Embedded above is my new short film, composed primarily of three (well, four really) shots and some audio recordings captured on my smartphone.
NOTES:
I would prefer that Six Nights speaks for itself, and whilst it is not my intention to use these notes to sway a particular reading or to justify its pretences, I still find myself compelled to openly reflect upon the process of its assemblance.
As with my two previous shorts Houseplants and Falmouth Collage, the flow of the text did not become apparent to me until the edit. Yet unlike those works, there never was any intention to make these disparate shots and audio recordings into something cohesive. Often, whilst I am running errands or home alone or just bored, I’ll take out my phone and just start filming anything. Much of this is audiovisual nonsense, but some stuff compels me enough to investigate it more. Many of these shots are taken from train windows with the phone balanced against the glass, although they felt far more meditative to shoot than to rewatch. Some are so banal as to be self-destructive; confronted with the reality that the sublime – funnily enough – does not always emerge from a lack of effort.
There is a distorted voice-over that populates the right side of Six Night‘s audio track. The passage is the only thing recorded with the intention of developing some formal cohesion, and was originally intended to be included in a clear and undistorted fashion. I will admit that there was some embarrassment over both my prose and my delivery that ultimately lead me to shroud it in abstraction. However, I was also displeased with how clearly it dictated a particular narrative direction. When I chose the three moments – a bus stop in the rain, an ajar door at night, and a lo-res close-up of a thunderstorm – the difficult part was not in finding a story to tie them together, but in allowing contingencies and experimentation to take control. Too often, anxieties around the hypothetical audience uncovering subtexts that betrayed or suggested some secret moral depravity or naivety crumpled my earnest desire to mess around and stick with what felt right.
With that, have fun and enjoy the film.
Daniel E. Smith 