Implied Narrative

I am looking to reintroduce and develop the implied narrative in my moving image work.

I am thinking of works/artists such as:

Matthias Müller

Christian Marclay

Such work is often made from found footage, picking themes, linking them together, and thus creating imaginary narratives and new meanings from reconstructing cinematic references and expectations. Much of the work depends upon extracting clips from their context, and finding a visual link, eg, phone calls, audience reactions, clock times. Such works also bring to them considerable provenance from their original contexts, allowing a playful mix of juxtapositioning, and compounding to create new configurations and planned spontaneity of thought.

http://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2011/apr/07/christian-marclay-the-clock

I am not particularly thinking of using found footage in my work, not much more than I have done anyway.

http://eleanormacfarlane.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/titles.html

In Titles, I sort of used appropriated imagery, but even then, it was already extracted and changed, captured blurred, or in part, or as an anonymous image almost impossible to reconnect to its original. The image I took was the original, with a shadow of its provenance, in an aspecific way, towards whole chapters of genres, styles. This makes them specifically about film, and a particular style and time, but equally, aspecific.

24th October 2013
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I find the artist Elizabeth Price interesting and admirable. She has such a varied background, from a punk band to a PhD and the Turner Prize.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Price_(artist)

http://www.lux.org.uk/collection/artists/elizabeth-price

She so beautifully weaves together vintage footage to create memorable and moving narratives. Through looking at her work I also hope to enlighten myself about my reluctance to use any more than a small layer of appropriated imagery. I have looked before at why I feel the drive to create images rather than to reframe old, but not for some time, and it's time.

16th December 2013

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Update on this idea

As I am actually making this piece, it is going another way. the deliberate implied narrative is perhaps for another time, another year, another work. Sometimes you can't force a work into a particular format.

There is still a layer or suggestion of narrative that may well still happen. I have been thinking about filming a printed layer of the photos as a figure flickers in wind, and moves, perhaps blows away. It entirely depends upon how that works out and how it fits in with everything else. I may have to edit away that idea and save it for another work. However, if this is not for the final project, it has been rather a dominant thought throughout making, informing decisions, even if they end up back stage.

21st July 2014

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Clearly my implied narrative lies in the characters in my old photographs in Class of Yesterday. At some points during making I wondered about creating some movement in the characters, perhaps making one float through all the images, or making a point of featuring always on a shoe or something like that. Ideas came and went, and none seemed right for this, especially as the work was developing, and in a way, I could not intervene by manufacturing some device to labour a point. All my ideas I tried came out a bit clunky.

I can see that there is a certain current trend in utilising archive moving image at the moment, which links it together by some contextual device. I like it, but I don't make work like that. There is a lot of work I like but don't necessarily make.

In Embedded, the implied narrative is the people, what might have happened to them, what happened to friends we knew in childhood, what happened to our past, and so on. Plenty to be going on with.

11th November 2014