The Camera Points...

Yesterday I happened upon some wonderful home video footage of a colleague of mine, filmed by his young son. The boy had followed a common theme within the genre: a guided tour of his house. Below is an extract of selected text from the video:

There's my playground
Here are some bananas
This is my dad, that's his eyes, that's his nose, that's his mouth, that's his ear.
Here's my brother, here's my mum.
These are my fish, as you can see.

(Brother asks)
What are you doing?

(Boy answers)
I'm making a film.

Photography of Performance

My skills as a photographer are increasingly drawing me to document events and performance works of my friends and peers. In May 2009 I am due to do the photography for a wedding. In January 2009 I documented Kings of England's performance, 'Where We Live and What We Live For' at London's Battersea Arts Centre. To see these images visit:

http://bowesandsondocuments.blogspot.com/

In February 2009 I documented 'Living Structure's' Carte Macabre performance at The Shunt at London Bridge, see:

http://www.livingstructures.co.uk/index.html (images unavailable at present).

I am happy to be contacted should you require a photographer to document your event / performance.

The Small Time: Make Film not Fame!

Home Video is a free-style genre, a hybrid form of film that is generally not acknowledged in Film Studies or the history of Film with a capital 'F' because it is not 'official'. It is made by people who are not experts in their field. It is an amateur's game. So let us make of it what we want, and let us call for the recognition and acknowledgement of our small time productions.

Popular film and television conventions have certainly influenced the way Home Video is made by YOU the general public, but to what extent is questionable. (What usually happens when someone you know picks up a camera?) Bringing a video camera into an everyday context, a personal context, changes the way people behave, and witnessing the overcoming of that 'camera-freeze' is part of the beauty of home video. Building confidence is part of it.


My mission with the Home Video Series is to document family life in an unconventional way, a poetic way, a brave way. I focus on my relationship with my parents because it is the most important relationship in my life. I owe them my life and now I try to make sense of it. I strive to be playful and varied, to allow duration and repetition to reveal the similarities and differences, connections and idiosyncrasies that exist within and between us family members. I consider the work to be a form of art, of documentary operating outside of traditional documentary conventions, involving sequences of performed actions in the context of 'real-life' relationships.

Influences include filmmakers such as Kieslowski, Jean-Luc Godard, Tarkovsky, Terence Davies and Duane Hopkins.

© Kate Rowles. 2009

Current Projects: 'Beginning to End', 2009, UK

New work is in the pipeline: a video piece with the provisional title Beginning to End. This is on the cards to be filmed next week when I return to Lancashire for a brief spell. The piece shall be a slow motion video of my parents running towards each other, to be filmed in a valley near where we live. Alternative versions will include my mother and I and my father and I performing the same action.

© Kate Rowles. 2009

Home Video 6: Family Name, 2007, UK

My mum, my dad, my brother and I each write our own name on a single piece of paper. We lean on the desk in my mum's home office that used to be my brother's room before he left home. The writing of one's own name is performed perhaps thousands of times during one's lifetime. I simply wanted to document the four of us performing this task together, to record the way our hands move and the way we make the name 'Rowles' our own. At 10% of the original speed, the action becomes weightier and takes on an air of finality. There appears to be a mixture of confidence and hesitation in the performance of this task.

© Kate Rowles. 2007

Home Video 5: See-Saw, 2007, UK

A ride on a see-saw is a game of weight and balance between two people in gravitational flux. One rider begins by pushing off the ground with their feet. From then on the weight of each body becomes a potential force; a source of energy and momentum. One at a time the riders send each other up into the air and back down to earth, playing their weight in turns along a single beam of wood or metal.

In this video my parents and I take turns at playing our own weight against gravity and being moved by the weight of each other.

© Kate Rowles. 2007

Home Video 4: The Changing of the Guards, 2007, UK

My family perform our own version of the traditionally British 'Changing of the Guards' ceremony outside our semi-detached house in Lancashire. This ceremony is usually performed by the highest ranking members of the British army as guardians of the Royal residence: Buckingham Palace in London. In doing so we make a claim for the recognition of the 'common' household of the citizen as part of a wider national heritage, each with a legacy of its own.

We are nervous and some of us more than slightly embarrassed. Understandably. The neighbours are watching. The local children are playing out and we don't really want to make a spectacle of ourselves, at least not here. The piece is not choreographed. The only rule is that during the change-over my brother and I should touch the hand of our parents to symbolize the handing over of the keys to the residence.

The props (flag and horse) were made by my mother and I for the occasion. The flag depicts an old family photograph taken in the living room of this house about 15 years ago.

© Kate Rowles. 2007