Recently I’ve been looking through some of my favourite film clips, and YouTube is a great place to relive favourite movie moments, as it’s choc-a-bloc with delightful fragments that allow you to revisit some of the moments that stick in your mind from movies you’ve watched in the past. Some of the short clips seemed to suggest little stories to me, and of course YouTube allows you to create and upload your own video mash-ups, so I thought I’d enjoy putting my own mashed-up imagination to work in telling a story of my own. It didn’t have the same narrative elements as the original movies, because in choosing small moments and editing them together something different is bound to happen, and the short format (under 4 minutes each) meant that the two clips I came up with as a result of using a free-association technique to link ideas meant that the results were impressionistic and more ambiguous than a full-length movie would allow for.

The limitations imposed by what clips were available to me dictated the story told, as least as much as the length of time to tell the story in did. One idea suggested to me by the clips I was looking at was the theme of the moon, and I used this as a glue to hold the pieces together, so ideas didn’t fly off in too many directions at once. I’m gonna talk about some of the metaphors suggested in the visuals, but I’d prefer to let you see the first video before I talk about them, because I don’t want to pollute your experience of watching it by pointing out what it’s about. It’s open to interpretation, and the viewer decides what to bring to the story, as much as the story-teller does. So here goes; the first part of me likkle diptych is called Donna’s Moon Story.

It’s terribly flawed in lots of ways, rough around the edges, quite literally, since I didn’t get my aspect ratios right, resulting in the black borders producing a frame, and the Windows Movie Maker software I used crashed every time I tried to apply transitions to smoothen the ragged joins between clips. However, that’s another story, and maybe the raw, abrupt quality that resulted suited the raw energy of the subject matter, which, though I wasn’t aware of it as I was making it, resulted in a nightmare dream theme emerging. The borders turned out to be a lucky mistake too, as they give a voyeuristic, peering through a letterbox, dissasociated feeling to the scenes.

I decided, when I looked at it afterwards, that it was a nightmare of sorts. It surprised me, in that I hadn’t initially set out to represent a dream, but of course the moon will produce dreams, not all of them wholesome or peaceful, and the music I found in the copyright-free music section of YouTube’s Creator Studio, now unfortunately missing the transition tools it apparently once had, provided a hammer-like soundtrack which, I thought, added to the menacing, uncomfortable quality of the visuals. Short scenes and quick cuts were used to keep the pace insistent and add to the anxious atmosphere. Sexuality is an obvious theme, as it was in the original movies the clips are taken from, and violence seems immanent. Carnality is a main theme in the video, in case you didn’t spot it already ha ha.

The eyeball-slashing moment was one that had always been unbearable for me to watch whenever I see Luis Bunuel’s ‘Un Chien Andelou’, and I felt it’s uncensored version was too jolting and repulsive to include in the mash-up, as it would destroy the dream-like quality too much, so I applied a filter to the short scene, (luckily, filters are still a thing in the Creator’s Studio), and also used filters on the last two ‘scenes’, though they are clips so short I can hardly bring myself to call them that. The woman’s screaming face at the end was far more effective as a result of the filter, but I was frustrated that I couldn’t fade the filters slightly on the eyeball scene, as the intensity of the filter obscures the climax of the video a bit too much, I think, for the intensity of shock I was aiming for. The abruptness of the ending implies the sleeper awaking from a nightmare produced from the depths of their unconscious.

The second video in the diptych is also a dreamscape, but a more pleasant one by far. The theme of female sexuality is in contrast to the male energies that run through the first piece. Can you spot the moment when orgasm happens?

I headed straight back down the stairs into the unconscious for this second story, as the staircase with the shadow moving across it suggests at the beginning, and the footage of the swimming pool, taken from the classic horror movie, ‘Cat People’, combined with the cave entrance shot (female body part symbolism, anyone?) creates, hopefully anyway, a sense of anticipation, which resolves into some kind of clarity of theme only towards the end, when the kiss over the abyss happens. From then on the dreamer continues the dream in a state of sexual arousal, with the climax occurring at the red star explosion, followed by the slow turning wave at the end. The male body features in the way that the female body does in the first, except that it is integrated with nature, unlike the first piece, where the female body is mechanical and distanced from the natural world, and it is the male energy which is in touch with the cycle of nature, under the gaze of the moon.

Of course, the materials I had to work with are masterpieces of cinema, and if you have not seen or heard of some of these movies already, I recommend that you give them a go. if you didn’t much enjoy my little movies, there’s sure to be something in here you like. Here are some links to help you find the movies.

Ivan’s Childhood (Andrei Tarkovsky 1962)

Un Chien Andelou (Louis Buñuel 1929)

A Trip To The Moon (George Méliès 1902)

Under The Skin (Johnathan Glazer 2014)

Cat People (Jacque Tourneur 1942)

King Kong (Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack 1933)

Bonus Clip: That clip from Ivan’s Childhood, for those who like a happy resolution, but don’t want to watch a whole movie to see how that kiss worked out in the end!