Third Take (working title)
- Anat Dan
- School of Arts & Sciences
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Student Creative Production Grant
A still from the film Third Take.
Anat Dan will create a video essay exploring the sensorial experience and the moral implications of spectatorship, by deconstructing an experimental film by Philip Scheffner called “Havarie” (2016). “Havarie” attempts to restore the political capacity of the image by reworking a short YouTube video featuring a small boat carrying refugees, recorded from a cruise ship. In this work, the tourist’s three-minute video is transformed into a ninety-three-minute film unfolding at one frame per second. This extreme slow motion further deteriorates the visibility of the migrant figures, making the human figure less legible. The soundscape—radio traffic between the cruise liner, the port authorities, and the rescue cruiser combined with anonymous recollections of migration—gives the film its loose narrative. Anat is interested in the sensorial experience “Havarie” creates for its viewers in the face of its poor, empty, image. She is particularly interested in the convergence of structural-materialist methods of filmmaking, emphasizing long durations with minimal or no narrative, with human rights themes, that at least on the surface, go hand in hand with representational codes of humanitarian emergency. She asks how these methods bring something new to the conversation about watching human suffering.