actualities (2022-present)
cinematography by emma volz
In 2021, when most students understandably chose to travel away from school for the summer, I found myself with a full class schedule on a mostly abandoned campus. One of my courses was on early film history. Twice a week, I spent my afternoons marathoning silent films in the cool basement of the now demolished Harris Fine Arts Center.
For someone whose adolescence partially overlapped with the rise in the overstimulating internet world, watching those films felt as though I was finally seeing for the first time.
When I closed my eyes at the end of the day, I could still picture Méliès and Chaplin’s sorcery as I slipped away into my dreams. Among the many great pioneers of early cinematic history, the much-revered Lumière brothers continue to infiltrate my subconscious.
The Brothers ventured into the world with their newly invented mobile motion picture device. Their movies lasted anywhere from 40 to 50 seconds—whatever length of time it took to hand crank through 17 meters of film. Within a few years, the brothers had crafted hundreds of short non-fiction films. These “actualities” consisted of everyday subjects, places, and things. Through the simple process of pointing a camera and highlighting mundane and often domestic spaces, the world revealed itself to both filmmakers and audiences as miraculous.
For instance! In “Baby’s Meal” (1895), two French parents spoon feed their child. This is the quintessential home video. Adoring parents. A milky chin. Little fingers at work. This film immortalizes people, a moment, in an exact time and place. While the subjects of the Lumière pictures are no longer living, the feeling of those images live and breathe as they did over a century ago.
To honor the Lumières artful legacy, I follow suit. I began filming my own actualities in 2022 and my experience has been inspiring and gratifying. For one thing, these little films have enabled me to slow down and see my surroundings with a new sense of wonder. Up until that point in my life, most of my hands on documentary experience dealt with stories that took me abroad. This filmmaking exercise helped me begin to see the everyday, my own backyard, with new eyes.
Though this form of documenting is unconventionally simple and short, the entire world can be made manifest in the small, consequential details of a single frame. Acknowledging the smallest details in person or place can be revelatory. For me, many of these actualities encompass simultaneous stillness and commotion. The tension between the stillness of the frames and the stories playing out within them creates a little symphony, an ode to the presence and productivity of life.
I believe there’s a story in everything and everyone. There is beauty in mundanity. Beauty, not for its grandeur, but for its quiet ability to uplift and instruct.