First Dissertation Meeting 03/06/24

Revealing/Concealing, what's controlled and what's out of control.

Suggestion from Kirsten: Surrender the idea of overthinking what other people think, and just go for what your vision is. If you're second guessing yourself because you're concerned about your grade, then the film will not be what you imagine it to be.

Leave the space more open in the film for the viewer to interpret their own meanings, like you did in the cave sequence.

Question of relational aesthetics.

Dialogical work.

The problem with political work is that it cannot be opaque. I need to create lots of room for audience interpretation.

Decision about how to curate the film:

• two screens? Collision, coherence etc.

• Sound

• Relationship between harmony and discord, coherence, incoherence.

Look into Panteha Abareshi's work and how they curate their work.

Back to revealing/concealing - in its refusal to reveal and denying voyeurism, it inadvertently becomes something highly charged and suggestive because of previous censorship that viewers now associate with erotic things. This, unfortunately, is not what I want for my film. I want to make something that undoes the misogyny of the monstrous feminine, and the patriarchal fixation to sexualise her. However, if my methods instead play into these tropes then I need to figure out how I go around this. Perhaps if I focus on the body in a way that abstracts it and makes it alien enough that it cannot be sexualised and just seen as a body, then maybe this is how I can achieve what I want. It's really frustrating trying to make work like this, as obviously people don't think the same way that I do. What I see as a visceral exploration of the body within a natural setting, someone else sees as something sexual and voyeuristic. I think because viewers have become so conditioned to see things through the 'male gaze', that 1. they no longer can interpret things through their own gaze as an individual regardless of gender, and 2. it takes a while to be able to interpret thing through the gaze through which I am filming, which I suppose would be called the 'female gaze', but also it is the gaze of someone who is Neurodivergent and thinks about the world quite differently.