WOMAN'S WORLD My film Woman’s World is an adaptation of my novel of the same name. Above is a work-in progress draft of Act One, which is constructed from nearly twenty-five thousand audio-visual clips taken from a wide range of films, TV advertising and documentaries from the 1940s, ‘50s and ‘60s. These pieces are edited together, layered and re-mixed, to create an original new work.
Even in its fragmented state the appropriated footage carries valuable traces of its core principles, telling its own social, historical and cultural story. In my film it provides the audience with a contextual backdrop that brings sharper focus to the film’s themes about gender stereo- typing and the prescribed paradigm of femininity as portrayed onscreen in the 1950s and ‘60s. It is essential that the viewer understands how Norma, my cross-dressing protagonist, is drawing from movie dialogue, advertising jingles, documentary commentary and images that she has seen in film and TV. From these fragments she is able to create a female voice through which she can tell her story. We need to see what Norma has seen to understand how it is informing her opinions and shaping her narrative language. Only by using the original material can this hold any veracity. The film clips I’m using are spliced together sequentially in the usual way, but also cut out and layered spatially, one on top of the other, so that a single frame might be composed from as many as twenty pieces from twenty different sources. At other times, the composition may be simpler: occasionally there might even be two or three seconds of unaltered material. This same multi-layering process governs dialogue, ambient sound and music. Editing is a long, painstaking process: on an average day I might produce just one second of finished film. |
© Graham Rawle 2018. All Rights Reserved.