Russian 35mm movie camera. The camera has a heavy iron body. It fits 35mm prime lenses. A film magazine attaches to the body. The camera has a handgrip with an integrated electro motor for setting frame recording speeds. A long spiral cable connects to an external battery belt. This camera is heavy. When the camera is loaded with a full 35mm film magazine it weighs about 40 pounds. The battery pack adds to the weight.

Figure 12: Konvas camera

When I would go on my walks with the camera it would usually take several minutes to get all gear ready. I would pack two fully loaded film magazines. One was connected to the camera body. The other one I carried in a backpack along with two or three additional lenses, a light meter, a set of filters, and some expendables. Adding to that I would very often take along a tripod. It is not easy to shoot with this type of 18

camera without a tripod as the camera is not balanced well. When the little motor pulls the film through it is a mechanical wonder operation. 18 inches of 35 mm film get pulled through the camera's film gate per second. The camera exposes 24 frames per second as single little fields in an intricate stop-and go mode. The film makes its way through the gate and back into the magazine on the take-up side.

This all happens next to my ear. I can hear the film working itself through the camera. It is being unwound, pulled through, and rolled back up on the take up reel in the magazine. I become familiar with the sound. I feel when a roll comes to an end. I can hear and anticipate it when the film end will roll out through the gate and then wiggle its way back into the take-up spool on the lower part of the magazine.

This camera makes noise. It is not made for working with sound. It takes only pictures. Sound has to be recorded separately with a different machine. The sound is not in sync with the images. This in itself was a challenge for the production but it brought about a unique set of opportunities for making the film.

Early on I decided to record sound independently from the images. Doing both at the same time would have required another operator and given the loud noise of the film camera it would have not functioned well. My production then became that of me wearing two different hats. I would go out and shoot film and then I would go out and record sound. Images and sound were never recorded at the same time and location.

With the sound gear I was much lighter on my feet. I carried a Fostex digital field recorder, a shotgun mike plus some cables and batteries.

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I had a choice every day: Record sound or record picture. It would determine how much I had to prepare and how heavy the weight would be to carry the tools to the location for the film.

5. PROCESS The process of making this film fell into distinct modes of acquiring material.

Camera work and sound recording were separate by nature as described above. There are several reasons for this working strategy. The camera is not made for working with sync sound. It is loud and would have destroyed the quality of a parallel-recorded sound. I was the only operator for both, sound and image and could hardly have done a sync sound at the same time.

This afforded me the opportunity to concentrate on each of the two recording modes for the film separately. I could be the observing eye and then I could be attentive listener while recording location sounds. But most importantly, I could give all my attention to conducting interviews for the film as pure sound without image.

5.1 Shooting film

As described above, the camera and gear were heavy and my access to locations in the dunes was in most cases only by foot. Mainly it was a tiring process for me to get 20

the equipment to the places where I wanted to shoot. In addition, the camera is so heavy that it cannot easily be run without a tripod. These considerations made me decide to shoot mostly from a locked down tripod. This allowed me to give more attention to the composition of the landscape and to the framing for the portrait shots.

Most landscape shots were shot with a normal 50mm lens. Occasionally I switched to a 20mm fisheye lens or worked with a small telephoto lens. I would have liked to employ a 35mm lens for a medium perspective but the lens had been returned broken to Duke by a previous user and I was not able to replace it in time. So, I was somewhat limited in my lens choices but was still able to get the images I wanted. As I used only prime lenses I did not have the luxury that a zoom lens would have provided.

I could not easily change perspectives as this always required the change to another prime lens. However the prime lenses provided superior quality and sharpness and were fairly comparable in their individual image results.

For most of the portrait shots I worked with a 120mm telephoto lens. I believe this lens was the most exciting because of its incredible quality and its ability to render the faces of my participants in a beautiful and detailed fashion.

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Figure 13: neighbor Marty Rosenbaum

5.2 Conducting interviews

Early on in the production I developed a rapport with most of the participants in the film. Most of the people I knew from town meetings or running into them at the local convenience store or post office. Some of them are close neighbors and some are members of my own family.

I held meetings with my interviewees and spoke to them prior to shooting. This happened usually over a beer or a cup of tea and some peanut snacks in relaxed gatherings somewhere on a porch overlooking the landscape and seeing the house at far distance. Early on I knew it would be difficult to convey all intricate details about the complexity of the case of the house on the dune. In fact, even now the case is still open, as the court has given orders to the town "to take appropriate action". Subsequently the zoning board of appeals of the town decided in favor of the removal of the building. It is quite a complicated court case. Even though I had hundreds of pages of town meeting 22

transcripts and copies of court orders as materials, I felt I needed to get human voices into the film. I needed emotional content and brief statements that would communicate the wealth of information succinctly.

Figure 14: group of neighbors portrayed in The Sandcastle

My choice of subjects was one tight group of neighbors. Some of these people had organized against the owner of the new building on the dune. Access to the other group of people in town who support the building

(builders, realtors, and some

libertarian characters) and to the current owner of the house did not seem possible at the time. I felt I had only access only to the one group but did not think it changed my approach too much, as I kept a more neutral stance and all along tried to advocate for something larger than petty reasons why the building should be destroyed.

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Figure 15: characters from the film The Sandcastle

I worked from a set of questions trying to investigate the mindset and emotions of the neighbors on the dune. During the interview sessions I would often repeat questions and interrogate more. I wanted to get emotional reactions and through the systematic repetition come to clearer articulation, which usually was achieved during another round of repetition. This strategy also gave my interviewees a second and sometimes third chance to restate an answer for me.

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5.3 Recording location sounds

Compared to shooting the image portion of the film, recording the sound for this production seemed a smaller and easier task. But I knew of the importance of having original well-recorded location sound. It was relatively easy to go out to the dune or down to the water to record bits of nature sound. I made sure to have a variety of closeup and faraway soundscapes from the ocean, dunes and the woods further down the hill. I would often slowly circle my microphone in 360-degree mode to get a surround feel. The passages I recorded were usually several minutes long so that I could easily choose an appropriate section for my film narrative. In addition I also recorded extreme close-up sounds of animal life on plants on the dune. I have, for example, a variety of cricket and bee sounds which are very prominent elements in the film.

5.4 In the dark room

Preparing raw film material and then loading it into magazines is a slow process, which must be done under darkroom conditions. The high-contrast Kodak material can be handled in safety red light though. First, large spools containing original unexposed material have to be opened in the darkroom. Then enough material is cut to roll onto "bobbies" which are the spools that fit into the camera magazine. About 400 feet of film fit into a camera magazine. The challenging part of this is to feed the film through the mechanics of the magazine so that they build a perfect loop shape for proper transport through the camera. 24 frames get exposed in an off/on repeated mechanism during the

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filming. The amount of raw film material running through the camera per second accounts to about a length of 18 inches.

Shooting with emulsion was challenging because I could only bring a small amount of raw footage with me. Each of the two camera magazines could only hold film for roughly 3 minutes. So each expedition out to the dunes and to the houses of my collaborators would only give me the chance to shoot for six minutes. This had an interesting impact on my shooting style. I worked economically and with an iron discipline. What helped me for this kind of working style was my previous experience with shooting film and large format photo cameras.

During the shoot the film gets pulled from the magazine through the camera, passes the lens, is exposed to light and gets transported back onto the take-up reel inside and the magazine. One can hear the film snaking its way through the mechanics of the camera and one can anticipate the roll-out through the camera body. This material gets then taken out of the magazine and stored in black lab bags in little metal cans. It is ready for the developing process. In the case of my production, a very long waiting time followed. I would not touch the exposed film for a few months as it took several weeks until I traveled back to Durham from my production on Cape Cod.

It is exciting to experience the materiality of film as it prompts a certain working style based on the limited amount of film per magazine and the necessary discipline while shooting. An overall slow working rhythm is the result of shooting with this camera. Usually 35mm movie cameras of this type are run by a camera operator, plus

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one or two assistants, who support focus pulling, camera movement and setup, and the loading and managing of the film material.

In the red light of the lab another exciting step towards making the film happens.

All material from the shoot comes tightly wrapped in black storage bags. It is a time for chemical magic and discovery in the red light. I spent about 8 weeks hand-developing the roughly 8800 feet of material. Each camera roll of about 400 feet was cut into smaller 50 feet pieces in the red light and then fed into developing spools. Usually I was able to process six spools at a time. After pre-loading the material I would set up the chemicals and then develop roll after roll. From time to time I would test little snippets of film ends for the accurate developing time and, if necessary, adjust chemicals and timing.

The film would go through developer, water stop bath, fixer, and water bath again.

Then it would be washed in a cleaning solution and set into a drying closet. This whole process from loading to drying would take about two to three hours before I could leave the lab.

Figure 16: 35mm film loaded on developing spools 27

I usually kept the film over night in the drying closet. Upon my return I would get to see the footage for the first time as I unrolled it from the developing spools onto a splicing reel. That was always the moment of discovery and excitement. It pulled me back into the rhythm of developing since the first step is always emptying the spools, seeing the footage and then re-loading the spools with un-developed film.

5.5 Editing sound and image

Sound and image are not in sync, as stated before. They were shot and recorded separately. Through the editing they are brought together in proximity. The intricate play of shifting them incrementally to influence each other and produce meaning was the task.

Two major conceptual elements influenced the editing process of the film. First, I composed sequences for the editing in a style that takes elements of the music form of a fugue. Secondly, I took inspiration from the concept of the town meeting that is practiced in Truro.

The formal structure of the fugue partly inspired me for editing this film. In this classical musical form a theme gets stated, imitated, and repeated. The repetition happens at different pitches. I made my edit by overlaying footage with new voices and altering the images slightly to accommodate for the content in the spoken word. But I did not aim for illustration of the spoken word.

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I composed my film using three distinctive modules for the films structure: "Sequences", "Moments", and "Interludes"

Five interviewee sequences build the core of the film. Each of them features a person and their statement. These are constructed like the theme and "voices" of a fugue.

Moments are free-play jazz-like improvisations that take elements of the sequences and elaborate on the sequences, set a mood, or bring several "instruments" (people) together in small moments. These moments also liken to the idea of the ongoing moments in my film-- a brief intermezzo of a moment just showing the house in the landscape for example or a rhythmic staccato of neighborhood impressions.

Interludes are designed as pauses and have a calming effect for the film. They help settle the rhythm for a moment and provide observational elements. The brief sequences of the parking lot and of some shots of the houses towards the end of the film function in this way within the edited sequences.

The town of Truro is governed by a town committee concept. This inspired me to organize the distribution of interviews in a manner of town meeting statements.

Interviewees are separated into their own parts of the film. They give their statements in blocks. The film footage for these segments is one sequence of equal length that gets slightly altered for each person. Each segment starts and ends with a long-shot vista of the ocean.

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Figure 17: ocean view, Cape Cod bay

Then I include establishing shots of the landscape in the dunes. After this I add imagery of the new building on the dune. This segment has several shots of house details. Each segment includes a portrait shot of the featured interviewee and wraps up with close-ups of nature life and grass on the dune before it finishes with a shot of the ocean. Each segment has the same length. However, the interview sound bites have varying length. So each segment has a different density of spoken word versus freestanding imagery. It evokes a feeling of variations on one visual theme in these sequences.

6. THEORETICAL INFLUENCES One of the guiding influences for filming and creating the film was French author and director Robert Bresson.

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In a preface to Bresson's classic book Notes on the Cinematographer, J.M.G Le Clezio lays out the arc towards truth and perfection in Bresson's work and his quest for provocation, reflection and eagerness to invent a new language for cinematography.

Robert Bresson states in his book: "Two types of film: those that employ the resources of the theatre (actors, direction, etc.) and use the camera in order to reproduce; those that employ the resources of cinematography and use the camera to create."

From the outset I was certain that I would employ my camera to create. There were no actors and there was no stage-like direction. I filmed events and social actors as they presented themselves to me within their social context. No script suggested the narrative path for my imagery and recording of fragments of action. Everything was pieces: landscape shots in varied locations, portraits of people, images of houses, vistas of the sea, and bits of sound. There was no representation of an existing whole. All pieces were created in distinct medium-specific segments. During the editing I put them in a certain order that still remains fragmented. The viewer has to engage with the material to make meaning, as I do not suggest a set and strict narrative.

Representation and illustration of images through words or illustration of words through images was never a choice for this film. I saw and I recorded objects, landscape, and protagonists in separate parts. Through rendering them independently I allowed myself to give them a new dependence.

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What assisted in this process of fragmentation was the physical fragmentation of my materials to start with. As described before, raw film was cut into small portions, exposed in segments, cut to fit in yet even smaller length for fitting into developing spools. The developed film was purposely not processed in the sequence it was shot in.

This allowed me to experience the unveiling of the camera negative in a new narrative sequence, a new combination of materials as they were spliced together after developing and drying. It was a quasi first process edit of the film.

Another edit happened when I added smaller combinations of spliced film footage into 8 transfer-ready rolls of camera negatives. These 8 rolls where then transferred to digital HD files. I made a critical choice during this supervised transfer process: even though the original footage was shot in the classic academy format I decided to crop into the image and re- framed for a more common digital HD 16:9 format. I feel this aspect ratio is more dynamic and presents the film material in a very crisp and slightly enlarged version with a contemporary look.

Figure 18: detail of ocean shot, 16:9 ratio

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Shooting my material was not a definite end of the process, it was the beginning.

It was the gathering of raw image fragments necessary for montage. It allowed and influenced preparations for further steps: Recording sound, editing, and projection of the film and the experience of the audience while watching it. I followed Bresson's advice to employ economy in describing the place and circumstances of my subjects. He states: "‌ make known that we are in the same place by repetition of the same noises and the same sonority. .." This was also a function of the limited amount of footage I had to work with. My shooting ratio was about 1:5 for the film and I made the narrative work through repeating materials, both sound and image.

In all phases of this production I practiced cinematography in the sense of Bresson: "‌it is writing with images in movement and with sounds."

7. STORY FINDING VERSUS STORYTELLING In the Fall of 2012 I took a class with Sam Stephenson concentrating on the documentary narrative. Through the duration of the course we mainly studied writers that work for The New Yorker. Stephenson kept pointing out his own approach to writing a story. His strategy is to conduct intensive interviews with his subjects. In this process his writing follows the material gathering in his lengthy interviews. He says that his story process is not so much telling it in the sense of what he feels it should be. His writing is entirely guided by "finding" the story within the raw audio transcripts.

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When working on The Sandcastle I made use of a similar working strategy. Even though I had an idea for a general narrative and I had prepared specific questions for my interviewees, I did not script the outcome. Almost all sound bites and passages used in the final cut of the film were spontaneous reactions, delivery of facts, and emotional content expressed by my interviewees. These words and sentences would find their way into my narrative as findings from the transcripts of the audio recordings.

Meaning in this film is the result of negotiating parts of narrative elements. It is a discourse. Images, sounds, and words from interviews are interwoven. The audience participates in finding meaning. The interviews of the film are one building block for the narrative of the film. But I did not approach this narrative with a clear story or with storytelling in mind.

The interviews provided me with material to tell more than one story and I detected a variety of stories within the spoken words and sentences. I found context and am able to provide context for the audience.

I would like to cite two additional influences for the audio documentary/ writing part of the film:

In 41 False Starts, Janet Malcolm (The NewYorker) celebrates fragmentation in her writing process for a profile essay on the painter David Salle. She does not seem to know where to start writing about him and breaks her text up into 41 vignettes. It is a process of getting at a story of the painter. It is a literary collage with contradictions,

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irony, imitation, and satire. She masterfully adapts a postmodern form for her interrogation of the painter.

Malcolm employs a fragmentation process that seems to be close to that described by Robert Bresson. She brings materials together and allows for shifting points of view arriving at a multi-faceted well-conceived portrait of the painter.

Another literary figure was an influence for my thinking about the narrative aspect of the film. The author W.G. Sebald is a walking and seeking character when he engages in a place. His writing blurs the boundaries of fact and fiction and constantly shifts from facts to intricate details that spring from his own imagination. The storyteller in Sebald's The Rings of Saturn records a walking tour of the eastern coast of England. He intermixes his text with a curious assemblage of somewhat unrelated photographic images and sets them next to things which cross the mind of the narrator- who could be Sebald or not.

I am fascinated by Sebald's approach of mixing layers of memory into his text of the lonely wanderer on the coast. One passage from The Rings of Saturn describes his writing style well: "‌I suppose it is submerged memories that give to dreams their curious air of hyper reality...what manner of theater is it in which we are at once playwright, actor, stage manager, scene painter, and audience?.." (pp 79 - 80, The Rings of Saturn)

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Sebald also includes B/W photographs in the text as part of his narratives. But they are not directly related illustrations within passages of his text - they are set as counterpoint to the narrative.

Figure 19: still from The Sandcastle

8. THE SUBLIME As described in the beginning of the text, the grand experience of nature is the central theme of the film. In addition, the film material itself offers a hand-made and analog "feeling of beauty" that comes out of properties existing within the material, the choices of framing, the remnants of analog chemical processes but also to properties of projection of the image and the functions of light during projection. The viewer might experience a devotional quality when sitting in the theater and being part of the alchemy and the projection spectacle in the illuminated room as Nathaniel Dorsky describes in his text Devotional Cinema: "…on a visceral level, the intermittent quality of film is close 36

to the way we experience the world. We don't experience a solid continuum of existence.

Sometimes we are here and sometimes we are not‌" (p 28, Devotional Cinema)

Figure 20: still from The Sandcastle

8.1 The case of The Sandcastle

There is a feeling produced by observation of the real landscape. A visitor to the dunes of Cape Cod may experience something beyond a "beauty feeling". This feeling continues by looking at the material generated for the film. The audience responds to the material depending on the quality and kind of projection. I showed my film in the context of a film transfer to digital HD video. The film here is not experienced in the intermittent quality Dorsky describes in his text. It is a translation of the classic filmic properties into an HD video signal. What is lost is the black space between projected frames as they are filled with an additional image to function in the context of video technology. So, I consider the HD projection as a different quality but am content with it 37

as it was a function of production and budget to choose this post-production strategy and presentation mode.

Dorsky describes the quality of intermittence as follows: " the quality of light, as experienced in film, is intermittent. At sound speed there are twenty-four images a second, each about a fiftieth of a second in duration, alternating with an equivalent period of black. So the film we are watching is not actually a solid thing. It only appears to be solid." (p 28, Devotional Cinema )

This may be close to how we humans experience the world around us. Nothing is solid. We don't do solid pans with our heads when we turn. We look at things and then look at other things. We jump from one image to another, one perception to another. We close our eyes, we blink. There are moments of black within our looking at the world.

Something triggers a reaction. This reaction is to the object or nature but also to a boundless feeling of grandeur of nature that inspires me as the filmmaker and affects the audience too. We tend to respond in awe in certain situations when nature unfolds in front of us in beautiful but also terrifying ways. A beautiful shallow wave may grow to the unexpected tsunami and show destructive power. This is where the difference between beauty and sublime can be found.

German philosopher Immanuel Kant differentiates between beauty and sublimity. For him the distinctions have additional experiential and moral aspects: beauty is seen within human comprehension. The experience of beauty is somewhat 38

measurable. In contrast, the sublime is beyond comprehension. The feeling overwhelms the subject.

In a 1961 article The Abstract Sublime Robert Rosenblum first identified elements one could link to the sublime when looking at abstract expressionist paintings. He found what Burke had described as "obscurity" and "magnitude" of abstract forms and a certain "boundlessness and totality" that Kant had written about.

Abstraction has long been associated with the prospect of transformative experience. The artists Kandinsky and Mondrian considered abstraction a means to reform an overly materialist society. Power was attributed to the arts and especially to abstract forms that could convey spiritual truths and exert social influence. The painter Robert Motherwell wrote:" the emergence of abstract art is one sign that there are still men able to assert feelings in the world".

In an essay by Anthony Haden-Guest in the anthology Sticky Sublime, he speaks of the work of the photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto. "The ocean remains and Sugimoto's photographs of vast oceanscapes are a testament, but the ocean is fragile too. There is our junk on the moon and more of our junk in Near Space too. That leaves Deep Space.

So long as the Hubble Telescope and its successors keep sending home images, the sublime will endure - just so long as anybody down here is paying attention."

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Figure 21: photograph by Hiroshi Sugimoto

Finally, I would like to consider the painter Mark Rothko. John Lahr, the stage writer of Mark Rothko Onstage suggests Rothko's encroaching darkness: "There is only one thing I fear in life, my friend," he says. "One day the black will swallow the red."

(The New Yorker, April 10, 2010) In my film the raw power of waves, the majestic appearance of the ocean, the light reflections on the surface of the water all trigger a deep emotional response.

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Figure 22: still from The Sandcastle

They are recorded in intervals: blackness next to sublime traces of beauty as I film them in 24 frames per second. The many words for beauty and the cultural varied meaning for beauty would not be enough to describe "that beauty feeling" we encounter.

Standing on the dune and filming and experiencing the grandeur of nature has to do with a quality of transcending, the effect of the sublime.

I believe my film The Sandcastle communicates properties of the sublime. The audience is taken to a place of awe. But this may also produce an extremely upsetting quality. I want to discuss the perceptions of the audience and a personal theory which I will introduce as a result of the post-screening discussions of my film mentioned in the chapter on process in this paper.

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The film seems to trigger reactions based on the nature shots and the large portraits of residents (neighbors) included in my film. The pairing of information about a land battle, real estate wars, property fights, and petty trespassing comments, seems to pull the film back into immediate and mundane reality of human behavior. The topics of privilege, greed, money, and possession surface and seem to influence the audience in the perception of the film.

The audience seems to respond on more than two separate levels. On the topical level, the audience has a reaction to the greed and privilege of some of the neighbors.

There is also a reaction to the form of the film. Certain people enjoy the way the film is shot, edited, and structured as a narrative. Some elements, like the inclusion of black, certain sounds, repetition of shots are liked or not liked by the audience.

Beyond this I get the feeling that the facts, and the interview contents of the film, and the reality of human nature, seem to clash with the grandeur of the footage. Forces are at work. I dare to take people to the place of "boundlessness and magnitude" as described by Robert Rosenblum but then bring them back to a place of reality.

Did I as a filmmaker transport the audience to a place of enlightenment and to experience grandeur of nature and feelings beyond beauty and then pull them out of it into petty reality? Did I turn a mirror on all of us who are looking ?

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9. CONCLUSION I believe choosing the tools I chose for this film and topic was appropriate and allowed me to work with the materials generated in a challenging and fulfilling way.

The portraiture in combination with the landscape shots works well. The continuity in shooting and recording style for image and sound made it possible for me to depict one place and one time. I was able to construct the experience of an "ongoing moment" in the small area on the dune. The film offers a systematic feeling of continuity and repetition in service for the narrative. There is a tight structure of experience coupled with a set of extensive statements of the interviewees. Yet the film succeeds in not representing or illustrating while it straddles the fine balance of experimental and poetic practice.

My unique situation at Duke University offered me last minute possibilities to confer with several knowledgeable scholars. I received their critiques and was able to exchange ideas about the film. I am considering the suggestions and will revisit the film in its current form. Certain portions of the interviews could possibly be cut out . The film's length is a concern. I am also thinking of cutting the interludes between the larger interview sequences. But I want to be careful about further edits and carefully negotiate the tightly floating number of elements which should not be disrupted as they interplay well in the current version. Based on the feedback I might "nudge" the current edit back slightly and consider the qualities in earlier versions of the film. I am aware of the issue of minimal over-illustration and representation in certain areas. But I also know that each small change may cause changes in the overall rhythm and pacing of the film and may impact the narrative .

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My goal is a very delicate negotiation between all the elements of the film. This might take a little while as the film has to rest and settle in my mind. I have to let the memory of the experience sink in. But I also trust the voice of the material itself as I know it speaks clearly to me as the filmmaker and editor and suggests ways of editing that are truthful to the qualities of the footage.

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Appendix A - Location and time

This is an excerpt from an audio documentary narrative I wrote that was used to set up the beach location and the voices of neighbors for a radio production:

â€œâ€Śit takes about 60 seconds to get from the house to the beach. There are some beach plum bushes along the path. When the berries are ripe, I stop for a beat, pick some, and eat them on my way down. There is a little bench on the upper part of the dune. Sometimes I sit down and take a look out towards P- town. On most days one can see the town across the bay. One can also see the little planes fly in from Boston airport.

They are landing in P-town delivering the summer people from the big city.

I never sit on the bench for a long time because I want to get to the water. I get up, walk around the first bend on the path by the shrubs and then along the little row of pine trees. I make another curve, duck down underneath the old and scraggly bush.

After the last left turn on the hidden path I see something amazing. I have always loved this view: The bushes circle in over me and frame a unique view. My window to the ocean. Seeing the ocean framed like this is almost like a natural wonder. But I stop only for a short moment, as I want to jump in the water soon.

It takes about a minute or two to get down to the beach. There is one upsetting issue: The ticks during the month of July can be nasty around here. Spending too much time on the path with the beach grass can be dangerous. I run to the beach and make 45

sure to inspect my bare legs, the clothes, and the beach towel for those ticks. On a bad day I might catch ten, fifteen twenty ticks. I take them off my skin and kill them.

Time seems to pass slower here than in other places. Sometimes it even seems to stop for a moment. Sitting here, taking the ticks off of my skin and looking at the clouds over P-town - that all happens in its own time frame. When the clouds move slowly one can also slow down and study how they travel above the bay. In the afternoon or on the next day , nature will look different again. Overnight the waves usually carry in sea grass, dead fish, shells and debris from fishing boats. Sometimes a storm cuts loose the colorful buoys from lobster traps and washes them ashore.

It takes time to cherish these slow moments. To become one with this land. Some of the summer people or the recently moved-in wash- ashores, as they are called by the locals, don't seem to have appreciation for this slow time, the beautiful moments, the standing still of time.

They rush and race with their cars through the little roads in the dunes. They hurry to meetings. They put up "no trespassing" signs. And they yell at people walking on their beach.

Some summer folks can be quite hostile. Town meetings become aggressive when people voice their opinions.

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Some of the rich newcomers build houses with gigantic reflecting pools. They bring in lawyers from the big city to sue everyone in the neighborhood for access to a property. They install surveillance cameras. They build houses much larger then they need to be. Most of them don't even take the time to go down to the beach, pick some bay berries, smell the pine needles, and touch the beach grass. These people and the ticks are the only thing bothering me here sometimes‌"

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Appendix B - A pre-screening introduction

For the premier screening at the Full Frame Theater on the American Tobacco Campus in Durham I gave a short introduction to the film project. With a brief poetic list I set up the film for the audience.

Within the list I set up my relation to Edward Hopper and making the film about him. I use the example for describing rapport with my subjects and the fieldwork I did on Cape Cod. Further I highlight the poetic idea of the duration of a summer day, stillness and a possibility for a dream. I include several brief bursts of inspiration which lead my thinking of the editing process while at Duke University. Then I set up the idea of physical time spent with the film while watching it. I also mention the role of black spaces in the film as a conceptual device for allowing space for audio to have impact.

I deliberately set up that image and sound were always separate during the production and post production. This encourages the viewer to work on combining these two elements while watching. To this information I add some of the physical aspects of the film. I mention the hand-made process and the handling of enormous amounts of footage in the lab. In the conclusion of the poetic introduction I point to the experience of watching a film in a movie theater and connect it with an introduction of the idea of "devotional cinematography".

This list is a tool. Filmmakers seldom have the chance to introduce films to a specific audience in person. Often the films run without the filmmaker being present. I 48

welcomed the chance to introduce the film to the audience. When I prepared for the introduction I considered a variety of approaches. The challenge seemed to be setting up a film that in itself is a fragmented narrative. I did not want to give too many clues and at the same time I felt I could prepare the audience for the film by hinting on the meaning of some of the fragments which I presented straight forward in the following sequence:

The List:

1

EDWARD HOPPER / RAPPORT AND FIELDWORK

2

A SUMMER DAY, ONGOING MOMENTS, STILLNESS, A DREAM?

3

CONVERSATIONS, part 1: BILL SEAMAN

"make an ugly, make a wild version, use the energy of the glitch"

JOSH GIBSON:

"Wolf, what is the beginning and ending of the film going to be?

Answer: the shot of the water. " Wolf, will you put in folly sound in the parking lot scene?

Answer: NO

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BILL NOLAND :

" make sure to keep it raw, don't over-edit.

Keep the eccentric!"

4

Film is physical time. Everyone experiences their own version of this film.

5

Black has a function in this film. It allows for transition of time and space.

It makes place for sound.

6

Repetition and variation are part of this film. I offer combinations of context.

7

CONVERSATIONS part 2:

ALEX HARRIS:

"I always ask myself a question: "How can something so beautiful be bad"?

(Alex Harris is referring to the new house depicted in the film)

8

Image and sound were always separate. This film is a piecemeal bit by bit - in small stages

9

8800 feet had to be cut, loaded, exposed, cut again, developed, spliced, transferred, edited. 2 miles of raw material in my hands. 2 months of developing in red light.

10

A ONE MAN MOVING STUDIO

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50 pounds of equipment. Walking in the sand. Carrying a tripod, the camera, loaded magazines, lenses, and more 11

DEVOTIONAL CINEMA NATHANIEL DORSKY THE MOVIE THEATER IS A PLACE OF EXPERIENCE. THE ILLUMINATED ROOM I mention the concept of 24 frames / second

INTERMITTENCE

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I would like to introduce DEVOTIONAL CINEMATOGRAPHY I see. Light enters into my skull. I film. Light enters into the Russian made Movie camera. Next to my ear I hear the images being made.

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It is a hot summer day on Cape Cod. Who wouldn't want to be here building a sandcastle?

Appendix C - Post- screening critiques The timing for the editing process was unique during the production of my film and the writing of this thesis essay. Wile I was finishing the first cut I had the chance to 51

meet with several prominent filmmakers on Duke University's campus. It afforded me the chance to get a variety of specific feedback while working on my piece. This and the possibilities of last minute changes in non-linear editing enabled me to detect weaknesses in the film's narrative and correct them.

The post screening critiques and conversations became a part of my editing process as I was able to include many changes up to the last minute before finishing the final cut for the thesis defense.

During the process of critiques leading up to the defense a set of questions were on my mind:

Have I been clear as a filmmaker in what I communicate?

Does the audience care about my subject?

Do people identify with subjects in my film?

Is there a universal topic people seem to be able to relate to?

Where can it be helpful to use small elements of illustration?

Is the element of ambiguity in my final edit successful?

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Making a film with a the sense of movie business consideration requires to account for the needs of a certain target audience. Which outlets and festivals could work for the film?

I edited this film under the premise of finding the truthful cut within the film & audio footage. The footage is rich. Did I listen enough to the materials I recorded?

The extreme beauty of the film material itself and the beauty of the depicted landscape, portraits of my subjects, and even the footage of the house are quite stunning. I get very strong positive reactions to the effect of the footage. How can one deal creatively with extreme beautiful/ sublime footage?

The audience seems to be in conflict with some of the interview choices and the general topic. What does the audience really feel?

This film seems to mirror my own feeling of the real life on Cape Cod. One wants to enjoy the privileged beauty of the space and not deal with real life and the ugly presence of lawyers and dispute‌

There seems to be a collision of the sublime effect of my imagery of nature and the real space with all the effects of human nature.

Some of the audience simply wants to see beauty/ the sublime and not be bothered by context.

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This film's deep message is that we don't own land as humans. We occupy it for a while. Structures will be taken down by forces of nature eventually.

I don't mind the house on the dune.

Meeting with James Benning

Benning points out the issue of "illustration " within the film. He suggests to remove any and all sequences that come close to illustration of the spoken words. He suggests putting them before or after. I have edited most of the film this way to begin with. I carry in pieces from both sides of my media spectrum. 35mm footage and independently recorded sound. This is the first layer of not illustrating. The voice track is composed to give my interviewees the chance to speak. It is an attempt to achieve something harking to a town meeting concept. People get almost equal time to speak.

They are then overlaid with imagery that has the same length for each person. Images are "exchanged" within these sequences. Occasionally they "illustrate" the spoken word and topic of conversation.

I question if I have been too considerate with my collaborators. I do have a good rapport with all my subjects. I even have three members of my family portrayed in the film. I ask myself if I act out of too much respect for my subjects. There is the fact that I 54

will see everyone that is in my film in real life again as everyone gathers in the same neighborhood during the summers.

I feel my film has an effect on James Benning. He reacts with a certain disgust.

Benning feels that the film is about the privilege to own land in this town. His reaction: "…people are flaunting their wealth". He hates the people.

Meeting with Mark Anthony Harris

I showed Mark Anthony Harris a close to final cut.

Mark responds from a standpoint of more commercial documentary filmmaking and narrative structure that can succeed in Hollywood. He reacts to repetitions in the structure. I agree with certain aspects. He finds that some characters appear too often in the edit. In the final cut I made changes that reflect our conversations. Mainly I took a closer look at the footage of the woman who stands next to a house. She is a strong and recurring character. I filmed her in a fashion that suggests a living character in an Edward Hopper painting. Mark suggests to look at the length of the film. He finds that I should take out about 4 minutes of the version I showed to him.

The result of our meeting was very productive. I re-edited several portions of the film and arrived at more clarity. I exchanged character shots of the woman and eliminated repetitive elements throughout the film. But I also made sure to maintain the 55

general idea of modules in the film that get repeated and go through slight alterations as described before in the section on the musical structure of the fugue.

Again, I am reminded about judging the possibilities of the film, its narrative and the options for editing from the standpoint of editing being inspired by the material at hand. Similar to editing for fiction film, my film has gone through three major stages of writing and conceptualization.

First there were pre-shooting ideas, and concepts based on my knowledge of the topic and further research.

Second came the actual shooting based on the concept with many alterations while shooting the material and recording the sound. In the third phase I responded to the actual footage that afforded me to edit. It is a test of how the story of the film survived through all the production stages. But it is also the fascination of more discovery and gaining clarity. I do feel that the beginning idea of the film was strong.

But it may not have been clear that in this material was a universal theme that could be discovered.

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Meeting with Alex Harris

Alex Harris has been involved with this project for a long time. His perception of the film is that of knowing most of the back story and also most of the editing phase and.

He was able to observe the bringing together of materials in several stages.

We first have a conversation about a Andreas Feininger quote

from the

exhibition "One Place" at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University. Andreas Feininger responds to a letter by a fellow photographer asking for help: "‌if you feel strong about your photography you don't need anybodies criticism. And if you are uncertain, no criticism would do you any good because you might ask six different people and get six entirely different opinions. And where would that leave you? ( Andreas Feininger, Life Magazine, responding to a letter from Paul Kwilecki on March 7, 1962)

We discuss my role as the author of the film and my voice in this film. Previously I had made shorter films with a narration element and as Alex describes my narrative voice as a voice that "asked questions" and seemed to "share a secret" while taking the viewer on a personal journey.

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For The Sandcastle my choice was to remove my own voice as I felt it was represented strongly enough within the imagery, my choices of interviewees, and the assemblage of the material. I felt I did not want to take people by their hands and lead them through the film. I felt I wanted to give equal space for the voices of my subjects to be able to "speak up" as if they would participate in a town meeting.

The concept of the town meeting is mentioned by one of the characters in my film. In this small town there is no anonymous voting about town issues such as on a variance of a building permit. In this small town citizens speak up in small town committee meetings and then they have to face each other in the daily town life.

Alex Harris mentions the value of voices coming into the film. He remembers vividly an older lady talking about how easy it would be to remove the house: "‌ they carried it in, so they can carry it out- hopefully with a local wrecking crew". I agree that these voices add context and give the film a message that I had always intended to give.

We further discuss that most of the quotes seem to be in favor of tearing down the house. Alex Harris feels it may be valuable to discover other sound bites within my audio footage which would make the film less one-sided. Possibly moving the quote by John Thornley about feeling a certain empathy with the owner of the disputed house towards the end of the film could achieve this. This added layer of empathy could influence the audience to accept the conflict around the house more easily.

The film actually develops towards the end into a film that both, visually and through montage sets the house apart from all the conflict and presents it as a beautiful

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pure object in the landscape. It is at this point not overlaid with narrative voices or suggestive music.

Alex and I conclude our conversation talking about a general paradox in documentary. We discuss the effect of photographing or filming and making things, people, and situations look pleasant to the eye through beautiful composition and other properties of photography. The paradox in this is that the image maker may record images and topics of horror, war, and distress and still furnish imagery of a certain beauty. He suggests that I may have countered this paradox with my camera work and editing choices of sublime imagery in the first place. Filling in raw and harsh content as a counter weight to all the sublime shots of people, landscape, and the building in the dunes produces the documentary paradox again.

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Works Cited Bresson, Robert, Notes on the Cinematographer, Kobenhavn: Green Integer, 1997 Chion, Michel, Audio Vison- Sound on Screen, New York: Columbia University Press, 1990 Sebald, W.G., The Rings of Saturn, New York: New Directions Books, 1999 Sebald, W.G., The Emigrants, New York: New Directions Book, 1997 Lightman, Alan, Einstein's Dreams, New York: Warner Books, 1993 Gilbert-Rolfe, Jeremy, Beauty and the Contemporary Sublime, New York, Allworth Press, 1999 Beckley, Bill, ed. ,Sticky Sublime, New York, Allworth Press, 2001

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