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When I first heard Idea of the North I was in
college studying painting and filmmaking and I decided to make a film using some
of Gould's ideas. At first I tried overlapping visual images. I found that
only the simplest type of narrative could be sustained at multiple, simultaneous
visual levels. I decided that this was inherent in the linear quality of film,
so I began to juxtapose sections of film linearly that represented different,
but related narratives, and I tried to develop the relationships between
the sections, both in terms of connective devices like fades and also by using
sounds, images and ideas to ties things together. The result was a rather
loose structure that was perceived sequentially because that's the way film
works but that had multiple layers created by the memory's ability to compare,
contrast and combine different sections. Not that different from a lot of
filmmaking ideas over the last 50 or 60 years,
but also not Gould. I then tried using two or three projectors to
simultaneously project different films that were designed to relate to one
another. A three ring circus almost, which is a perceptual experience I've
always enjoyed. Closer to Gould - again the trick is sustaining in a meaningful
way anything but the most simple contemporaneous narratives or visual ideas
- but not successful at anything close to the level he pulled off in
radio. There was something about the separate screens that seemed
artificial or contrived, unless the images were quite abstract. And using
visual and aural images together was often too much information to try to
manage. I concluded that radio was the perfect medium for Gould's ideas,
and perhaps the only one in which they could be realized at the level he worked
at. And that really was part of his genius - the ability to exploit the
unique potential of something like radio. A number of radio programs use
narrative techniques from filmmaking. The Solitude Trilogy is probably the
only use of radio that I know of that is based upon techniques that may be
unique to that particular medium.
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