What was the starting point or the initial idea for Travelling Fields?
Travelling Fields was shot on location in Murmansk, Monchegorsk and Kola in North West Russia. It is the last film in a trilogy focusing on particular phenomena occurring through a change of perspective and animated camera-movements, as a way of redefining a place and its geography. The earlier films are Proximity, shot on a beach in Denmark (2006) and Parallax, shot on the rooftop of a department store in Austria (2009).
In my earlier films I was experimenting with camera-movements and turning the image 180 degrees. Due to certain ways of framing, and the camera mounted low in front of a large flat surface, the parallax movements made the ground at the top of the frame appear to lose its solidity. In watching these inverted images the eye was not fixed in one particular place, but shifting its attention between foreground and background, and searching the image across the screen. These particular conditions also cause the ground which usually forms a static background in most films, to appear to be in motion and therefore brought to the main attention. I was interested in this shift of focus, and also the repositioned architectural shapes and transformed spaces it created on the screen.
So, I started making longer shots and placing the camera on a track, moving it frame-by-frame, centimetre-by-centimetre and by hand. This slow method became like a process of “scanning” sections of the landscape, and I used it to document places and topographies in a number of different geographical locations.
For Travelling Fields I was looking for flat and open landscapes within the northern geography. One of the conditions for the choice of location was that a track could be laid down straight on the ground. When I arrived in the Murmansk area I discovered that it is not particularly flat and a lot the vast landscape is covered in small birch trees, and there are also places destroyed by industry and pollution. A lot of areas are also closed military zones. The locations I found for the filming were situated mostly by the edge of the cities, and were in places such as a car-marked on the days it was closed, in fields next to a factory and in an area with half-built housing.
The films are shot with a Super16 time-lapse camera that is often used for effects and action-shots in movies, as it is very small and easy to mount in awkward places, such as inside a car. It is a non-reflex camera with a fixed 9mm lens, and it was not possible to see thought the click-on viewfinder when the camera was mounted upside-down in this low position. That meant that the framing had to be worked out in other ways. In the first films it was done just by calculations, trial and error, and later by a video-assist made from a surveillance camera.
What do you do when not making films?
I prepare for new films and sometimes I am teaching.
What would you like to say to your audience before seeing your film?
I would hope the audience will watch the film freely, and forget my explanations as the film has its own life and logic.
Could you please tell us something about your future projects?
Last autumn I spent two months in China and I am hoping to go back to shoot a film there next year, with a different approach to documenting places and dealing with time..