DREAM DOCUMENTARY: UZHHOROD
2020, HD, 15 min
Dream Documentary: Ukraine
Treating dreams and nightmares as witness accounts, Lerman collected them in Uzhgorod, Ukraine during the pandemic of 2020, while in residency there, and edited them into a documentary.
Alexandra Lerman invited Uzhgorod artists to take part in an archaeological excavation of locally sourced dreams and nightmares. Using their smartphones the artists collected “witness accounts,” dreams orally recounted and recorded on camera by friends and strangers alike, and together they reverse-engineered several versions of the “original plot” of the dreamwork in order to create a series of films sourced from the same shared footage. These accounts of the dreams and nightmares became “found objects” out of which a bricolage of new narratives congealed. Upon completion of the project, the “collective memory” of the dream was returned to the city of Uzhhorod in the form of a screening in which the completed film was projected onto the walls of the defunct Uzhhorod Cinema.
The DreamDoc: Uzhhorod project unfolded over the course of nine Zoom sessions, which consisted of Lerman’s presentations on the subjects including the history of film language, how film is used by visual artists today, and discussions around the sourced dream footage collected for the project. Throughout this process, Lerman utilized the essay by Hito Steyerl “In Defense of the Poor Image” as an organizing principle and manifesto on mobile filmmaking, in order to think (and dream) through the contemporary phenomenon of the ubiquitous low-resolution image (and sound) as captured by the smartphone. Together with the participants, Lerman led discussions on techniques to implement the smartphones as a video cameras, presented a range of accessible lighting techniques to optimize visual effects, and sketched out a history of different narrative compositional strategies that can be deployed to edit together a sourced collection of oral accounts, cutaways, and live sound - in order to construct what Roland Barthes once named the “third meaning” of cinema.
This project was created with the participation of artists from Uzhhorod, Ukraine. The project unfolded over several weeks during the COVID-19 lockdown in the form of a remote Zoom workshop on the subject of the history of moving image and mobile filmmaking. Participating artists were Anastasia Kostiv, Viktoriia Dorr, Attila Hazhlinsky, Danylo Kovach, Petro Ryaska, Kasha Potrohosh, Leo Trotsenko, Eugen Korshunov, Alexandra Liven, Raivis Kapilinskis, and Daniel Kosinski. The workshop was made possible by The Cultural Capital Introspection program and Sorry No Rooms Available residency. You may watch all films made during the workshop here: https://cci.co.ua/dreamdoc-uzhhorod/
