Notes for a film from a notebook.

(in response to the Arts Council of Great Britains EXPERIMENTA LONGFORMAT)

I should present this treatment for your perusal.
An outline in post modern heuty teuty terms including an isotopic diagram.

HEUTY TEUTY

Carnival. Mnemonic (various devices to jog the memory of the viewer) Nostalgic, thought provoking and Funny. Ha ha.)

Carnival : a somewhat bastard entity comprising a mish mash of different practises, and not necessarily artistic. The list is virtually endless so there will be no list. A fluid spectacle, choc a block and fairly full to overflowing with iconographic imagery and some such. Some not. A new language would be created, literally, so as things that you felt you already knew would be heard anew : Pater keck, Pater Keck, Bechers mann, Bigamie er keck es festeschuh kann.

Collage and thus placed in juxtaposition.
And montage. Selection, cutting a piecing together as a consecutive whole or separate sections of cinema and television. Composite whole from juxtaposed pieces of music, painting, photographs, voiceovers etc  almost willy nilly but compelling in their structure. A definite sense of understanding from (quite often) the non sensicles.

Create a world in which everything is not as it should be. Use primititve in-camera techniques as well as those of the clever clever computer generator. There would however be a grotesque and respeckful mundane realism and carnivalesque FEEL as a  back bone to the piece.

Bizarre true life stories would drift in and out of the soundtrack, read by an assortment of compelling and often humorous readers. Often relating to the imagery on the screen and often not.

Perhaps the only structure or criteria for some of the imagery would be that of footage shot on the journey made around the edges of the British Mainland. Dialects would change as would the landscape, and a sense of purpose or progressive journeying would be evoked; enough for the viewer to understand that there might be some semblance of a linear narrative unfolding. This of course would be undermined throughout.

Enough of the Coastal Ancient sites of Britain would be included to evoke a truly deep and magical sense of the British Landscape Heritage. We would however be travelling to the elsewhere through the use of other devises such as sound, music and atmosphere.Perhaps the whole shebang would start with a somewhat voyeuristic look into the film maker as we watch him branding the outline of the British Isles, for real onto his arm or leg. (Not his face.) There would then be very fast and memorable images from the film that we are about to watch , including a brief cut up soundtrack which would incorporate severe dialectal changes. The whole of the lot would look quite painful, but not Bob Flanagan painful.

Dialect = subordinate variety of a language with non standard vocabulary, pronunciation or idioms.

There would never be any lip sync, but throughout a strong sense that various characters that we are looking at are indeed telling their own story. There would be twins, motheres and daughters, aunts and uncles, big friends and little friends, owners and their animals, people and their ice cream vans, lollipop ladies and their children, shepherds and their flocks, pastors and their parishoners, bed and breakfastees, paper boys and girls, milkmen, postmen, morris dancers, The Salvation Army, deck chair attendants, lifeboatmen, amusement arcade owners, people selling scotch eggs, pickled eggs, lighthousemen, rising more slowy, Ronald’s way, Guide dogs for the blind, (plastic and sitting patiently outside charity shops-SPASTICS) complete with yellow hair, red shirts and blue socks, Bowls, fishermen, garden gnomes, the long man of wilmington, publicans and crazy golf attendants, rock makers,
Blips and pieces.

The short wave radio might be at work and large sonic chunks from this corruptive little monster would add to the rich tapestry, one minute we might be in Turkey and the next with a bornagain in Washington. This little island bombarded throughout.
Could I search for another Kotting en route? Like I did in the Paraguayan Chaco once.