Four Parts of a Folding Screen
International Film Festival Rotterdam 2018 (IFFR 2018) 29/1/2018 (Cinerama 6) – World Premiere screening (screening time: 15.30)
- Submitting institution
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University of South Wales / Prifysgol De Cymru
: A - A – Faculty of Creative Industries, University of South Wales
- Unit of assessment
- 33 - Music, Drama, Dance, Performing Arts, Film and Screen Studies : A - A – Faculty of Creative Industries, University of South Wales
- Output identifier
- 1882992
- Type
- Q - Digital or visual media
- Publisher
- -
- Month
- -
- Year
- 2018
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
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- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
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- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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- Research group(s)
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A - Drama, Theatre and Performance
- Proposed double-weighted
- Yes
- Double-weighted statement
- This feature-length film was made with a £15000 'Grants for Artists' award from Arts Council England. It is the culmination of extensive research, matching, cross-referencing and contextualising materials identified in Berlin and family archives. Its methodology of production required repeated visits to Berlin, mapping researched locations and, fulfilling narrative and conceptual aims of the film, shooting in different seasons. Kennedy and Wiblin, in post-production, constructed the film's densely layered and rhythmic form. The film was selected for nine international film festivals, has been the centre of numerous other public and academic events, and reached extended audiences via international online platforms.
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- This feature-length work, an equal collaboration of its two makers, articulates the routine processes of Nazi bureaucracy that deprived a woman of her citizenship and facilitated the legalised acquisition and public auction of her family’s belongings. Kennedy and Wiblin developed a methodology of making which, in part, mimics the bureaucratic raison d'être of its subject. The shooting was determined by archive material sourced in Berlin, including an auction document listing the family's possessions.
The film's key section re-enacts the event of the auction in simple bureaucratic and geographical terms. These shots, which together form a collection of images documenting largely unremarkable urban space and architecture, map the dispersal around the city of the contents of a family home. That this sequence of twenty minutes duration simply records the addresses of buyers lends emphasis to the banality of the represented bureaucratic process and its temporal and spatial denouement. The collecting of shots (and the logistics of their gathering) parallels the organised dispersal of objects previously collected together by a family since rendered stateless. Accentuated through editing and application of sound, this strategy of making engages the viewer with the film's subject through the acknowledged alignment of digital video as a database-based process with logically reasoned processes of authoritarian bureaucracy. In order to reveal the iniquities of bureaucracy, the film laid bare
its own defining bureaucratic traits; bureaucracy here is both the form and the narrative of the film. The second-person narration further facilitates this linkage between the present of the film's images and the past of its subject image and sound pulling the past into the depicted present. The film's making has addressed the purpose of the archive: its function, not as memory bank but as a facilitator of a future, effected through the reimagining, reordering and juxtaposition of collected data.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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