The realization of my final project takes inspiration from one video and photographer artist Richard kern.
Richard Kern (born: North Carolina, 1954) has lived and worked in New York City since 1979. In the eighties, he produced a series of short films that now are recognized as the central works of the movement now known as the Cinema of Transgression. In the 90’s he switched to photography full time and occasionally directed music videos for bands like Sonic Youth and Marilyn Manson - sought to both unravel and illuminate the complex and often darker sides of human nature.
Kern has published nine books and is a regular contributor to a variety of international publications.
Photographer, occasional pornographer, former-filmmaker and video director, and a man once amicably referred to as the 'Evil Cameraman', remains, first and foremost, a portrait artist. For more than two decades Kern has - with a shifting band of accomplices that, over the years, has included post-punk diva Lydia Lunch, artists such as David Wojnarowicz, Karen Finley, Rita Ackermann and Lucy McKenzie, the novelist Geoff Nicholson.
As the underground reflection of Reagan’s America, Kern’s films embraced the subculture of the Lower East Side and the avant-garde impulse of those on the fringe of the established art world. However, a split occurred in Kern’s career around 1987 when he decided to quit the Lower East Side to remove himself from its drug culture. This split is depicted in The Evil Cameraman (‘87-’90), an allegory of Kern’s evolution as a visual artist. The first part of the film is made up of two segments depicting Kern “arranging a model” in provocative S&M scenarios; the imagery and music is dark and the threat of violence is palpable. Then the title “2 Years Later” appears and we are given two very different segments of a different Kern-- back from his hiatus-- who works with two “models” who do not play into his “control” as photographer. The film ends with a rejected Kern looking into the camera. This new relationship to the women in his films-- playful, puzzling, rejecting the anticipatory action of “pornography”-- colours his later films: X = Y (1990), Nazi (1991), Catholic (1991), Horoscope (1991), and The Bitches (1992). During this period Kern also shifted his attention to a different visual form.
The ability to represent the dark side of the human nature is what interests me most. What inspires me when I watch his movie is the fluidity of the action, and the dark and bohemian surroundings that he creates in his movies.
What I would like to achieve during this project is the same ability of expression.
What interest me more is how he builds his scenarios and how he uses his camera.
Obviously the subject of my project is going to be different from the stories that Kern developed.
My idea is to express the condition of a subject that is experiencing a particularly and meaningless period of his life.
While he is going out in the city where he lives, he starts asking questions about the system and how he should react to this way of living.
The main point of the story is the relationship between his feelings and all the systematic rules that a society imposes.
I guess that Kern tries to express a solution to this, in his movies and pictures, using the transgression, highlighting the soft desires of the human being.
My work will not however go into such sexual detail.
I want to direct the moment when the character first starts to have doubts about where he is in life, and try to portray the psychological sacrifices that the character is ready to make. After not being able to resolve these problems he will experience a weird sense of dissolution. This project will be a in a short movie format.
For this movie I will have to use a wide range of recording techniques, to create the desired effect. All of the filming will be done in and around London.
I still need to create a sketchbook, and write the script/storyboard for the film. I am also considering using some books in order to gain some further insight into how I can get the right feelings across in film. One in particular it will be Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse where the study of the human paths is deep and rich of questions proper for this field.
Few Ideas are coming in my mind and I guess that the visual elements is going to be the central aspect of the movie.
I will take in consideration the various angles, considering the fact that right now I am discovering that short cut's of images, captured from different visual sources has the role of a strong odience attraction, in according with my taste as well.
