Imperceptihole
Lori Felker & Robert Todd - 2010, 14:00, 16mm, Chicago & Boston
A high contrast correspondence film, a science non-fiction fairy tale. Things are never as polarized as they appear. Circling and searching, falling and landing, entering and exiting; actuality lies between seasons, states, planes and worlds. Film rolls were sent back and forth in the mail over the course of a year until the film began to reveal itself. The edit and sound were done in tandem.
Lori Felker
Lori Felker chose Filmmaking as her official second language in 2003-ish, bumping German into third place. Eventual fluency is important to her, so she employs many forms/formats, practices frequently with others, and tries hard not to shy away from expressing her thoughts on human behavior, travel, inter-activity, frustration, failure and political irritants. She currently lives, makes, teaches, projects, performs, watches, programs, organizes, promotes, and compulsively collaborates in Chicago. www.FelkerCommaLori.com
Robert Todd
After a lifetime torn between music and drawing/painting, film sauntered into the picture in 1989 andoffered Rob Todd’s maker-innards a truce that seems to have endured ever since. A lyrical filmmaker as well as a sound and visual artist, he continually produces short works that resistcategorization. He has also worked as editor, sound designer/editor, post-supervisor or music producer on various broadcast and theatrically-released productions. He currently makes, collaborates and teaches in the Boston area. www.roberttoddfilms.com
Questions & Answers
ATA: Imperceptihole was included in a screening of works by both yourself and Robert Todd. Was the film created especially for the screening, or did it come about in some other way?
LORI: The screening came about after, and I suppose, partly because of the film. Rob and I met a film festival, found that we had various conversational swings in common, stayed in touch, and at one point, I assisted him on a documentary he was shooting in the midwest. (I'm Chicago, he's Boston). While working in Wisconsin, we took a break, still armed with cameras and high contrast film, and shot, playfully, in tandem, at a hay bail climbing structure for kids at some sort of a parking lot fall harvest fest. We liked what we shot, and how two minds saw the same thing differently and sometimes exactly the same way. So we continued that conversation from afar and would send rolls back and forth with no instruction, just shoot, watch, shoot again, watch the other's footage, shoot again...until we saw themes and connections emerging by way of our conversations, the changing seasons and serendipity. As we worked on this corrrespondence film, we also watched the other pieces we were working on at their various stages, lending a hand or a brain when we could. The program we created together comes from realizing that each of those pieces benefited from our conversations and collaborations, that they were all a part of our ongoing dialog just as much as they were our personal creations. A context of connection, collaboration, gesture, communication, was clearly rising as we moved forward with our personal projects, while Imperceptihole was forming to become the singular manifestation of our parallel paths.
ATA: What projects are you currently working on, and is there anything you're particularly excited about?
LORI: I'm working on quite a few things right now, but mainly on a series of experimental television episodes which will be on the web and on public access television. I employ television forms as a familiar, accessible format for characters to explore the oddities and chaos of human behavior. I'm still really engaged with the layers of communication, appearance vs. actuality, and the beauty of fumbling through thoughts, searching and trying. I'm into "ings"...Playing, falling, doing, being "in" the process. I think this comes out in all of my current and various projects.
ROB: I'm finishing up the feature that Lori mentions in Question 1 that helped with, a 16mm film called, "Master Plan", a film that focuses on housing and neighborhood development as a way of considering the function of prisons/jails in American society. And I've had a few other short 16mm poems come out recently, one that I'm particularly thrilled by that features a blind owl.
Lori and I are finishing up another 16mm collaboration that we shot last November with Craig Webster when we were in Iowa City for the "WORKS IN PROGRESS" festival. We're still working on the soundtrack for that film, and we're hoping that's done by the end of the year.
Recently I've reconnected with Super8 film, and I've been excited not only to shoot with those fabulously portable cameras, but also to see the spectacular results of the new color reversal film. Lori and I shot Super8 with Ted Kennedy in Detroit, and I took film and a camera along to the UK this summer, where I met a group of people at a festival who were interested in collaborating together in Super8 film - we came up with a "dream correspondence" project, and we're giving ourselves plenty of time to let that develop.
I'm excited about all of these things.
ATA: Is there anything I should have asked you or anything else you'd like to let us know?
ROB: The ambiguities that present themselves in the shooting and constructing of black and white film helped us along the path of collaboration and correspondence. It allowed us to float away from the specifics of location, time of day, season, any kind of environmental indicator that would enforce contrasts in editing. In this way it reflects a strain of our personal philosophies when making work.
These "ambiguities" also allowed us to suspend (though not fully) our notions of individual authorship that small amount that allowed us to consider the footage more as part of a collective pool of ideas than as Rob's or Lori's, and this led to a certain kind of magic as the themes bloomed over time (not necessarily consciously).
I think we both agree that we'd like to have this film seen by others both as a unique experience for themselves, but also as a process template, an inspiration for film correspondence.
Q&A by Liz Wing
