What is a useful and challenging creative research design for exploring what editing does to invite and enhance layered experiences of characters in cinematic storytelling?
This question is explored through the BLOD project – a shared site for research aiming to go beyond norms regarding content, aesthetics, and modes of collaboration in cinematic storytelling. The story content revolves around female bleeding from cradle to grave as well as emotional swells in the wake of the blood – between people when bodies fail. The film events are based on our shared experiences of being human with brains, heart, and uterus.
This is a 90 minute iteration of the BLOD material, loosely tracing two filmmakers making a movie. The film’s role in this documentation of research on film editing is to be a manifestation of editing-centered aesthetics and construction of the overall narrative in the editing process.
A first version of Feature film // BLOD was publicly screened in November 2019. The above version screened as Official selection of LA Underground Film Forum in 2020.
For reference only. If you want to further explore the materials of BLOD, you can find scripts, costumes, topical videos, timeline of process and reflections along the way, and more in the RC-exposition BLOD, BLOD(y), BLOD. It started as a digital version of the Open Studio exhibit held at Färgfabriken, Stockholm in Nov. 2019. The exposition is a repository of materials found throughout this research, and the link to it is included here as a taste of the sprawling nature of the BLOD project and its further potentials.
This article was co-written with Annika Boholm, peer-reviewed and published in International Journal of Film and Media Arts on Oct 03, 2022, part of Vol. 7 No. 1 (2022): GEECT Transversal Entanglement - Artistic Research in Film. The paper provides an insight into the BLOD project, its methods and methodology under the headings: Immaterial conceptualization, Material creation, Material composition and Immaterial causata.
For reference only. Video documentations of the BLOD research presentations mentioned in Academic paper // THE BLOD METHOD can be found in the RC-exposition BLOD Screening Room. They are unedited and arranged by date and conference. The link to the presentation documentations is included in the documented artistic research project as a reference source. RC-exposition BLOD Screening Room also serves as a second home to the collection of films that have come out of the BLOD project.
