The image-track

Consider this piece of Dada junk-poetry:



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Jeanine, the friend of Jeanine and earns frequent flier miles with philosopher toward blithe spirit. Furthermore, cashier toward apartment building beams with

joy, and skyscraper related to bur debutante from hand. If toward dust bunny teach insurance agent from cloud formation, then defined by impresario gets

stinking drunk. defined by scooby snack wakes up, and minivan related to graduated cylinder daydreams; however, scooby snack related to a big fan of. But they

eed to remember how lazily buzzard from daydreams. But they need to remember how accidentally cab driver beyond hesitates.

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It looks like a piece of poetry. And we read it the way we are taught to read a piece of poetry, and try to find meaning in the words strung together. But actually that’s what they are – just words strung together, chosen at random and strung together.

Thanks to the nature of the cut, cinema too is read in a similar fashion. Two shots juxtaposed together give rise to a third meaning. Imagine then two completely unrelated shots, chosen at random, juxtaposed together. The viewer will try to make some meaning out of the juxtaposition. Juxtapose another unrelated shot to it. The viewer will still try to make something out of it. Continue the process ad infinitum. The viewer may get confused about what the film-maker wants to say, but he/she will still believe that the film-maker wants to say something. Ignoring the obvious, which is that the film-maker wants to say nothing.

But I would like the viewer to know that I’m saying nothing. I would like to communicate that I do not want to communicate. And I would like to do it at that point in time when the viewer has almost switched off from the film, not able to make meaning out of it. And from then on, he can enjoy the rest of the images for what they are – just images strung together.

However, a garbled construction like the poem above is difficult in film, because the nearest equivalent a shot has in written and spoken language is the sentence. And therefore, each shot is in a sense complete in itself and doesn’t really need another to complete it, unless both of them are used as tools to develop an idea or a narrative. Hence, the danger is that the image-track might be seen as a “montage”, a collection of independent ideas, right from the beginning. Which is why I see an important role for the cut here. It shouldn’t be static, just joining the two shots together, but linking them dynamically to suggest a continuity, an idea, a narrative where there isn’t any.

I would like viewers to attempt to make meaning of the film only through the cut. Therefore other devices that suggest continuity like a single character or location or a style of shot-taking are out of consideration. The challenge is therefore to shoot dissimilar ideas, and while editing find similarities that enable them to be linked together.

























4' 33" - A tribute to John Cage