Why Colonel Bunny Was Killed: review here by Adi Chesson 3.04.2011 (translation coming soon) Interview: Dazed Digital 3.2011. View it here
Throwing Some Weight Around article by Lizzie Le Quesne in Dance Theatre Journal 01.2011
Drum Room: Sounds of Silence review Christian Borghino, 2008, Clermont Ferrand Short Film Festival (F) Translated from the French Few films have celebrated the beauty and mystery of empty spaces and vacant interiors. Miranda Pennell does so with a very graphic art, filming details that accentuate the poetry and emotional charge that emerges from spaces in which anything can happen. Hallways and doors, air vents, the geometry of false ceilings are as a landscape before battle. Few films have sought to film sound. As the rooms start to come alive, it is as much through the musicians’ themselves as by the sounds and rhythms that they produce. As she films the musicians, Miranda Pennell also films the visual and sound recuperations they provoke: attention to movement (drum sticks rotating against blue background) as much as the sound created by the instrument. She illustrates very well the idea that the beauty of musical interpretation lies in the physical presence of the musician and the manner in which this presence inhabits the space. Sound becomes a form that colours silence.
You made me love you: Nanda Jansen ,Netherlands Media Art Institute In the works of Miranda Pennell, minor everyday activities are transformed into fascinating choreographies. In fact, she was not trained as a film maker or audiovisual artist, but rather as a dancer. She usually points her camera at 'ordinary' people in their own habitat and in this way analyses the various facets and meanings of movement. In 'You Made Me Love You', the rules of the game are simple; a camera moves unexpectedly, quickly or slowly, backwards and forwards along a rail. A troupe of ballet dancers strives to make or keep eye contact with the camera. Only a few faces are continually on screen. Sometimes other dancers manage to steal the limelight for a moment. The rapid footwork, which sometimes can hardly keep up with the camera, is the only audible sound. A true struggle for attention is taking place on the dance floor. Because woe betide you if you end up off screen and sink into oblivion! With 'You Made Me Love You', this artist presents us with an allegory on the present-day fixation on cameras and stardom.
You Made Me Love You: Artsway Open 07 Dr Stephen Riley Looking at the monitor is like looking through an aperture into another space. On the other side is a group of silent, rapt faces, all of which gaze intently back at you. Some are close-up, others jockey for position further away. All are intent on staying as close as possible to that aperture. At irregular intervals the camera moves and the figures on the far side shuffle to stay within its (your) gaze. The sound of their feet on hard floor adds to the sense of urgency they seem to feel. The camera comes to a halt, and they gaze again, unwavering, waiting for its next move, hoping never to lose its attention. On the one hand this is like looking at a group of aliens who have never seen anything like the camera (or you) before. The concentration of the faces on what is before them takes away their self-consciousness, and like a series of Thomas Ruff portraits they have an unsettling air of insouciance. But ultimately, the thought one is drawn to, and the allegory the title suggests, concern the contemporary obsession with becoming visible through some sort of brush with celebrity, however brief, demeaning or meaningless that might be. For the full text see here
Festivals Vienna Independent Shorts: portrait | Q&A
Celluloid Choreography Glasgow Film Festival 03.2011 View article here
Miranda Pennell - Choreographies for the Camera Miranda Pennell is a choreographer. This does not make the works presented here dance videos in the usual sense, and she is right to reject this label. For, although Pennell studied contemporary dance and not film, and then worked with Sasha Waltz among others, since turning to filmmaking she has displayed little interest in showing her fellow dancers at work. Instead, Pennell has set about exploring ‘dance’ as a filmic domain, discovering it in unusual places: on the parade ground, for instance, in living-rooms and pubs in London, on a frozen lake in the north of Finland. Pennell’s redefinition of the dance film starts at a very elementary level: with the way it is shot. Every image selected is a statement: you see only what I show you. When Pennell says that she uses film to explore choreographic ideas, it is important that this always means ideas for at least two choreographies - one for the actors, one for the camera. The fact that neither is reducible to the other is what creates the tension, the “counterpoint” (Pennell). The first thing one notices about the “choreography” of the camera is that any unconsidered movement is forbidden. But even when a pan or a tracking shot is inserted, Pennell’s attitude to using the camera is basically rigid: the fixed, calculated frame meets the incalculable in the form of the movement in front of the camera. This attitude is encapsulated in a type of shot that Pennell often employs: a cross-wise movement (carefully choreographed, of course) occurs so close to the camera that the viewer would see no more than a quasi-abstract blur of movement if it were not for the sound (which Pennell always uses in a very economical and, again, frequently contrapuntal manner). In many of these films, you can feel how formal visual ideas and concepts are in friction with their realisation. With reality, if you like. As if Pennell were actively looking for a foil to her own perfectionism, she often draws upon something she calls found dances, undertakes documentary expeditions into the uncool, sometimes strange parallel worlds of amateur dance. (....) With Tattoo (2001) we are flies on the wall watching soldiers in the seclusion of the woods pursuing that strange ritual called drill. Pennell systematically avoids any camera positions that would make it easier for us to understand the ceremony, and instead adopts a point of view more or less akin to that of the forest animals. The bellowed orders are sometimes hard to tell apart from bird calls; when we see the face of one of the young men in close-up and it twitches strangely, he is saluting. As with Lounge, the point is that rituals alone do not produce meaning; but here the humour is more subtle, the way of looking is more particular, and the military ceremonial is “found”; to a certain extent then, the film is documentary in nature. The shots follow their own choreography, which sometimes runs counter to that of the drill, and thus circumvent the usual, officially sanctioned picture of soldiering masculinity. An important stylistic device is the sound; for the first time, Pennell works here with the British sound artist Graeme Miller, who processes sounds and music according to a master concept. For the marching band that appears in the second half of the film, he has composed a wonderfully weird collage in the spirit of Charles Ives. The view from above of the soldiers running to and fro in an ordered yet completely senseless fashion to the cacophonic sound of the brass music is a great cinematic experience. In her next film, Pennell’s predilection for stylisation and elements of typically British kitchen-sink realism meet up in close quarters – in the apartments that here become stages. Human Radio (2002) takes the final step towards documentary film, portraying several London “living-room dancers” with whom the director got into contact via newspaper advertisements. It seems almost like a counter-concept to Lounge, with the black and white that suggests the greyness of everyday life, offset by the dancing. In Human Radio, the rigid frame mentioned earlier is readily provided by the constricted living spaces; the “found dances”, which Pennell documents or restages, often work with the “found frames” of doors. In passing, Pennell also briefly outlines each living situation with admirable economy of means. Material for a full-length feature film is compressed here into nine minutes: while her husband hides behind his newspaper, a housewife with an unappreciated desire for glamour uses the walk to the kitchen for a brief 'number'; Pennell provides the music, disco ball and applause. Another married couple presents itself in the black-and-white Western partner look; to the sound of a banjo, they perform a formation dance in the shared garden, “line dance” between washing lines. One woman has learnt to walk again after an amputation by taking a detour via dance. She sweeps through the house to the plebby disco rock of Anastacia; her teenaged son, who would rather sit playing shoot ‘em up games, watches on from the balcony in embarrassment. Pennell has worked his gaze into her film like a barbed hook, a question mark. Pennell’s next film also involves teenagers, everyday dance, and issues of gender. Magnetic North (2003) achieves a reversal of gender clichés of narrowness and breadth. The film was made in a small village in northern Finland in collaboration with the teenagers living there. It is an ode to adolescent life. In this world, the girls are outside ice-skating all the livelong day, in the woods and on the frozen pond in front of a high-rise development, while the boys sit around in their rooms, decorated with elk antlers, practicing electric guitar. Together with Graeme Miller, Pennell has managed the feat of visually maintaining this strict separation of the sexes, while bringing about a convergence at the level of sound. For both sexes are listening to the same song in their head or on their Walkman, and it is saying: Away from here! Whereas in Human Radio the restrictions served the purposes of narrative economy, here they become a means of creating poetic density. The high-tension wires that connect the village with the big wide world have five strings like the guitars, and drone like them too: lines of flight. In 2004, Pennell made Fisticuffs. Here, she plays with the familiar Western cliché of the pub brawl, exploiting its choreographic aspects. However, punches and kicks are not translated into the weightless grace of a ballet. On the contrary: with the help of professional stunt artists, a fight choreographer and added sound, Pennell creates quite a merry ruckus. At the same time, she undermines the 'reality effects': for example, by having the film start several times in the style of a computer game: a pub guest wants to order some beer and keeps getting punched instead because he accidentally bumps into someone at the bar – crash, new start. Pub door, bar counter, the next mishap, the next punche, new start. Each time, Pennell accompanies the recurrent walk along the bar with an identical parallel camera movement, thus emphasising the serial principle. This soon undermines any realism in the depiction of the space. As a result, by the time the man finally gets his beer, he has long since become part of a world in which nothing really hurts and where the bar seems to extend into infinity. With all the calm in the world, a cultivated wholesale punch-up develops. While fists and ashtrays are flying about, elderly ladies and gentlemen sit in the midst of it all, somewhat bored, chatting and knitting. Next door, the amateurs from the “Urban Country Stompers” line-dancing club keep practising stoically to rollicking music, stomping on the dance floor with their white cowboy boots. The choreographies of blows, knitting and stomping thus run side by side; the contrapuntal treatment of parallel elements remains recognisable as a structural principle, even if Pennell has given up her original concept of using a parallel camera movement ... repeated in cumulative fashion for the whole film. You Made Me Love You (2005), Pennell’s last film to date, uses this idea again in a different form. It is based on a sort of exercise, a game, in which a cameraman (John Smith) portrays twenty-one male and female dancers. They are asked to form a queue facing the camera (a very English idea). As with a stationary queue in which people start getting restless, those at the back try to gain a view of the counter, i.e. camera. But the picture is mostly filled by the four or five faces that are nearest to the camera, which block the view of the others. However, the camera does not allow the situation to settle; mounted on rails, it moves, sometimes slowly, then very rapidly, and always surprisingly, to the left or the right. The queue has to follow, which means that the faces that have just filled the picture suddenly disappear, allowing the deeper levels of staging, the dancers who are further away, to be seen. This video is thus shaped by a “constant line”, a rigid concept which, through its realisation, creates a lot of movement, overlapping, and surprising revelations. Meanwhile within the sound track moments of tense calm alternate with the patter of many bare feet, a noise that is all the more confusing because we never see the feet in the picture. What these three-and-a-half minutes allow us to see instead is a wealth of strangely touching portraits: twenty-one people “making love to the camera.”
Dirk Schaefer is best known for his collage soundtracks for most of Matthias Müller's films, e. g. AUS DER FERNE , THE MEMO BOOK (1989), HOME STORIES (1990), ALPSEE (1994), VACANCY (1998). Lately, he has collaborated with Austrian filmmaker Peter Tscherkassky on INSTRUCTIONS FOR A LIGHT AND SOUND MACHINE (2005). He is also a writer and has published a book about Nietzsches sisters (the natural and the supernatural one). Dirk Schaefer lives in Berlin.
2001
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