PARIP 2003

NATIONAL CONFERENCE: 11-14 September

CONTRIBUTORS

MYER: CLIVE
the film academy
university of glamorgan
film practice as film theory — the place of the viewer and the viewed

This presentation of theory and practice engages epistemology, reflexivity and the instance of practice as theory.

Where a contribution to new knowledge demonstrably lies at the heart of practice, then this practice itself is theoretical research. In the case of my own practice (of teaching and making) it is explored beyond the dialectic of form and content and into what I term a ‘trialectical’ relationship with context.

This methodology involves an examination of form as the defining factor for the reading of content, both of which are subjected to the theory of context as the wrapping device for specificity. It becomes necessary to work within practice itself, exploring this framework through shifting specificities on intertextual levels.

This framework does not use extradiegetic space to raise cinematic issues, it evaluates film language through the very use of film language itself. Particularly prevalent is the counterposing of image, sound and montage. However, the filmic punctum within codes of acting, locations and costume can also play a significant role in the methodology of film-practice research.

An epistemological engagement emerges between the sociological and the aesthetic, relating the diegetic space of cinema (the represented and imaginary place of the viewing subject) to the sociologistic space of the ‘subject in the world’, placing the viewer as the site of complex social interaction.

Clive Myer is Director of The Film Academy, University of Glamorgan, founder and former Director of The International Film School Wales, Independent filmmaker.

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