Participants' production diary conclusions / Hanna Harris /

Site of Leaves

David Lynch was commonly sited as reference material during our production. His weird day dreams realized in film form are certainly narratives that create confusion. The Americans won't give him the bucks, the Europeans are thrilled but cannot understand any more than their American fellow-viewers of what his work is all about. At this year's Festival of Cannes Lynch said that he was busy creating his own web pages. He told the Finnish reporter that he was happy to do whatever he wanted without somebody always interfering. "You can put anything there: fragments, films, dreams, ..." claimed the enthusiastic film director.

Similarly, many of Candira's viewers stated that they thought the piece was beautiful, touching, even poetic - yet many of them were confused about what was going on. 55-year-old Montana-guy David Lynch seems to share the same rhetorical approach for important yet strange issues as 19-year-old Bombayite Candira. Lynch would have probably been the one to understand Candira.

Candira grew from a blindly enthusiastic candy girlie to the deity-like lady drifting between insanity and reason. She acted out her roles both as the Indian girl Indira and the fictive tramp star Candy Darling, created by Andy Warhol (after all, this is how she got her name). She got feedback ranging from "a mysterious beauty" with a "special aura" to "a nut case". Most importantly for me, she seemed to be a character that touched people, a digital person who's language and rhetoric got to her public at some level. Since today's socio-cultural environment is favorable to character-based narration, this means that personal details and doings of the character(s) in question and the ambience of the place where they are, rather than detailed plot lines, carry the narration. We could even say that sociological and narrative elements become mixed, if the drama of life, and thus change, is conducted through prophet-like strong characters and/or networks of people, as Manuel Castells (1996; 1997) thinks. Narration, in its large sense of life itself, is thus focused on the here and of the characters in question, not projecting into the future. Drama is acted out here and now. Even the current cult of diaries on the net, ranging from celebrities to anybodies to fictional characters, points out towards the mix of dramatic and sociological elements.

Since Candira is essentially a character-based piece of work told mainly from her subjective point of view, I didn't find it to support a straight-forward rhetoric of story-telling. Character-based drama focuses on the character itself as an interesting construction. Jim Jarmusch has managed to bring special magic to his films through detailed characters. He uses film for character-development through describing details, rather than just focusing on infra-structures and action. Also the environment and setting where these characters act out is important. Paul Auster' New York Trilogy describes a map-like pattern of a mysterious New York as a scene for film noir characters, all in search of something. Maybe a typology of film noir -like characters in search of something - and mostly themselves - could be useful for character-based narration. The search itself is a personal action which doesn't always require answers. The process of search is often the answer, as in John Fowles's novel The Magus. The plot is not clearly opened. This was, more and more during the course of events, my personal aim in Candira.

Associative fragments - textual, visual, audio - are a powerful narrative method in a character-based piece, especially when aiming at creating confusion between the fictional and the real. Maybe this is also what David Lynch meant. What do I mean by these associative fragments? For example, in the diary there are different levels of fragments of texts, partly super-posed. These fragments have been arranged by priorities according to each act's aim, they also vary in length and style according to Candira's state of mind. Within the text, there is a mix of links to existing real sites (companies, characters, research) and to fictional ones. The amount of these links is increased when Candira is confused.

Especially day 3 worked very well with the mix of these textual fragments and implemented links. Day 3 also introduced some video clips within the diary, clips that were supposedly filmed by Candira (staring at the sun, spitting into the sea). These clips supported the narrative and added to the confusion ("did she really film these?"). Unfortunately we didn't have the opportunity to experiment more with them. Moving image, as Ville Eerikäinen also states in his comments on visual continuity or Egon Randlepp and Sami Haikonen on the visual rhetoric of the cinematic cut, should be used more and more also in web-based drama. In brief, the narrative mass of these fragments is not only beautiful but also works in an associative way such as for example in the much-acclaimed novel "House of Leaves" by Mike Danielewski. Also repetition of certain elements (dreams, sea, pain) supports the fragmentary language of the story. Lynch's dwarfs or Aronofsky's headaches in the Pi: repetition is a strong form of narration when dealing with the confusing.

In our specific medium, we have the possibility to use different facets for describing different sides of the character and the story, allowing the viewer to have different experiences of identification. Ideally, this will form a crystal where one side adds to another. Plural identifications support the idea of contextually changing "tribes" (Maffesoli 1995). Our visual solution to focus the visual rhetoric on Candira herself rather than on her actions supports the narrative. Through visual changes, we wish to express changes in the state of mind of the character rather than explicitly show the big course of general action. For me, this logic of the piece itself, fitted into the five-act structure, was a convincing one. Candira as a character could keep on living on the web even now, without Capture, without her Father, just basing her narration on her inner world. Ideally, Candira would become a poetic mix of a short story and a homepage using the stage of web. Hopefully we gave a glimpse of this.

References

Films:

p / Darren Aronofsky, 1998
Ghost Dog - The Way of the Samurai / Jim Jarmusch, 1999
Lost Highway / David Lynch, 1997

Bibliography:

Auster, Paul (1990). The New York Trilogy: City of Glass/Ghosts/The Locked Room. Penguin Books.

Castells, Manuel.
- The Rise of the Network Society (1996). Cambridge (Mass.): Blackwell.
- The Power of Identity (1997). Oxford: Blackwell.

Danielewski, Mike Z. (2000). House of Leaves. Pantheon Books.

Fowles, John (1985, orig. 1977). The Magus. London: Cape.

Maffesoli, Michel (1995). Maailman mieli: yhteisöllisen tyylin muodoista. Helsinki: Gaudeamus