Framing Intimacies

INTIMACIES: AFTER DARK

'Intimacies: After Vallotton,' a theatrical exhibition staged at the Old Fire Station (4th March - 16th April 2022), is an incredibly cool project and I am grateful to Georgina ('Georgie') Dettmer for bringing me on board. The project is everything that the art historian in me loves in the discipline and was missing in Oxford. 

The concept for the project was the French painter/printmaker Félix Vallotton and his Intimités, a series of ten woodcut prints depicting the intimate and scandalous lives of the French aristocracy.

The exhibition displays the artwork of Paul Majek, a current student at the Ruskin School of Art. His pieces are gorgeous, hazy blue depictions of family members. He is inspired by family photographs and plays with dreams and memory – the concept behind his works speaks to me. 

Sam Spencer wrote ten scripts corresponding to the ten original titles of Vallotton's prints. Each script explores an intimate scene between a couple and their relationship. He takes the concept of Vallotton's works and decontextualises it into our modern dating world. They are complex and knotted – they are brilliantly written. My favourite is 'Extreme Measure.' Nothing beats throwing plates and a turkey.

The scripts were performed and recorded by an entirely black cast. The audio recordings were paired with works in the gallery; when walking through the gallery and looking at the paintings, a viewer can scan a QR code to hear the corresponding recording. 

Georgie brought me on to create the trailer and behind-the-scenes video ('Framing Intimacies'), the latter of which is to be screened at the After Hours event (9 March). 

Unfortunately when I began the project, I learned that Paul did not want to give an interview and that Sam was too busy. The artist had previously done one over Zoom, which had been recorded, so I was instructed to work with that. The curators had done one with Paul and Sam together, but this was saved in the form of a word document and was therefore not useable for the video. 

Without an interview with either major creative answering the questions that seemed most important to me, I felt a bit lost. The Zoom recording was also, unsurprisingly, not of the best cinematographic quality. Nevertheless, I began editing and trying to make the best of what I could get my hands on. 

A major obstacle was B-roll and footage of Paul's art. B-roll allowed me to edit the interviews without creating jump cuts. This was also important to the creative vision and aesthetic of the film. Because I was working with multiple Zoom recordings – and had been ill the weekend they recorded the scripts so others had filmed for me – the B-roll felt like the only footage I could control about the project. The composition of the interviews was not as neat as I would have wanted in an ideal world, and I thought the B-roll would make the video look more polished and professional. My concept was 'getting intimate' with the art and the process of the project. When I was finally able to get access to the artworks – the day after the deadline for the video – I chose to film slow close-up pans of the art. I wanted to get intimate shots of the art that showed the detail of the pieces. I also didn't want to reveal a whole painting in one shot so that viewers had to go the exhibition to properly see the pieces.

At the last minute Sam was able to send me a few videos of him answering important questions about the project; however, he filmed these in portrait mode rather than landscape. The content of the interview was exactly what I had wanted, and I felt bad asking him to record again, so I cut the seven minutes of footage down to four and put B-roll of Paul's art over the whole thing. 

The second obstacle was sound. The videos I was sent (particularly those in the studio) were not of the best audio quality and also had lots of background noise. The gallery was very echoey, so the videos I recorded of the installation had the same problem. To fix this access issue with limited time and technical expertise, I created subtitles in YouTube. The auto-generating feature did not work, and I spent 5-6 hours manually typing out and syncing the subtitles. It was ultimately worth it because I was very happy with how professional they looked. 

The original structure of the video was: 

1. A segment from one of the recordings
2. Paul's interview
3. Georgie explaining the concept (with images of the original Intimités) 
4. Sam's 'interview'
5. Recording of a rehearsal
6. Interviews with the actors from the recording studio
7. The installation and a final shot of the gallery

I felt that the video was the best it could be given the circumstances and I was happy with it. I was actually starting to feel proud of it – especially following initial reactions to it. 

During this time I had also made the trailer. The concept was to recreate the concept and vibe of Paul's art in real life to highlight the multi-media aspect of the installation. I filmed for just over an hour with Joan, Zarah, and Pablo, members of the cast that I met on the day. They were so friendly; they were all beautiful and I was particularly struck by their smiles. I used my new LED light and stabiliser to film close ups of the three of them while we sat and chatted. I then had them act out their respective scenes and recorded that as well as playing with holding hands. I edited the footage in time to a chosen music track and synced the text to the music as well. I left spaces to include Paul's art in order to blur the line between the filmed and painted people. I was, and still am, very proud of the trailer. It was everything I envisioned it to be. 

Unfortunately, Paul changed his mind about having his art filmed (after everything had been edited and posted) and I had to re-edit the trailer. The new version, which I now actually prefer, is below.

And here is the behind the scenes video, 'Framing Intimacies':