Content uploaded by Elisabeth Brun
Author content
All content in this area was uploaded by Elisabeth Brun on May 12, 2023
Content may be subject to copyright.
1
Every body opens space and carves it, set about cutting it up in
portions, in pieces, in sheets, ribbons, flaps panels and veils.
Every body is a camera which frames according to its
movements, advances, retreats, slidings, ascents, descents..a
body at work carving into the thick mass that finds itself in the
world and placed upon it. Jean-Luc Nancy (Nancy, 2010, p.
xiv).
The Expanded Essay Film: The Researcher-Filmmaker as a
Topographical Thinker
INTRODUCTION
In “Gaps and Fissures”, the third part of my film-experiment 3xShapes of Home (Brun, 2020a), I
let an GIS-algorithm decide the framing of my sub-Arctic childhood village in Norway. A heap
of garbage, a straw, some seaweed. Not the views of which memories are made. “East, west, up,
down” my voice-over comments in the finished film. The agency of the algorithm performs a
random plotting, I set up my camera according to its coordinates (Brun, 2020b). I set up rules
for my embodied placement, the camera movement, for the direction of view. The procedure
sparks my curiosity, on the impact of framing, on non-human agency upon place experience.
How attachment, memory and affection is inseparable from embodied perspective, from
framing, the very action of selecting a material view. As a researcher, I think through the camera
and its techniques, a process which is mediated and at the same time very much embodied.
The following essay explores the relational and internal workings of the filmmaker-
researcher as a spatial thinker. It deals with how one can think through the camera about place
texture, place forms and how they impact the way we shape our worldviews. This is a timely
topic. To use the film camera as a tool for researching spatial experience and design, is
increasingly recognized and explored in what is called the fertile intersection of film, architecture
and urban culture (Bruno, 2006). There is a renewed interest in academia, as well in the arts, in
the way that place/space is intrinsically interwoven with embodied experience (Janz, 2017, p. 1).
Correspondingly, there is an growing number of academic efforts to understand the
entanglements of environments and subjectivities through creative practices (Andersen, 2020
(2016); Glisovic, 2014; Gough-Brady, 2020; Haralambidou, 2016; Rogers et al., 2021). In this
context, architecture´s expanded field, increasingly acknowledge essay film practices as a research
technique: that is, as means to reveal the affective, political, philosophical and storytelling
potential of architectural thinking (Haralambidou, 2016). Essayist Filmmaking is according to
architect Penelope Haralambidou, a useful tool for shedding light on the link between the
2
“perception of built environment and the structure of intellectual processes.. (in the sense
that)… every day experience of built architecture sculpts our inner intellectual faculty (Haralambidou,
2016). She argues that the tropes and techniques of essayistic filmmaking, that is: its subjectivity,
reflexivity and disjunctive practices, are useful for shedding light on the experience of
architecture, and the interplay between structures of knowledge, affect and material
environments. This emergence in architecture´s expanded field is drawing on literature on the
essay film and its subjective, reflexive, dialogical and disjunctive properties (Alter, 2017/1996;
Biemann, 2017; Brink, 1999; Corrigan, 2011; Montero, 2012; Rascaroli, 2009, 2017). Laura
Rascaroli´s latest book How the Essay Film Thinks (2017) is a particularly useful contribution, in
which she argues that essayistic films are better identified as an epistemological strategy, than a genre
with certain properties. Essayist filmpractices, she argues, perform what she calls a strategy of the
gap: a thinking through disjunctions made between elements of the moving image, or as she
formulates it: “disjunction is to be found at the core of the essay film´s diverse signifying
practices in which the verbal is only one of sveral levels of intelligence,” (Rascaroli, 2017, p. 7).
This is an important insight that opens up for discussing critical potentials for non-verbal film
techniques in a research context, or more precise, for filmmaking as a critical tool for place
thinking.
The Researcher Filmmaker as an Embodied Thinker
However, we need more knowledge, I think, on filmmaking as a process of thinking. We need more
knowledge about the dynamics of audio-visual thinking processes that is broader in its scope,
and not purely textual. Thinking through the camera is a complex process, it is embodied,
strategic, affective, relational and situated, shaped by environmental structures as well as moving
image technology. As geographer Harriet Hawkins puts it, experience is in its nature “co-
constituive” (Hawkins, 2015). Therefore, in order to map the critical potential of such practices,
we need to address the question of how from the filmmaker-researcher´s point of view as an
embodied thinker. There is indeed emergent literature on filmmaking as place-thinking, which is
very much descriptive of embodied and biographic experience of place, conveying a process of
becoming, of tacit knowledge being changed by filming (Gough-Brady, 2020; Rogers et al.,
2021). But in addition, we need to discuss how such thinking process actually works: how exactly
is the relational and internal workings of the filmmaker-researcher, as a spatial and embodied thinker?
How do place texture, audio-visual technology, and perception interact in shaping experience and
knowledge? In order to clarify what I mean by this question, I want to borrow Hunter
Vaughan´s precise question to the intersection of film and philosophy. Here he targets what he
3
sees as a fundamental, but underresearched question in the field: the question of how (Vaughan,
2013).
How may the moving image help us to understand our perceptual processes, our mental
images, our internal structures and our interaction with the world external to our bodies,
and even offer us new organizations of these relationships …? (emphasis added) (Vaughan,
2013, p. 1)
While Vaughan´s quest is to understand how cinema´s configurations may offer us new ways to
think, this question is also forcing us to take a closer look at the thinking process of the
filmmaker-researcher. I put his keywords of “internal structures”, and “new organizations” in
cursive in order to highlight what points directly towards my own quest: to understand the
relations between (embodied experience of) place texture, moving image form and processes of
thinking. In this context I propose my research project Moving Image Topography, a practice-led
study investigating how one can think topographically through the camera, that is: to think
embodied and spatially through the camera apparatus about form, and the impact of form for the
way places are experienced and understood (Brun, 2020b). The study draws on philosophical
Topography; a conception of place and methodology of thinking about place, originally developed
by the philosopher Jeff Malpas (Malpas, 2018a). In Malpas conception place is not only a
subjective or social construction, but central to the very ability to think and act. Place is what
structures experience. Drawing on his work, this essay discusses, in conversation with
architecture’s expanded field, the essay film discourse and the making of the experimental film
3xShapes of Home, the relevance of understanding the filmmaker-researcher as a topographical
thinker, for researchers of spatial cultures and design.
3xShapes of Home (2020) – a Topographical Moving Image Experiment
My 7-minute experimental video titled 3xShapes of Home (2020) was originally not meant to be an
edited film – a linear unity on a timeline. It was a series of three experiments through which I
conducted my thinking about the relation between place, perception and technology. It was “a
theorizing machine” through which I generated new perpsectives, both literally and theoretically.
On one level, I explored and tested through the camera apparatus, my relation to the
topographies and architectures of my childhood place in Sub-Arctic Norway; a coastal village
with approximately 250 inhabitants. Returning to this village several times, I investigated through
the camera its textures and material dynamics, and how these forms shaped my attachment, my
memory as well as my thinking. Strengelvåg, as the village is called, is situated by the coast, facing
the open sea, yet it is sheltered by a bay. The place is surrounded by mountains, the open
horizon of the ocean, by encompassing moraine left there by glaciers of the last Ice Age, as well
4
as vast marshlands (Ramberg et al., 2008). It is particularly the mountains and oceans that is
affectively important to me, structures that feels integral to who I am, structures with which I
think. On a second level, it was an exploration of cinematic thinking and how it may work as an
embodied practice of thinking. By returning to the same place three times at different times of
the year, equipped with new camera technologies and new strategies for exploration at each visit,
there emerged three forms, three dynamics, which allowed for three different “topographical
views” of my childhood place. I named these forms after the geological structures of Sediments,
Configurations, Gaps and Fissures, each form describing the dynamic between stillness and motion
produced by the interplay between film techniques, memory/conceptuality and place. My
intention with these experiments was to use the camera as means to identify reemergent forms
across mind and materiality and their affordance for thought and experience. Importantly when I
speak of form, I do not mean only film form, but form in a broader sense as “all shapes and
configurations, all ordering principles, all patterns of repetition and difference.”(Levine, 2015, p.
3). As literary theorist Caroline Levine notes, one of the main features of form is that it travels – it
migrates from one materiality to the other, as well as from materiality to the abstract, from one
domain to the other (Levine, 2015, pp. 10-13). In relation to form, I use the term affordance, in the
way that the psychologist, James J. Gibson, conceptualizes it. His concept is useful, as it captures
what forms of artefacts, as well as the surfaces of environments, may offer the human creature,
also in terms of thinking (Gibson, 1986). In my study, I argue that mental affordances, are
connected to mental action such as metaphoric meaning-making, analysis or associative thinking
(Brun, 2020b).
The thinking which was conducted through these experiments, were re-conceptualized
and interpreted in light of Jeff Malpas system of philosophical Topography (Malpas, 2018a).
Importantly philosophical Topography, regards place, or Topos – the Greek word for place, as a
fundamental concept, as a general and encompassing structure for experience, in which the
forms and dynamics of environments structure the way humans think and act. From this
conception of place, follows a methodology of thinking about place. Malpas speaks of his
method of philosophical thinking as topographical, as it sees place as an open region where the
interrelations between distinct, irreducible and interrelated elements may come to light, and, in a
similar way, one may in a physical topography orient oneself by measuring the relations between
objects (Malpas, 2018a, p. 16).
This corresponds to non-narrative film-practices, and in particular to film practices called
essayistic. Tellingly, filmmaker and scholar Ursula Biemann accurately describes essay film
practice as a geography, a juxtaposition of ideas, technologies and discourses: a facilitating for a co-
5
existing in space, rather a sequencing in time (Biemann, 2017, p. 262). She describes such
practices as a gathering of elements, of identities, discourses and technology creating what she
calls an imaginary topography in which thinking and new connections may take place. Corrondingly,
an essay film is topographical as it collects a range of sources from different disciplines, into the
place of the film in order to survey interconnections and overlaps, rather than to concentrate on
one detail or question within one particular tradition. The way philosophical Topography,
understands the act of creation fits wel into this picture. It sees creative practices such as
architecture, literature, is an externalization of memory (memory is created through embodied
movement and through practice, thus place is internalized through such practices), of mental
images, of thinking and thus of place. In light of this creative practices, such as architecture,
literature and poetry, are regarded as a poetics of place (place-making), a writing of place (place
inscription), or a way to evoke place topographies and thereby recognizing and reflecting on its
dynamics (Malpas, 2015, pp. 5-6). There is no reason why filmmaking should not be subjected
to the same principle, I argue. Simultaneously with the act of framing, our bodily perception is
influenced by forms: the forms of objects, topographical forms, architectural forms that are
taken up by perception. It is widely acknowledged in philosophy and the empirical sciences that
the forms and topographies of our surroundings participate in our ability to think conceptually
(Damasio, 2010; Johnson, 1987; Lakoff & Johnson, 1980; Malpas, 2018a). Embodied movement
in place/space, it is argued, is where our thinking begins (Damasio, 2010; Malpas, 2018a;
Merleau-Ponty, 1962; Sheets-Johnstone, 2011). It is thus a matter of interaction. How can we make
these dynamics visible through cinematic means?
As mentioned, in my film experiment 3xShapes of Home, I use geologic terms as tools for
mapping recurrent forms between materials and the abstract. In the film´s three experiments:
Sediments, Configurations and Gaps and Fissures, each form is named after dynamic that
emerges in the interplay between place structure, perception and camera technology. In the
“chapter” of Sediments, for instance, I record places in my village that has an emotional impact
upon me. My grandparent´s kitchen, which I associate with love and care, the ocean, the
mountain top with which I associate integrity and endurance. Here the application of filmic
techniques, such as the fixed frame, and superimposition, trigger for me a conception of place and
perception, that is layered, or even more accurately – as sedimented. Interestingly, the geological
structure of sediments implies a suspension, as well as a certain layering of material. Sediments is, by the
The Dictionary of Geological Terms, defines Sediments as “solid material settled from a suspension in
liquid”(Bates et al., 1984). Suspensions are particles of solids that are large enough to settle into
sedimentation. To think of the relation between moving images, topographies of place, and
6
mental images as sediments, opened up a theoretical discussion about the way the techniques of
the moving images may interact with our memory in that they may hold places still, suspend
them, as well as providing a layering structure of images, that in turn evokes, and perhaps, write
certain place structures of the mind in the sense that is suggested by topographical thinking
(Malpas, 2015). Stillness introduces a kind of “paralysis,” that enables a retreat into thought. It
affords the creation of memory as much as it evokes memory. It affords place building, place
making, by metaphor and association, a place in which one in an Heideggerian way can “dwell”
(Brun, 2020b).
Moving past Configurations, and directly to the third part: Gaps and Fissures, I attempt in
this experiment to go beyond my preferences, to discover “blind spots” at my topographical
origin. The explorations here are organized in steps, corresponding to the way they are carried
out. It is an experiment of widening “the gap” of tension. A gap can be defined in many ways. In
geologic terms it can be defined as “a sharp break or opening in a mountain ridge” One type is
the fissure, which is a “long and narrow opening”, or a process of splitting, of separating, that is; a
fissure can be an interstice: a very small space in between. As an object, I have in this experiment
chosen the sea, which I associate with openness, freedom and adventure. In a situation fishing
for halibut with a close relative, I explore the gap of simultaneous perspective by strapping a
GoPro-camera to a long stick, lowering it into the ocean, while (almost) at the same time
recording what goes on “above” the surface with a digital camera. My human relation to the
ocean as a meaningful sur-face is put in tension. Later in Gaps and Fissures, I widen the gap and
explore how to go beyond my relation to that village, beyond the intersubjective, beyond human
perspective altogether. By applying a simple GIS-algorithm, in combination with the techniques of
the fixed frame and the camera angle, I collect frames that otherwise would not be chosen. By the
algorithmic coordinates, I conduct a random plotting, by which I will choose my recording
position. It is a matter of accessing the blind-spots, the fields that have become invisible to us, it
is what lies outside the frames of perspective, our likings, our metaphors, our paradigmatic
views of the world. As the voice over in 3xShapes of Home expresses: “I´m bored, let´s play.” The
gap incites playfulness, adventure, but also numbness, indifference and human boredom. The
experience is no longer subjectively affective in the way of Sediments, it belongs, rather, to the
pursuit of knowledge.
The Topographical-Architectural Thinker
What the Topographical understanding of film thinking contributes with, is a differentiation of
the embodied acts and attitudes of a reciprocal formative process of cultural production. As
7
literary scholar Sean Silver notes, a metaphor is created by our embodied vision, the sense of
touch, we attribute meanings to the forms we encounter: we shape the metaphor, then the
metaphor shapes us (Silver, 2015). By reconfiguring through the camera apparatus forms that
structure our understanding, one consequently alters their meaning and render such material-
cultural forms visible for reflection. How does this idea of cinematic thinking correspond with
architecture´s expanded field, and its explorations of cinematic thinking?
Guiliana Bruno notes that cinema is born out of a topographical sense (Bruno, 2002, pp. 8-
9). It is haptic, that is: closely connected to the body´s ability to sense movement through spatial
environments. Cinema and architecture, in this haptic sense, are neighbouring activities rooted in
the spatial presence and movement of the perceptive body, an observation initially made by early
modernist filmmakers such as Sergei Eisenstein (1989). Exploring these parallels from the side of
architecture in Agencies of the Frame (2010) Michael Tawa maps the resonances, parallels and
productive tensions between the architectural construction of space and the construction of film.
Tawa emphasizes that both cinematic construction and architecture are patterning practices.
They are geometric organizations and mobilized agencies. Like in film the sequencing of
experience in architecture are open to many possibilities of “trajectory, rhythm and infiltration”
(Tawa, 2010, p. 2). In a Deleuzian fashion, he calls them “assemblages” of frames, actor and
dispositions constituting – a strategic field of symmetries, and asymmetries, “orthogonals and
diagonals” (2010, pp. 258-259). The word strategy is important here, as the material
arrangements of the architect is not merely a matter of putting materials together. The architect,
in a similar way as the filmmaker, a willful agent that acts according to certain predispositions,
means and ends. Jean Luc Nancy, in his foreword, formulates it most beautifully when he says
that:
“archi -, in a very general way, is the frame of frames and thus the frame before the
frames, places, delimitations, distributions, relationships of force, of volumes, of
tensions. The architect should therefore go before himself. Let us call “tectonic” the
quality of the structure, of the principal disposition, of the consequent putting into place
the idea…”(Nancy, 2010, p. xiv)
In other words, the architect, similar to the filmmaker, is a framing agent who´s intellectual
patterns and creative practices are mutually enforcing, and constitutive for the shaping of place.
And therefore, Nancy writes, the architect should “go before himself”. One should ask, what is
it that shapes the intellectual faculties of the architect? This premise is key also in Malpas
philosophical Topography: rather than to start thinking from the idea of place as a human
8
projection, one should start by regarding humans as projections of place.
1
This ontological shift,
I argue, opens up new ways understanding the critical potential of moving image thinking. It is
my argument that it is particularly through challenging such forms and their meanings by
cinematic techniques one may detect significant dynamics and place structures (and their
affordances ) that otherwise would have remained obscured. Thinking through disjunction, in
the way Rascaroli suggest, is one possible strategy of knowledge of the filmmaker-resarcher.
However, it is ofcourse not the is not the only way a filmmaker may think through the camera.
She thinks in an embodied, flexible, co-constitutive, mediated, situated and complex way. She
thinks in way that may be understood as topographical: a way to think through creating and
responding to forms, thinking through form about the forms though which we think (Brun,
2021).
Bibliography
Alter, N. M. (2017/1996). The Political IM/Perceptible in the Essay Film. In N. M. Alter & T.
Corrigan (Eds.), Essays on the essay film. Columbia University Press.
Andersen, A. U. (2020 (2016)). The Norwegian Institute in Rome Screenworks, Screenworks.
https://screenworks.org.uk/archive/volume-10-1/the-norwegian-institute-in-rome
Bates, R. L., Jackson, J. A., & American Geological, I. (1984). Dictionary of geological terms
(3rd ed. ed.). Anchor Press.
Biemann, U. (2017). Performing Borders: Transnational Video. In N. M. Alter & T. Corrigan
(Eds.), Essays on the Essay Film. Columbia University Press.
Brink, J. t. (1999). The Essay Film. Middlesex University]. http://eprints.mdx.ac.uk/6876/
Brun, E. (2020a). 3xShapes of Home Oslo/Vesterålen,, University of Oslo.
Brun, E. (2020b). Essay Film as Topography: explorations of place through moving image
thinking [PhD, University of Oslo]. Oslo.
1
Malpas, J. (2018b). Place and Placedness. In A. Schlitte & T. Hünefeldt (Eds.), Situatedness and place : multidisciplinary
perspectives on the spatio-temporal contingency of human life. Springer.
9
Brun, E. (2021). Thinking Through Form. Screenworks, 11.1.
https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.37186/swrks/11.1/5
Bruno, G. (2002). Atlas of emotion : journeys in art, architecture and film. Verso.
Bruno, G. (2006). Visual Studies: Four Takes on Spatial Turns. Journal of the Society of
Architectural Historians, 65(1), 23-24. https://doi.org/10.2307/25068236
Corrigan, T. (2011). The Essay Film : From Montaigne, After Marker. Oxford University Press,
USA.
Damasio, A. R. (2010). Self comes to mind : constructing the conscious brain. William
Heinemann.
Eisenstein, S. M., Bois, Y.-A., & Glenny, M. (1989). Montage and Architecture.
Assemblage(10), 111-131. https://doi.org/10.2307/3171145
Gibson, J. J. (1986). The ecological approach to visual perception. Lawrence Erlbaum.
Glisovic, S. (2014). Casting and Straying: hybrid approaches to understanding the dissolution
of the body into landscape and landscape into body RMIT University]. Sidney.
Gough-Brady, C. (2020). Using film as both embodied research and explication in a creative
practice PhD. Media practice and education, 21(2), 97-108.
https://doi.org/10.1080/25741136.2019.1675407
Haralambidou, P. (2016). The architectural essay film. Design, 234-248. (Cambridge
University Press)
Hawkins, H. (2015). Creative geographic methods: knowing, representing, intervening. On
composing place and page. Cultural geographies, 22(2), 247-268.
https://doi.org/10.1177/1474474015569995
Janz, B. B. (2017). Place, Space and Hermeneutics (Vol. Volume 5). Springer.
Johnson, M. (1987). The body in the mind : the bodily basis of meaning, imagination, and
reason. University of Chicago Press.
Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors we live by. University of Chicago Press.
Levine, C. (2015). Forms : whole, rhythm, hierarchy, network. Princeton University Press.
Malpas, J. (2015). The intelligence of place : topographies and poetics (First edition. ed.).
Bloomsbury.
Malpas, J. (2018a). Place and experience : a philosophical topography (1999) (Second
edition. ed.). Routledge. (1999)
10
Malpas, J. (2018b). Place and Placedness. In A. Schlitte & T. Hünefeldt (Eds.), Situatedness
and place : multidisciplinary perspectives on the spatio-temporal contingency of human life.
Springer.
Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962). Phenomenology of perception. Routledge.
Montero, D. (2012). Thinking images : the essay film as a dialogic form in European cinema
(Vol. vol. 3). Peter Lang.
Nancy, J.-L. (2010). Pretection. In M. Tawa (Ed.), Agencies of the Frame: Tectonic Strategies
of Cinema and Architecture. Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Ramberg, I. B., Solli, A., Nordgulen, Ø., Binns, R., Grogan, P., & Norsk geologisk, f. (2008). The
Making of a land : geology of Norway. The Norwegian Geological Association.
Rascaroli, L. (2009). The personal camera : subjective cinema and the essay film. Wallflower.
Rascaroli, L. (2017). How the Essay Film Thinks. Oxford, England: Oxford UP.
https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190238247.001.0001
Rogers, C., Gough-Brady, C., & Berry, M. (2021). Breathing places: Three filmmaking
investigations. Cultural geographies, 147447402110036.
https://doi.org/10.1177/14744740211003628
Sheets-Johnstone, M. (2011). The primacy of movement (Expanded 2nd ed. ed., Vol. Vol.
82). John Benjamin.
Silver, S. (2015). The mind is a collection : case studies in eighteenth-century thought.
University of Pennsylvania Press.
Tawa, M. (2010). Agencies of the frame : tectonic strategies in cinema and architecture.
Cambridge Scholars Publ.
Vaughan, H. (2013). Where film meets philosophy : Godard, Resnais, and experiments in
cinematic thinking. Columbia University Press.