The Face of Time - POV - Aarhus Universitet

136 p.o.v. number 13 March 2002
ine putting these pre-imagined scenes and blocks together into a
whole film. In particular they were encouraged not to put too much
energy into imagining how to connect scenes or blocks to one another,
but rather to keep thinking about them as provisional and
free-floating building blocks which could be used to build several
possible films.
The “documentarists” initially resisted this method. Early in the
course, their “filmic imaginations” really did not get going until
they had concrete material to work with. When they had done field
research – begun to get to know the people, the places, the situations,
the actions and so on, that they were going to film - then they
could imagine ways of filming these things. So they tended to put
off pre-imagining until late in the development process. This often
meant, in the films they did early in the course, that they were not
sufficiently prepared when the filming started.
Later in the course most of the “documentarists” learned to use
their filmic imaginations earlier in development and tended to find
the change energizing and motivating. They understood that all the
filmic solutions they had imagined and had rejected were, in a
sense, still “there” and helped them to focus on what they should
film, no matter how they filmed it. A number of them, year after
year, reported that they felt they could “improvise” better during
the filming because of the imagined scenes they had rejected. Some
of them even reported that the pre-imagined, but rejected scenes
helped them during the editing. I regarded these things as successes
for the method.
For the “fictionalists,” I believe, the method exaggerated, perhaps
even created the “field research angst syndrome.” They felt I was
encouraging them to build up “finished” film scenes in their heads