Episode #5 - Post-Production Expert, Director, and Cinematographer Stephanie Gould was the appointed contributor. Originally from Australia, Stephanie does animation, coloring, and editing in a wide variety of films and has had much of her own visual work featured at film festivals and live events. She captures City Skins in photo formats as well. To see more of her visual work, visit her website.
Our screening took place in Bushwick at Fourwind Films’ headquarters where Stephanie presented her impressionistic, experimental short film which was shot in 8mm titled Dreaming (2015). This piece in its debut was projected alongside a live dance performance, but for the podcast Stephanie replaced the live dance piece with a song by Akiva Zamcheck who performed a live soundtrack on the guitar.
For the second film of the event, Stephanie presented the 1981 feature-length documentary Mural Murals by Agnès Varda. For this film, we enjoyed some Mexican pastries to accompany its L.A. flavor and had some nice beers to wash it down. There was a Coors Light advertisement in the film, so we had those for refreshments.
Credits:
Host - Justin Joseph Hall.
Location & Production Company - Fourwind Films
Live Score - Akiva Zamcheck
Sound - Brian Trahan
Stephanie Gould - Director/Cinematographer, photo by Justin Joseph Hall
Transcript:
Justin Joseph Hall:
Welcome to Feature & a short. Feature & a short is a monthly screening hosted by Fourwind Films, where an appointed contributor presents their chosen feature motion picture and short movie. The only condition for screening selection. The presenter must have been directly involved with one picture, but not the other. I'm Justin Joseph Hall. Stephanie Gould was our presenter this week and she does almost everything in post-production, including editing, animating and color correction.
She presented her short film Dreaming, which was shot on film, originally accompanied by a modern dance. Tonight, however, since the film doesn't have any sound, we had a live score played along with the film. This was provided by composer Akiva Zamcheck.
Stephanie Gould:
This short that I made has my friend Brighid in it, and for my screening at that festival, I showed the film with her dancing with the projection of the film. The film I made in one of the eight millimeter workshop. It's silent, but Akiva is going to play a live score for us.
(guitar starts playing)
I shot it all so that I didn't have to do any editing, so I filmed everything, like, very specifically timed out in sequence. I didn't actually end up editing them at all.
Audience:
Cool.
Stephanie Gould:
Yeah. So this is just basically one reel of super eight film.
Justin Joseph Hall:
How did you do the kaleidoscope?
Stephanie Gould:
That’s through these crystal prism things that I got this sort of multifaceted clear glass. So for that, I was like holding them in front of the lens, rotating them to get that refracted image. I made the film with this song in mind that didn't end up putting them together after I had finished it, but it was a song by a friend’s spouse who had this band called Friend Roulette. It was a song called Garden’s Tidings.
Audience:
But you couldn't get the rights.
Stephanie Gould:
Couldn't get the rights. No, I don't know. It just, you know, I, it just turned out as this silent film. And I like having a film that has no fixed soundtrack that could be reinterpreted in different ways. So I like that it can stand alone. The story is just sort of restless sleep and frantic visions of dreams.
Audience:
Wow.
Justin Joseph Hall:
Did you do a lot of color with this or…?
Stephanie Gould:
No, I didn't do any.
Akiva Zamcheck:
I know that it fell off from out of nowhere and he seems to be accumulating gear.
Stephanie Gould:
Actually, yeah. They're building a lab in Brooklyn, and he got this huge piece of very expensive equipment from, like, the Scientology church in California. And he had to drive across the country to go pick it up, and he brought it back here. He's a great guy to know if you're interested in doing any work with 16 or 8 mil, especially. I wanted it to go from night to day so yeah, that's sort of how the lighting goes.
Audience:
And how would you spend making it, was it?
Stephanie Gould:
We filmed it over one night and then into the morning.
Audience:
And how did you get the cat to ah…?
Stephanie Gould:
That was just a very lucky shot that I got of her. She's not trained… at all.
Audience:
Did you actually film the protagonist in her sleep?
Stephanie Gould:
No, I didn’t. She was just acting. Maybe I should have done that, though.
Justin Joseph Hall:
Yeah, that would have been hilarious.
Stephanie Gould:
(laughing) Yeah.
Audience:
So, that girl who's dancing during the performance…
Stephanie Gould:
So when I did it for the screening, I had her, like, do a dance in front of the projection. So then it’s sort of in conversation with each other. I think I like images that have a lot of texture, and almost feel tactile in a way.
I always liked taking pictures on film because you can get those, you know, marks on it from handling the film or dust and scratches. And I always like that extra layer to the imagery. It's little, like, happy accidents.
Audience:
Do you think it's too silly to intentionally corrupt your digital imagery?
Stephanie Gould:
I have done it. Yeah, I think it's kind of silly, but I also find digital video to be too clean and flat. So for me, it feels nice to watch when there's a little bit of softness to it.
Audience:
So it's almost like looking back in that eight millimeter stuff has different connotations than it did in the 90’s.
Stephanie Gould:
At the time. Yeah, definitely. I think that with every new advance and technology, the era that is producing films in that medium always becomes iconic for that era.
Audience:
Right.
Stephanie Gould:
Like VHS or even like the first HD video.
Audience:
I'm running the same, the same idea with my current project. Wanted to use, like, a higher tech camera, but I want it to feel like it when you film. So I don't use like a mid-level camera.
Audience:
Can you tell the difference though between?
Audience:
Yeah.
Audience:
Really?
Audience:
Oh, definitely. There's just more grain. The nicer camera you have, the cleaner it is just off the bat.
Audience:
Even the mid-grade ones lens?
Audience:
Yeah, cause a lot of the darker tones have a lot more stuff. And also the color profiles aren't quite as even all the time.
Stephanie Gould:
Yeah, usually. And with higher end cameras, you get more latitude and color space. So you tend not to get overexposed whites and underexposed blacks. And they have much, much greater range.
Audience:
Yeah.
Stephanie Gould:
Yeah, it’s just a different effect.
Audience:
Oh wait. If you're a mid-level camera looking for today's look, what is the high level camera supposed to signify then?
Stephanie Gould:
The future.
Audience:
Didn’t you say also that you wanted it to look like an indie film, not like a-
Audience:
Yeah, not a Hollywood.
Stephanie Gould:
Not like a blockbuster, yeah.
Justin Joseph Hall:
So maybe. Yeah, maybe Hollywood films right now. That's what you'd want to use it for…
Justin Joseph Hall (as narrator):
For Steph’s second film, since it's Oscar month, she chose a film by one of this year's Oscar nominees, Agnès Varda, called Mural Murals or Mur Murs, which is a film of the famous Agnès Varda coming to the United States and doing a documentary in Los Angeles about murals and different paintings that live in the city.
Stephanie Gould:
I started watching her film several years ago. She's 89, French woman, and was very influential to the French New Wave cinema and has done a lot of documentaries and fiction films. I especially like her documentaries because she's very much a character in them as well. And I just think that her vision and way of presenting her films is really beautiful and interesting.
And this film is a documentary set in LA and, and she goes around the city and films all these various murals around LA in the 70s and talks to the artists and other people in the communities.
Justin Joseph Hall:
With this film, which focused a lot on the Chicanos of Los Angeles. We ended up picking out some pastries at a Mexican bakery and accompanied it with some nice beers to wash it down. There was a Coors Light advertisement in the film, so we had those for refreshments. After the film, we had a discussion on Agnès Varda and her style of film. We couldn't quite finish off the baked goods, but we sat around and talked for a while.
Akiva Zamcheck:
So ominous and prescient about this film, especially with the final scene and the very dramatic soundtrack, is it ends at the cusp of gentrification. Like, which it hints on this development happening, but that word doesn't exist in America yet. And, uh, the concept is beginning to become real to them in L.A.
Audience:
And the real estate is mentioned?
Akiva Zamcheck:
Yeah and they’re starting to talk about it. They don't know what's about to happen, but cause, you know, the 90’s haven't happened yet and they’ll still be some time before the people can even imagine how cities will be devastated by this. But just with that really dramatic soundtrack,
Stephanie Gould:
Yeah.
Akiva Zamcheck:
it seems like there's an indication that this dream will be truly washed away. And she kind of sees it coming from afar. It’s really quite beautiful.
Stephanie Gould:
Yeah, I think that that was one of the reasons that I chose it was that it’s, when I saw it which was only a couple of years ago, it still felt, like, very relevant.
Justin Joseph Hall:
Yeah. It's also very interesting seeing film, because we don't, especially in the U.S., it doesn't happen as much, I feel like. It's having a foreign filmmaker, especially with somebody who's respected, come and see what they find interesting in American culture. And it's interesting because we do that all the time. But it doesn't happen here as much.
Akiva Zamcheck:
Um, there are a few great examples of Werner Herzog. Did his great study of the American bro in the early 2000s. My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done. That takes place in Northern California. And it's actually the most accurate depiction of his American prototype.
Audience:
Except for Borat, right?
Audience:
You know it.
Stephanie Gould:
Borat, yeah!
Akiva Zamcheck:
It's very powerful having this French lady perform a little study…
Stephanie Gould:
Yeah, I like her, especially though, because she just seems interested in people and what they're doing with their lives. So she doesn't project anything of her own ideas of how things should be onto them. She's just more, like, curious about what they're doing.
Audience:
Except for with her visuals. And it's not, Yes. So it’s not the characters. But like, her style is so much like, “Oh, I look. This was fun to look at,” and it's, like, constantly like that. Or this is what the music rhythm is like with the visuals or something.
Audience:
You’re just in that party that was being planned, or there's a group that put on these temporary warehouse occupations and through, like, some performance pieces, that little moment where they were painting like a mural over the course of the weekend and having different performances. It reminded me of like early New York uh, examples that have enough Brooklyn, Cat's Head and other dominant occupations in the waterfront that became Rubelade and other famous permanent parties.
Audience:
I love watching documentaries from before the time that people grew up watching documentaries. So the people that speak, they don't, they don't know how one should speak on a documentary. So they come across very strange to us.
Stephanie Gould:
Non-actors. Yeah, just regular people,
Audience:
Yeah.
Stephanie Gould:
who agreed to be part of it. But yeah, she obviously just had a way of making people feel comfortable
Audience:
Yeah.
Stephanie Gould:
on camera. The other films of hers that I’ve seen that seem to have a similar feeling to them. And to me, it seems like she's just a very approachable, interested person, and she wants to know about these different people.
Audience:
You, you see her a lot in Faces Places.
Akiva Zamcheck:
I wonder what Agnès Varda’s relationship was with, with the darkness like.
Justin Joseph Hall:
If you watch Faces Places you’ll find out.
(audience laughs)
Stephanie Gould:
With Godard?
Justin Joseph Hall:
Yeah.
Stephanie Gould:
Oh, in all her documentaries. You don't really. You don't see her on screen a lot, but she's narrating them.
Audience:
That was her, right?
Stephanie Gould:
Yeah, it was her narrating. She's very much a part of that.
Audience:
Yeah.
Akiva Zamcheck:
Great film choice. It was a lot of fun.
Justin Joseph Hall:
It was a pleasure to have you all listening again to Feature & a short. We hope that you have seen or will see some of the films that we talk about. Please leave a comment on iTunes or wherever you find the podcast or shout out to us on social media. We are always @fourwindfilms. That is f-o-u-r-w-i-n-d-f-i-l-m-s. Thank you very much and we'll see you next month.