In keeping up with the theme of the
surreal, and existential questioning in my project, I decided to do my artist
blog on a writer that I have been researching a lot recently. I have been
looking a lot into the works of Albert Camus. For those who don’t know, he is a
French writer, and the work that I have been specifically pulling from is his
novel ‘The Stranger.’
In this book he touches on ideas of
existentialism and philosophy through that of an oddly absurd and dry story.
One of the things that is most striking to me about the novel is Camus’ ability
to keep such an odd and ridiculous story so dry. I think the fact that it is
dry, is what makes it powerful though. The ability to take the emotion out of
the absurdity, so that the only thing left to talk about is why these absurd
things are happening is something that I think I want to pursue. My goal is to
have the absurd moments and people be symbols for things that I want to have a
conversation with the audience about. I think by having the film be so boring
(for lack of a better word) it will lead the audience to think more about why
these things are happening and decipher them.
It
is hard to say exactly what makes the novel so dry, and I think it will be what
is going to be so difficult for me to tackle. From what I can gather, the
matter of fact nature of the way things are described is what takes all of the
emotion out of it. Events are described as being just that, events and nothing
else. The problem is translating this to the screen. With a novel it is much
easier to describe events than a film. One of the most important things that I
will have to look into is research on camera angles and lighting that take the
emotion out of a film. Probably a lot of straight on shots with even lighting
and few shadows. Along with very close to emotionless actors.
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