Maya Deren At Land Pt.1

Deren's second experimental film, At Land (1944), reinforces her interest in the juxtaposition of anachronistic spaces and introduces a critique of social rituals. This film begins by reversing the natural rhythm with images of waves breaking and descending back into the sea. Starring again, Deren is seen climbing up a dead tree trunk on the beach, magically emerging onto a table where a formal dinner party is in progress. This 'civilized' world ignores Deren as she crawls along their dinner table. By depicting herself as invisible to the diners, Deren highlights the myopia of the guests. The dinner sequence in At Land ends with an enchanted chess game. A pawn falls from the table and descends back into the dead wood on the beach, it falls over rocks, into the water and is washed away over the waterfalls. Chasing the pawn, Deren is restored to her original landscape.

Maya Deren At Land Pt.2

I decided to research women's emotional fears by developing an online survey; the survey was posted to all of my facebook female friends and asked questions about women’s physical and emotional fears/phobias and their physical and emotional dreams/ambitions.I received around fifty responses, and found the results of women’s emotional fears were of particular interest to me. The majority of the responses were how women are scared of ending up alone, being left by there loved one or a life without a love. The response gave me a new inspiration and focus and I asked myself the question of why women felt this way and could not face being alone?

Cindy Sherman

At Land Film Still

Cindy Sherman - Cindy Sherman is an American Art Photographer who has been commenting on the stereotypes of women, predominantly featuring herself or objects relating to women throughout her art photography career. Sherman has been a huge inspiration to me, representing women is her style and a style that I can relate too and a subject area I choose to use in film and photography.

Sherman's work reminds me of the concept and idea's that I like to create, dealing with the ‘Issues of Female Representation’ through the medium of Video Art. The focus of the video will be based on one main female character, which will be in the mindset of female’s fears.

Bill Viola - The Reflecting Pool

I am inspired by Bill Viola as a fellow video artist! I especially like this video 'The Reflecting Pool', it has a stillness and slow pace to it that I like, the movement is subtle and slow. There is an element of rebirth to the piece represented by the water and baptism, at the end the man is naked which also represents a certain baptism and innocence to it. Viola uses repetition of images throughout his films and water is a common theme too.

Seven deadly sins vrs Seven heavenly Virtues

My idea came from an idea about seven deadly sins versus seven heavenly virtues, the concept of creating contrasting backgrounds appealed, almost like heaven and hell. Visiting Alton Towers at Halloween was an inspiration for the darker side of the concept, visiting a haunted house and seeing the reactions of the women inside the haunted house became my focus of fears and phobias. To contrast this I thought it would be interesting to also have a perspective on women’s dreams and ambitions too.