SCENARIO

SCENARIO consists of two series of photographs, a carousel projector, and a tungsten light.

Tungsten light: Film, requiring much more light to produce an image than our variably sensitive eyes, creates a necessity for an artificial source. In the early days of film, the only one available (apart from fire and candle light) was incandescent bulbs (or tungstens named after the material used for the thin filament found in their core). Like a fire, these bulbs glow yellow and orange, hues we most often perceive as warm. But if a filmmaker didn’t want their images hued with (homey) warmth, the chemistry of film could bring them back to the neutral whites of daylight. Splitting color film into tungsten balanced and daylight balanced.

Carousel projector: When the Kodak Carousel home projector was first released, one of its main selling points was its ability to not only move backwards and forwards through photographs, but round and round and back again The addition of an automated timer could move through them cyclically and independently, inching their viewing slightly closer to that of a film: with only a flicker and clunk of the projectors mechanism leaving a small gap between the images.

Two series of photographs: Our mind has the tendency to fill in the gaps. A tendency which in the medium of film is called the Kuleshov effect, after the Russian filmmaker Lev Kuleshov who first observed it in the 1910s. Following, is an explanation of this effect Alfred Hitchcock gave in an interview in 1964:

We have a close up of an old man. Then, we show what he sees. Let's assume he saw a woman holding a baby in her arms. Now, we cut back to his reaction, and he smiles. Now, what is he as a character? He is a kindly man, he’s sympathetic. Now. Let’s take away the middle piece of film, the woman with the child, but leave his two pieces of film as they were. Now we’ll put in a piece of film of a girl in a bikini. He looks. Girl in a bikini. He smiles. What is he now? A dirty old man. He’s no longer the benign gentleman who loves babies. That’s the difference. That’s what film can do for you.

Create meaning where no meaning was filmed.

Aristotelis Nikolas Mochloulis