ACMI certainly know film, but even these cinephiles are about to have their socks rocked. British-German artist collective, Gob Squad, and their free-range documentary cameras are about to hit to create Super Night Shot.
ACMI certainly know film, but even these cinephiles are about to have their socks rocked. British-German artist collective, Gob Squad, and their free-range documentary cameras are about to hit to create Super Night Shot.
Sarah Thom is one of the founding members of the collective, which has been together 16 years, a fantastic haul in anyone’s books. She explains the performance: “Super Night Shot is a film – it’s a bit like watching a Polaroid unfolding – it’s the first time anybody ever sees it. We have four people with four different cameras and there’s four different screens. The four people go out onto the streets and video the city, video the people in the city and make a video about the city and then they come back to the cinema or the theatre, press rewind on the cameras, and press play and then we all watch the film unfolding.”
It sounds like a truly terrifying undertaking. Happily, not for this group. Thom met her compatriots at Nottingham Trent University where they were studying a multidisciplinary course. “We all came from different disciplines. I had formerly been, as many people are in Britain, in a band I had worked in the theatre a bit doing design.” When it came to a long term art though, Thom didn’t want to be wedded to one discipline. “The reason I chose that course was that it really, really overlooked the boundaries completely and just sort of mixed everything up. That’s why I chose that course because it did all sorts of different things and didn’t really concern itself with labelling the work.”
The group wasn’t brought together by any lofty ideas of theatrical brilliance though. It was far more practical than that. “The absolute initial idea of what we would be was… there’s a festival in England called the Glastonbury Festival and it’s a fantastic big music festival and it has a performance area to it. The absolute beginning time we ever did anything as Gob Squad, we wanted to go to Glastonbury for free and if you performed you got to go for free and you got free tickets that you could make money from. That’s why we made our very first piece: to actually get to go to Glastonbury Festival! But then we kept the name and we kept going with it. The initial desire was to make work collaboratively without a director,” shares Thom.
Flying in to foreign countries and taking to the streets with cameras, Thom and the squad have perfected the art of approaching strangers. “I think that is actually the key to the rehearsal process and all of the work that we do that involves audiences; seeing the people when we approach them, being incredibly open ourselves, really being able to spot body language and seeing whether people are interested in joining in the film. Generally, if people retain eye contact with you, smile at you and are also open, you know that you can approach them and those people who look at their shoes and rush off; they’re not interested.
“We always make sure that people are happy to speak to us and of course when we do it… in some countries. For example when we’ve done it in Poland or Latvia there’s sometimes communication problems. We don’t all speak the same language, but it’s really interesting how people do understand the language of film. If all of a sudden you’re in Latvia and you say, ‘Let’s perform that scene in Titanic!’ they do know what you mean. If you say, ‘Kate Winslet and Leonardo Di Caprio’ they know the scene you mean and they can perform it with you. It works in all languages. Of course, I’m really looking forward to Australia because you speak English.”
If you’re approached by a lovely British or German type with a camera on February 3-5 don’t be afraid to go along for the ride (your line is: ‘Jack, I’m flying!’). If you’re a keen performer yourself and want to learn from these innovators, there’s also a workshop on February 5 – go forth!
The Australian Centre for the Moving Image presents Super Night Shot by Gob Squad on Thursday February 3 until Saturday February 5. The cinema events happen each night at 9pm, with the Friday night event also including a post-event Q&A. Screenings happen at the ACMI cinemas and are $25/$22/$20. The workshop on Saturday February 5 is called Framing Reality Unclassified and happens in ACMI Studio 1, with tickets at $15/$13/$10.
