bartheliccus

[bartheliccus]

Final project. Finished edit.

[bartheliccus]

Коля and Issues

Not sure when you will be reading this Sean, and I acknowledge I could write something in an email to you just as effectively, however I have been lacking in blogging. Talking about my process and the evolutions of the project that followed could be really helpful. If you find it necessary to reply to this I wouldn’t mind opening a conversation.

I’ve started editing most of my footage for “Коля.” Plain and simple. Some is missing and I will be retrieving it once I return from break, and most I’ve cut out. From all the B-Roll and extraneous shots, I think I’ve found something I can mold into a longer narrative. The original idea I had for a lighthouse being the recurring theme has dwindled and dissolved. Sixteen millimeter was a goal of mine, however the timeframe I had left before I was able to shoot consistently left it near impossible to do with the amount of other projects I have to do and the sheer size that this one has become. But out of this struggle, I think something much more commanding and powerful has arose. 

Nick and myself got together over Thanksgiving break and went around central Wisconsin, shooting locations from Baraboo to Madison. In the narrative I’ve incorporated two new characters through the statue of Jesus (acting as the father of Коля) and a statue of Mary Magdalene (acting as the mother of Коля). Working with Nick, he has helped me to free up the camera and move around. Get dirty, work hard for the perfect shots. I was ankle deep in a creek bed for some or other times caked in mud, my tripod completely soaked (My camera is perfectly fine). 

Through all of this, most of the ideas for “Коля” have changed. But the central idea of loss of language/self still remains. But now, the project has moved to reflect that through a journey across memories. Коля finds himself facing the memories in the beginning of the film with each of the places being presented (save one or two). Then we are greeted by mother as Коля turns to face her. We begin to follow him in his journey from a Brutalist landscape into a more serene calming outdoors visage. Visions of his childhood home, a looming tunnel, or activities he used to participate in are now available for the audience to enter.

And in all of this we have only silence. So far no vocals accompany the filmscape, nor does any sound save for the lone sound of a cassette static loop. Only brown noise and our imagination to fill the void. Having reflected on this idea, I’ve decided upon two cuts that I want to create. Maybe a third depending. I would like to make a voice free version, and also a dubbed/subbed version. Upon the completion of both, I’d like to present them and find which one is more appealing, or more inclusive for the audience (in this case the class)

I apologize for the long read, but I had a lot to say about what I have achieved. This project is one of the first that I have made that I can say I am truly proud of. I take a great sense of accomplishment in what I have here. I only hope you will enjoy it.

Chase

[bartheliccus]

Quick colour correction, edit, and working title

[bartheliccus]

A shot with nice depth of field. The bikers going past and the depth of field really captivated me. I have more with me directing Nick that will be uploaded soon

[bartheliccus]

One of the many video clips I have shot in the last two weeks. I can’t upload many video clips due to size limit. Working on editing more.

[bartheliccus]

мой манифест

This film I am choosing to make is a journey into exploring my own visual preferences and style in a way that challenges me to think about framing and exposure.

I’m going to be using 16mm film which will be an inflection of my own preference to spend time with and reside in a film. As an insurance plan for the worst, I will be recording a digital copy of the film.

The idea I would like to communicate to the audience is ones fear of losing oneself.

The crew is remaining small, three people at most. Zach Nichols has offered to drive me to Sheboygan to photograph the lighthouse there, and Nick has accepted my proposal to voice act within the narrative.

[bartheliccus]

The Road (2006) Cormac McCarthy

Just today, I finished Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road.” The entire books is focused on telling the bleakest father son story set in an apocalyptic Earth long since burned to ash.

The entire story is framing the reality with dreams of despair that slowly evolve to dreams of hope. And as this evolution is happening, The Man will often recite the lines “Dreams of bad things keep us alive.” But slowly his dreams become those of comfort and security, delving more and more into his acceptance of his own imminent (and desired) death to, assumed but never mentioned, lung cancer or COPD.

McCarthy is not concerned with punctuation or formatting, his form is one that feels stream of conscious. Almost as if the entire narrative is a dream, maybe implying an unreliable narrator/storyteller. It could even be a manner of reflection on the setting, there is no order left in the world and such there is no order or legality remaining in the writing of the narrator.

I’m interested in this manner of storytelling and how that could be similarly applied to film. How can order be deserted to help reflect a bleak reality? Is a restriction such as this possible with film?

[bartheliccus]

JUXTAPOSITION V2.0 (2019)

[bartheliccus]

A Life

It was a cold night, a blizzard having blown in not two hours before. Or to be more specific it was January the twenty-third of nineteen ninety-eight at 10:23pm. Amid the hustle of the nursing staff and the raging screams of the weather outside, a woman had given birth to a healthy male child. Me. Chase Matthew Barthel, son to Matthew Warren Barthel and Lori Anne Barthel. The name wasn’t and instant thing actually, I wasn’t named until a few days later because my parents thought I was a girl and so had a different name picked out for me. That was the first of many surprises in a long and convoluted life.

A few days later, I was taken home to a house I cannot remember in a neighborhood I remember all too well. It was in the “bad” part of our “suburban” town of Portage, Wisconsin. If a door wasn’t slightly off its hinges or a window cracked in some place, an AC unit hanging out the window, then you were clearly in a different neighborhood and I have no idea why you are picturing this part of town when indeed you are thinking of literally everywhere else. The upside to this neighborhood was “The Gully,” a giant hill where many children and adults have sustained injuries and a few had even died.

Our dog, a massive german shepherd called Satia, watched over me, protecting me even from my own father. But since I don’t remember much about this house, we’ll move on. We moved to 108 Summit Street in the same town and lived their for most of my life. I grew up playing in the asbestos siding, thinking it was like chalk but just nailed to houses, running around our giant maple tree naked nearly every moment I could. When I was five, Satia, scratched me across the eye because she wanted the tennis ball I was keeping out of her reach.

I try to forget the year I was 8.

When I was ten I had a biking accident. I gouged out my knee biking back from my Aunt’s house. My younger brother, 8 at the time, was biking with me and I told him to rush back to the house to get Mom. There was blood everywhere and they had to cut me out of my bike in our Blue Dodge Grand Caravan. I spent the next three house cleaning the muddy and dirt filled wound.

All of my school life past the age of ten was spent being picked on for wearing the wrong clothes. I was beat up in school bathrooms because I didn’t have aeropostale, or other kids would pull down my pants and spank me. I have no idea why this was what they chose to do, and looking back I completely understand why I have the mental trauma that I have now. 

When I reached the age of 14 we moved away from Portage. No longer were we in our “suburb,” rather we moved to a place in the middle of Nowhere. If you haven’t been to Nowhere, its really a difficult place to describe. The people are just a bit off and the landscape seems to be different overtime you pass it. It’s always the same, but you get the feeling that something is different. People seemed stuck in their cycle of weeks are for working and weekends are for fishing. All 1462 of the population would be out as soon as 4 o’clock on Friday rolled around and they would be fishing the Nowhere damn. Nobody would really catch anything or talk to each other, yet they would be out fishing.

On top of this it seemed that no one really had relations outside the town. In Nowhere everyone was a cousin or second cousin, an aunt or a distant relation. It seems like its impossible for these people to leave Nowhere, and we, from the outside world entering in... we were an anomaly. The people of Nowhere were unsure of how quite to handle us.

High School was the best time of my life, though. I made a lot of friends and overcame a lot of my deep rooted fears. I found my passion for film and filmmaking, and many of the people I consider family came from here. Many of the lessons I’ve learned and the value I hold deep came from High School. One of my favorite teachers being Mary Ott, the choir teacher. She told me one day that she wanted me to do tech for the musical and to come in during auditions to talk to her. But really she had me do an audition instead and had me join the ensemble. I really didn’t have any other choice and so I went with it.

I would tell more of my story but, that’s a long writing indeed.

[bartheliccus]

On Juxtaposition

The recent video “Juxtaposition” I did, I wanted to make it a diptych. However, with the footage I came up with, I was unable to work with it in a way I thought still communicated what I wanted with the shot. Expulsion was really the main idea I had in mind here, working with water (besides digital film) as my medium. Using steam as an expulsion for notifications sake to create. Using water as an expulsion for removing waste from view. In what ways can this be mirrored with a more concise metaphor?

I think this pseudo-diptych would work better in a montage. Curating a number of ideas involving water that are expelling to some degree. A dam letting off excess, the tea kettle, the toilet, a sink, rain gutter, hose, jet ski. They could all be assembled together in a collage to communicate the idea. Or using menial household items, tools, pieces, during a narrative montage (like a waking up in the morning motions routine) to communicate this idea of expulsion as an allusion to an upcoming event.

[bartheliccus]

Juxtaposition (2019) an experiment

[bartheliccus]

The Darkroom finally reopened. I’ve never printed before but I have developed many rolls of colour and black and white film and I must say this was one of the most exciting things I have ever done. Granted they weren’t my negatives, but of the ones there to pick from I made double and triple exposures, manipulating what stock photos were available into really cool images that have a lot of depth and complexity to them.

Double exposure really is an interesting technique and something I would like to explore more perhaps even in Film and Video. What new meaning can you place on an image with two images projected at once?

How does Black and White contribute to this?

[bartheliccus]

Found Poem

I have traded

your car

that you have

just bought.

Because I had

no money

leftover

this month.

I know that

you liked it

red paint and

racing stripes.

[bartheliccus]

When thinking about surrealism and its manifestation, I can’t help but to think of the painter Heironymus Bosch. The way that his paintings both disturb and attract. As seen here, we are immediately drawn in by the portrait of a face but soon find boats filled with people filing out of him, his forehead peeling back and an assortment of other atrocities which occupy the space.

“Surrealist methods would, moreover, demand to be heard... Surrealism does not allow those who devote themselves to it to forsake it whenever they like. There is every reason to believe that it acts on the mind very much as drugs do...It also is, if you like, an artificial paradise“

[bartheliccus]

Automatic Writing | Timed Activity

At the beginning there is always a pause, a moment in time where the author needs a moment to take a breath before diving in. Eventually, there’s this moment. A time of preparedness and the realization that time has passed. Splash, cold, burbles, and your head is beneath the waves. 

In the moment there is no difference between speed and quality, just the writing of words on paper, or text on screen. The words blur by like the stars outside of the Apollo 11 rocket shuttle. You travel at the speed of sound, passing through Wisconsin, Illinois, Ohio, Indiana, Kentucky, North Carolina, the Atlantic Ocean, England, France, Germany, Russia, Alaska, Canada, Wyoming, North Dakota, Minnesota, back to Wisconsin.

And when you are there. You stop. The words cease to exist and there is a void. A void that wants to be filled, but you are unsure of how to satiate its hunger. Do you continue? Do you let that void hunger and starve and eventually die here? There is nothing left to put on the paper. There is no more storage in the device. Everything has completely and utterly run out.

This is only another opportunity to start again.

Schreiben Sie etwas.

Or don’t. I guess I don’t really care whether or not you continue. If you wilt like a hydrangea that a gardener refuses to water. Life is your prerogative, you’re opportunity to get from point A to point B. Who am I to tell you to keep trudging forth. “One foot in front of the Other” after all.

All I know is I am to keep going, to finish the race that I started. No matter how tired or how defeated I am, I can’t let myself lie down and be defeated. To be fed upon by the carrion crows watching over me in the desert. If I let myself become stale, rot, stagnate, then all will have been for naught.

However.

Every race has a water stop. Every musical an intermission. Every work day a lunch break. We need not let ourself push us to the extreme, till the cold bitter dreary end. Rather perhaps, we should allow ourselves a pause. A moment to examine the Goldenrod by the overlook on Lake Michigan. A moment to enjoy a double espresso on the patio of a French alley cafe. Respite from the blazing heat of a midsummer afternoon and lemonade for twenty five cents from the little girl on the corner of Linnwood and Summit. 

Don’t let yourself stop, but neither let your self continue. Fight your battles but take a breath.

[bartheliccus]

ON NON-AMERICAN SHOWS

One of the shows that I have been watching, or rather I finished several weeks ago, is Dark. Dark is a Science Fiction Thriller TV show made in Germany and set during the present day (among other time periods). Several local children in the town of Winden have gone missing, and as the characters come to discover, preternatural forces are at work.

As a way to introduce why I am thinking about this show among others, I’ve been exceptionally bored with most shows that have been released on American Television, or with American audiences in mind. There are lot of the same conventions especially in Netflix shows, a rinse and repeat formula. Introduce characters with cliche problems, create a situation where the world is at stake, sex, solve the issue by the end of the season.

Granted, if you have watched Dark you will realize that this show follows this formula as well. After all, this is Netflix we are talking about. If we peer deeper into the show however (specifically the first season), there is a greater attention to detail to each of the characters. Characters personal wants and desires are strong and well developed. Ulrich Nielsen cares deeply about his children and even his wife, despite being bored in his marriage. Magnus’ insecurities lead him to extreme jealousy and distrust of his significant other Franziska and eventually to her father’s connection to the stranger, Noah.

The focus on relationship and its intricate web of interpersonal conflict is what really makes this show quite brilliant and exciting for me.

On another note, some of the shots in the second season have really captivated my attention. Specifically the vertical splitscreen shots. Its not really a new concept in my mind but the subversive way that the shot was used to communicate a parallel journey of certain characters or even the perceived opposing goals and to do so beautifully was a flawless accomplishment on their part.

This is not to say that the show isn’t without its faults. There are some cheesy CG scenes that you can only find in a Netflix show, and pointless sex scenes that are common place on the platform.

All this being said, I think that this show has been a worthwhile investment of time and a great source of entertainment and inspiration.

Until Then,

Tschüss