the non fiction film

By Stephanie Beth
IN JOY(1980)
Stephanie Beth(documentary maker )and Emma Fitts (artist) 2021 discuss two films from the 1970'sInterview produced by Thomasin Sleigh in 2021 : Drop the link on your browser.SOUNDCLOUDhttps://soundcloud.com/circuit-2/circuit-cast-98-stephanie-beth-and-emma-fitts.
I completed study at University at Ilam, in the Department of Fine Arts in 1977, at the University of Canterbury. Principle supply of films to watch, as a student, were those supplied by the French Film Embassy, as well as archive film from the silent era and the Avant- Garde; followed by documentary and /or narratives emergent from after the German occupation of France, mid 20th Century. This was standard University fare, to look into what and how ideology affected composition and thought. Then, as foremost thrust of change, how technology changes human industrial responses. Artists, as outliers, are affected by ownership of power and expression. This vast jolt of accelerated industrialism in Western society, as far as human psyche handled itself, stimulated responses to labour and sensibility in the Arts .
After I had made a ' companion pair' of films about women as a sex, ka , lots of wit and sometimes not enough play. I swung a pendulum in lateral terms, in the other direction.. I took the thread of such a theme , play, and put myself more deeply to the whimsy's of clusters of people in play with irony, still seeing the enablers of adrenalin as well as thought, also seeing the way that contested spaces for expression were a read of a changing public, a public moving away from institutional 'guardianship'. Play, in the Liberal Arts, I rationalized, was a skill used for assessing the cracks of society . The pre-computer rushes and then the accelerating computer rushes were again placing engineers to the forefront of entertainments. Predessessors had been the cartoonists, the characiaturists, the farces at play, and the like. The great films of the early 20th, such as Renoir's La Grand Illusion (1937). had been part of a corollary of messages in fiction. I travelled to Europe and America when I was young. When I went to Europe again, it was after the time of raising a child. I specifically willed myself to find the resources to attend the For Ever Godard 2001 Conference at the TATE Modern, after which I had days for a brief sojourn to , Paris , Rome, Parma, the Amalfi Coast and then back to home. I was home just two weeks before the New York Twin Towers were attacked. Any of us who had grown up in the Liberal West, were hungry to know more about how perambulations of expression do ' seize the day'. Equally, by what decision Art alone receives and requires patronage, still. Filmmaking, in particular, due to sound and image, space and time, and then speed as acceleration in the digital arts have taken hold,, hs provided voracious impetus as well as cautionary tales aboout excess, choice and a wide range of ideas about responsibility iwith 'discourses of ideas'. (5) For the film, IN JOY, I employed a stills photographer. What the cinema camera carried for me was a coordinating brief for the construction of 'flow' via long shot, medium shot, close up, pans and montage. What the stills camera brought was the reflexive observations of Photo Realism in direct terms. The still photographer on the job was Jane Zusters.(6) Earlier, for the 1977 film, the framework commenced so much further back. It is the travel I had, when I was twentyone, overland to Europe, before England, that gave me notification about ways to view the end of the 19th Century and the beginnings of the 20th. It was how my mother whispered and read the serious themes of conscience that gave bearing to me about the world .
Talking About Art: Go to Chapter one and musings & observations or general page ) as a quick overall of the implications in my thread throughout. All thought becomes a question of how form is expressed. This is editorial. I'm such novice, as a reader, yet still hasten on.