Siobhan Davies and David Hinton in Conversation with Claudia Kappenberg, Part 2

Abstract

In Part 2 of the conversation, Siobhan Davies and David Hinton reflect on the extensive work that informed the first proposal for the film. Key compositional elements are discussed such as the representation of the protagonist through a variety of images from different sources, the decision to represent both the inner and the external world of the protagonist, and, drawing on Étienne-Jules Marey's chronophotography, the decision to work with minutely choreographed image sequences that are composed from archive material. The conversation explores the forensic work with visual details and the intent to draw the viewer's attention to the richness of the found film frames. Davies and Hinton also reflect on the use of damage and decay in Chu-Li Shewring's soundscapes and the roles of film editors Danny McGuire and Matthew Killip. Keywords:All This Can Happen, Portraits, noticing, protagonist, narrative, Muybridge, Marey, Stanley Spencer, Walser, dance, dance film, walking, sculpting, found image, still image, collage, sound Claudia Kappenberg (CK): We are now looking at the time before you made All This Can Happen (ATCH).1 When I read the proposal for the BFI, I was amazed as to how accurate it was and how closely it envisaged the film.2 I was wondering how much and what kind of work you did even before writing the proposal. Could you talk a bit about that?David Hinton (DH): We worked very hard on the BFI proposal. When Sue and I collaborate, we are quite likely to start from an intuition, but the minute we start to prod at that intuition, all kinds of questions come up. We then try to go one by one and answer all the questions in advance: if we want to do this, we will have to do that, and so on. So you end up having to think your way through the whole process. You start to see all the problems and decisions that are lying ahead, along the road. I suppose I have made so many films now that I can usually see what is going to be difficult.

Postscript

“…6 Davies also recounts in this interview how they "re-sequenced a series of frames of movements according to a score" 7 to break up fluidity in her movement and to challenge her to rethink her previous way of constructing movement, reflecting that: "At first these felt as if I was deoxygenating the movement. But I was also thrilled by this new relationship to movement in these tiny increments."…”