The document discusses key lessons and insights from a mid-term review of a filmmaking project focused on representing places. Some of the challenges discussed include balancing the representation of place with narrative elements, distinguishing between unique places and more generic spaces, and how to present places as characters. Younger students sometimes focused more on themselves while older students erased themselves to immerse the viewer in the place. The films created showed how places can be represented in evocative ways through imagery, sound, and fictionalized human testimony about the place.

1. CCAJ MID TERM REVIEW FEB 2018 EDINBURGH FILMHOUSE
Some things we learned
The ‘no filming in school’ rule presents a challenge, especially to primary, and those
working in school time.
Exercise 1 presents further challenge in that continuous shooting of a favourite place
doesn't enable the selection of features, details and facets of the place that make it
distinctive, unique. Some groups had slowed down their perception of the space, by
using still photograph first, then building short filmed sequences from there. Elliott
Eisner talks about ‘slowing down perception’ as being a crucial pedagogic role of he
arts.
It’s hard to balance the competing needs of ‘Place’, with those of ‘Story’. Narrative
tends to speed things up, leads us to want to know what happens. To represent Place
effectively, we have to ‘step out of the story’, even briefly.
We found a difference between ‘Place’ as unique, and ‘space’ as generic. We
wondered whether there was a dialectic between the two: Place is sometimes
contextualised by its surrounding ‘space’. Not or the first time, I think of the opening
to Psycho: a long tracking shot of a cityscape that moves closer and closer to a
particular skyscraper, then a particular window, then the camera glides seemingly in
under the lintel into a real room, with Marion Crane and her boyfriend: the story starts
here, and now.
We wondered about how to present a particular Place as a character. We thought it
would help children if they thought of their Places as unique, like people.
Some of the films used music so obtrusively that it obscured the ‘realness’ of the
Place in the film: music can make a place seem generic. “Music kills Places’,
someone said. Voice-over, on the other hand, can locate Place.
Some of the films actively grappled with the challenge that there were no Places (or
spaces) that young people could call their own: in Bulgaria, in Stains outside Paris.
When Gerry and Arnaud in Stains asked their 12 and 13 year old children which
places they called their own, they said McDonalds. The most popular shared places
were online – facebook and Youtube.
Some of the groups of younger children foregrounded themselves, above their chosen
Places, while others – older teenagers – almost erased themselves, submerging
themselves into Place.
One of Foucault’s heterotopias were ‘sacred spaces’. We realised that transgressing
the rules, norms, and boundaries of a Place revealed something of its nature.
Liebfrauen Catholic High School in Berlin filmed teenager playing basketball in
church, upsetting the church warden who had allowed them to film. For some of us
watching, each sound of the ball bouncing, in the acoustics of a church, jarred and
jolted.

2. Some of the films:
St. George’s Primary in Glasgow (33 children, 9/10 years old, filming on a
Thursday morning, 2-3 hours) made a short film derived from Moonfleet, with its
secret places and map of treasure. Lingering shots of moss on the granite walls of
their location and angled winter sunlight, caught the atmosphere of this part of
Glasgow – people who know the city, could recognise it without prompting. This is a
good test: would you recognise this place without being told?
St. Margaret’s Withern were filming in their greenhouse. Nathalie Bourgeois, of
the Cinematheque, recognised it immediately: ‘we have seen this before; it is like
their ‘signature’.’ For Exercise 3, they interspersed shots of drawings of the same
plants taken from books in their Library, made by Victorian botanists.
College Barbara, in Stains, Ile de France, made two Exercise 1 pieces about their
neighbourhood, with voice-over accounts of events that made those places
memorable: an air ambulance rescuing a child from a playground, and a brief account
over footage of a Square that had been saved from developers. Neither film made the
Place seem specific, but the voice-overs did: they gave them a value, a history, a
unique identity. Except Gerry, the film-maker, said the voice-overs were fictional!
We were really taken in – something about the plausibility of human testimony,
especially that made by children.
Algirdo Brazausko Gymnasium, Lithuania (7 x 15-16 year olds, after school, 3
hours a week) made a series of very evocative pieces, using sound and image to evoke
a multi-sensory experience of Place. Their film of an abandoned civic building, alone
in a frozen and desolate landscape, graffitied, was so reminiscent of the recent
Russian film Lovleess, that we insisted Ginte went to see it immediately. Then short
pieces about ruined railway buildings, night-time shots of snow, with very loud
footstep crunching. And a sequence shot in another abandoned building, which Ginte
said has specific resonances for the Lithnauian independence movement