Artist Statement
The generalization that most accurately sums up my work is that I am interested in perception and in how humans organize remembered perceptions to construct meaning in time and under the monolith of our own mortality. I am fascinated by the maelstrom of raw sensory data which is miraculously and habitually organized, by even the dullest of minds, into ostensibly clear thoughts populated by people and solid objects. It seems to me, that phenomenal reality is just an abstraction we have grown accustomed to. To crystalize this idea in my work, I like to start with nonfigurative formalism which through movement, editing, and sound drifts closer to an associative surrealism. My films are only ostensibly strange but in reality there is always something familiar beneath. Much of my past work, while more experimental than narrative, has found itself in dialogue with ideas about narrative.
These interests first manifested themselves in A Narrative Film. The name of the film itself is intentionally ironic as there are no characters or plot. It is a three-act progression of imagery in which I explored my obsession at the time for what I dubbed, “the conceit of the narrative”. Framed as “an assault on the conceit of the traditional narrative” the film encourages viewers to reflect on the expressive power that film and art as a whole can have when unburdened with the largely unquestioned supremacy of narrative that many, including myself, can take for granted.
While creating A Narrative Film, I thought I was trying to escape the narrative but due to the sequential nature of the cinematic medium it felt like a fantastically beautiful and epic failure. A failure, because despite the easy victory over plot and conventional narrative, it is impossible to escape from the lived sequence of events and consequently a chronological narrative.
This observation led to my next film which I less ironically but no less brazenly titled A Sequence of Events. The title again implies a more straightforward connection between imagery and ordering of events than is actually present in the film itself. In actuality, the connections between the objects and scenes is quite spontaneous and obscure. Through the fragmented imagery of A Sequence of Events I continued to reflect on the nature of cinematic imagery and how sequential continuity is inescapable in even the most literally partitioned grouping of frames. Once two frames are shown in sequence, a relation is created in the mind no matter how ostensibly vapid or obscure the content.
After creating two films obsessed with their own extreme interpretations of “sequentiality” as a kind of inescapable form of narrative (A Narrative Film and A Sequence of Events), Plot Driven Movie jumps in with the awareness of these failed “escape attempts” and tries to reconcile them through pun driven visual semantics. Plot Driven Movie sits on the shoulders of my previous installments. This time it is indeed a “Plot” driven movie, but only as an exploration of alternative meanings of the word plot. Unlike the previous trilogy installments, rather than feign ignorance in the hopes that my imagery would never become narrative, I leaned into it heavily. I even created a deliberate statement on the inevitability of narrative involving a violent car crash and the absurd death of a necessary letter (T). I then shamelessly elaborated on the tragedy with a joke funeral and a memento mori, in the form of eyeballs watching a NO SIGNAL broadcast (among other things).
I informally call this three-film grouping (comprised of: A Narrative Film, A Sequence of Events and Plot Driven Movie) The Reluctant Narratives Trilogy, because as anti-narratives they all “accidentally” fall into the proverbial narrative p(L)othole. What they have in common are their IDEAS about narrative and their visual reflections on conventional storytelling, despite not being overtly narrative themselves. The shared dilemma in all three of these films is how to analyze the story driven impulse in cinema without succumbing to that impulse in the process. In the end I hope these three films are advocating for a new visual and sonic paradigm in which the formalistic binary such as Narrative and Non-Narrative, Realistic and Abstract, Representational and Non-Objective, etc. can meld more freely without being so antagonistic to one another. Perhaps they’ll always fight but the dialectic is more fruitful when they don’t ignore the fact that they will always be two sides of the same coin.
Coming off the heels of three narrative obsessed non-narratives I wanted to create a film that is less preoccupied with categorizing and contextualizing its own imagery. This film is now complete and titled: It Is What It Is. It Is What It Is, is basically a series of isolated loops woven together through cinematic continuity. Thinking of each loop as its own character, they go on journeys of mounting complexity through transposition from 2D to 3D. They each have varying degrees of success until the last two eventually blend together in their own imperfections and fall apart. The elevator is a humorous unifying element and became a comment on certain illusions of progress.
The Film Death After Death was created for a multimedia concert called Both Sides of the Mirror for the Fuse Ensemble. The music Fauna of Mirrors (composed by Juan Carlos Vasquez) is inspired by an excerpt from The Book of Imaginary Beings, by Louis Borges. The passage “Fauna of Mirrors” deals with a myth of an ancient Chinese emperor who fought off creatures from a mirror dimension by casting a spell on them, forcing them to copy everything in our world as if in a waking dream. This fantastical explanation of why mirrors reflect ends with a sinister prophecy that one day the magic will wear off, allowing the Fauna of Mirrors to get revenge. The music is a more conceptual than narrative adaptation of the source material with a dialectic created between the acoustic music and the electroacoustic tape sounds as “mirror”.
My approach could be argued to be similar, but in a visual dimension. I created a dialectic between the 3D skull imagery on the left with the 2D rotoscope imagery as “mirror” on the right. The final product ended up as an exploration of the tension between reality and representation and how the balance of power between the two flips back and forth. The skull is an obvious memento-mori as well, giving the extra layer of dialectic between the opposites of life and death. Due to the freedom I was given in animating to the music, Fauna of Mirrors, I was able to generate some imagery that I was quite proud of and further my research down a path I had already been traveling for quite some time. The themes inevitably generated through an artistic engagement with mirrors and metaphorical reflections lend themselves quite seamlessly to the meta-imageries I enjoy exploring.
These interests first manifested themselves in A Narrative Film. The name of the film itself is intentionally ironic as there are no characters or plot. It is a three-act progression of imagery in which I explored my obsession at the time for what I dubbed, “the conceit of the narrative”. Framed as “an assault on the conceit of the traditional narrative” the film encourages viewers to reflect on the expressive power that film and art as a whole can have when unburdened with the largely unquestioned supremacy of narrative that many, including myself, can take for granted.
While creating A Narrative Film, I thought I was trying to escape the narrative but due to the sequential nature of the cinematic medium it felt like a fantastically beautiful and epic failure. A failure, because despite the easy victory over plot and conventional narrative, it is impossible to escape from the lived sequence of events and consequently a chronological narrative.
This observation led to my next film which I less ironically but no less brazenly titled A Sequence of Events. The title again implies a more straightforward connection between imagery and ordering of events than is actually present in the film itself. In actuality, the connections between the objects and scenes is quite spontaneous and obscure. Through the fragmented imagery of A Sequence of Events I continued to reflect on the nature of cinematic imagery and how sequential continuity is inescapable in even the most literally partitioned grouping of frames. Once two frames are shown in sequence, a relation is created in the mind no matter how ostensibly vapid or obscure the content.
After creating two films obsessed with their own extreme interpretations of “sequentiality” as a kind of inescapable form of narrative (A Narrative Film and A Sequence of Events), Plot Driven Movie jumps in with the awareness of these failed “escape attempts” and tries to reconcile them through pun driven visual semantics. Plot Driven Movie sits on the shoulders of my previous installments. This time it is indeed a “Plot” driven movie, but only as an exploration of alternative meanings of the word plot. Unlike the previous trilogy installments, rather than feign ignorance in the hopes that my imagery would never become narrative, I leaned into it heavily. I even created a deliberate statement on the inevitability of narrative involving a violent car crash and the absurd death of a necessary letter (T). I then shamelessly elaborated on the tragedy with a joke funeral and a memento mori, in the form of eyeballs watching a NO SIGNAL broadcast (among other things).
I informally call this three-film grouping (comprised of: A Narrative Film, A Sequence of Events and Plot Driven Movie) The Reluctant Narratives Trilogy, because as anti-narratives they all “accidentally” fall into the proverbial narrative p(L)othole. What they have in common are their IDEAS about narrative and their visual reflections on conventional storytelling, despite not being overtly narrative themselves. The shared dilemma in all three of these films is how to analyze the story driven impulse in cinema without succumbing to that impulse in the process. In the end I hope these three films are advocating for a new visual and sonic paradigm in which the formalistic binary such as Narrative and Non-Narrative, Realistic and Abstract, Representational and Non-Objective, etc. can meld more freely without being so antagonistic to one another. Perhaps they’ll always fight but the dialectic is more fruitful when they don’t ignore the fact that they will always be two sides of the same coin.
Coming off the heels of three narrative obsessed non-narratives I wanted to create a film that is less preoccupied with categorizing and contextualizing its own imagery. This film is now complete and titled: It Is What It Is. It Is What It Is, is basically a series of isolated loops woven together through cinematic continuity. Thinking of each loop as its own character, they go on journeys of mounting complexity through transposition from 2D to 3D. They each have varying degrees of success until the last two eventually blend together in their own imperfections and fall apart. The elevator is a humorous unifying element and became a comment on certain illusions of progress.
The Film Death After Death was created for a multimedia concert called Both Sides of the Mirror for the Fuse Ensemble. The music Fauna of Mirrors (composed by Juan Carlos Vasquez) is inspired by an excerpt from The Book of Imaginary Beings, by Louis Borges. The passage “Fauna of Mirrors” deals with a myth of an ancient Chinese emperor who fought off creatures from a mirror dimension by casting a spell on them, forcing them to copy everything in our world as if in a waking dream. This fantastical explanation of why mirrors reflect ends with a sinister prophecy that one day the magic will wear off, allowing the Fauna of Mirrors to get revenge. The music is a more conceptual than narrative adaptation of the source material with a dialectic created between the acoustic music and the electroacoustic tape sounds as “mirror”.
My approach could be argued to be similar, but in a visual dimension. I created a dialectic between the 3D skull imagery on the left with the 2D rotoscope imagery as “mirror” on the right. The final product ended up as an exploration of the tension between reality and representation and how the balance of power between the two flips back and forth. The skull is an obvious memento-mori as well, giving the extra layer of dialectic between the opposites of life and death. Due to the freedom I was given in animating to the music, Fauna of Mirrors, I was able to generate some imagery that I was quite proud of and further my research down a path I had already been traveling for quite some time. The themes inevitably generated through an artistic engagement with mirrors and metaphorical reflections lend themselves quite seamlessly to the meta-imageries I enjoy exploring.
Michael Edwards
CHARMING LUNATIC
CHARMING LUNATIC