Jeanie Finlay Reference
Love Takes.
When Was The Last Time You Said I Love You?
https://vimeo.com/4726640
This film follows a series of love stories explored by Jeanine Finlay. When was the last time you said I love you? examines how we talk about love, fixing on the words we use to talk about this most intimate of emotions and refracting them through an artificially staged sequence of performances to create a series of ever-shifting narrative stages. Constructed from hundreds of responses to an online questionnaire about love, the scripts for the films were performed by a group of older actors, each actor performing in isolation in a blacked-out studio and directed to address the camera. Through the subsequent edit, these performances have been moulded to form a series of dialogues, staged conversations‚ about private experiences. Once brought to life by others these anonymous written responses are asked to take on the role of performed dialogue , and the disjunction between their origin of these words and their theatrical performance creates a distancing effect that leads to a sense artificiality. The viewer becomes aware that what they are seeing is an act , due to the lack of spontaneous outbursts of feeling, these lines are practised, staged and rehearsed, this feeling is strengthened due to the use of older actors. Thus becoming apparent through the films that the experiences they are presenting as their own in fact belongs to others. The films also call into question the shifting, mutable nature of how we feel about love as within the space of a few cuts, the actors change opinions, recount contradictory experiences and beliefs.
This documentary has created as an influential piece in my project, due to the poetic nature of Finlay's filmmaking. The documentary also follows the participatory mode of making while simultaneously following a non-linear structure. The one to one style of feature is an element that intrigued me and i intent to use in my final outcome when collecting audio evidence. The staged, artificial aspect is something i would like to implement as well, this i will achieved by creating a structured juxtaposition between my visuals and audio.
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