Auckland filmmaker Nova Paul has used a technique forged in the golden age of Hollywood to reflect on the interior world of her Dunedin friend Forbes Williams.
In 1939 Hollywood studio MGM produced The Wizard of Oz using an inventive film making process known as technicolor. The movie stunned cinema-goers by depicting Dorothy’s Oz with a richness of colour virtually unseen at the movies.
Just as audiences in the 1930s thrilled to Technicolor’s gloriously saturated reds, blues and greens, Paul realised it would be a perfectly evocative medium for a film about other realities, and the world of her friend Forbes Williams.
Williams lives in Dunedin where his house is home to a collection of keepsakes from his wanderings around the city; bits of plastic, bottle tops, ribbons, soft toys, lost notes, hair ties, dried flowers and other objects are carefully arranged throughout his house.
Paul describes a visit to Williams home as a “densely psychedelic” experience. She cites George Perec’s 1998 book Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, where the author lays out the complex relationship an individual has to their personal environment.
“It takes a little more imagination no doubt to picture an apartment whose layout was based on the functioning of the senses. We can imagine well enough what a gustatorium might be, or an auditory, but one might wonder what a seeery might look like, or a smellerey or a feelery.” Describing Williams’ home Paul says, “I see what a seeery could look like and feel a feelery. It’s a place of confusion.”
Nova Paul has been working with technicolor for the past eight years. She began The World of Interiors by filming Williams’ house but was disappointed by the result as it failed to translate the chaos of a real world environment. Instead, she decided to create abstract images composed of strobes of light and shadows.
Filmed in red, green and blue layers the filmic surface of The World of Interiors is composed of buzzing shards of colour. Influenced by the aspirations and optimism of the 1910s Russian Avant-Garde movement Rayonism, the film in her exhibition is reduced to colour and line.
The technicolor process used in The World of Interiors is an optical filming method sometimes called three-colour separation. Each take for a scene is filmed three times, with either a red, green or blue filter. The result is that anything that is temporal or moving becomes colour coded, creating and chromatic palette, where colours blend and new ghostly forms emerge through the overlays of each filtered take.
Accompanying the abstract 16mm film are oral recordings made with Williams. Paul explains, “in this space there’s a switching between the conversation, that is directly connected to someone at a specific point in time and the unanchored abstract image.”
On the soundtrack Williams shares some of his experiences ranging across subjects as diverse as metaphysics, the health care system, relationships, mental wellbeing, literature, dance parties and his process of collecting ephemera. Paul says the conversation is “a tender and articulate oral recording”. She describes her fascination with the power of storytelling and its ability “to help heal both the listener and the teller, to connect people and create empathy.” She says she is particularly interested in "stories that allow us to see valid and thoughtful ways of existing in the world.”
Nova Paul's film making practice stems from an engagement with experimental and structural filmmaking, such as Stan Brakhage and Michael Snow. The technicolor technique is similar to early colour processes used by experimental filmmakers such as Len Lye, Oskar Fischinger and Australians Arthur and Corinne Cantrill. She will be at the Film Archive on 5 June to introduce a number of films from the Archive’s collection including works by the Cantrills, Lye and herself.
The World of Interiors is on at the Film Archive Friday 23 May to Saturday 21 June.
