Long Departure

Long Departure

David Ellis

David Ellis, FamilyCat Productions

France, United States

en

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David Ellis
Director
NO SIGNAL, UHF
David Ellis
Writer
David Ellis, FamilyCat Productions
Producer
NO SIGNAL, UHF
Nhung Nguyen, Soundawakener.com, Hanoi, VN
Music

Long Departure - 04:46 David Ellis, FamilyCat Productions, 2016.
Another fascinating film by award winning filmmaker David Ellis exploring the relationship between moving image and sound. Long Departure is a visual poem about passage, time, aging and the blur between departure and destination. It is a brief moment from life’s ceaseless motion, with all its temporal fragility yet determined in spite of constant buffeting. In this non-traditional storytelling portrayal,the interplay of image, sound and atmosphere leaves the viewer to create their own narrative, in a cinema created as pure visual poetry without the burden of narrative, agenda or the limitation of language intended to be responded to as pure art of moving image and sound.
Shot on b&w super8 film in Paris, with video montage, the haunting minimal music of Hanoi’s Nhung Nguyen(soundawakener.com),composed specially for Long Departure, adds a beautiful audio layer to this experimental film. Contact: [email protected]

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DAVID ELLIS
Exploring a new digital avant-garde.

Over the last 15 years, as a moving image artist, David Ellis has emerged notably at the forefront of a new wave of experimental filmmaking. With a fiercely original, distinctive and visionary style of movie making, his works are a personal cinema where traditional storytelling is redefined through the absence of dialogue or defined narrative, where
poetic sensibility and pure art replace traditional storytelling with the interplay of image, sound and atmosphere leaving the viewer to create their own narrative. In his exploratory approach to filmmaking, moving pictures no longer need to “make sense”. Why should we need a narrative when we are fully capable of forming our own stories? We do not move through our “life experience” aware of our own narrative. More so, we experience a stitched / weaved together continuum of snippets of experience, with one usually seamlessly melting into the next, yet we do not “ask for our narrative” as we experience our moment-to-moment lives.

As an experimental filmmaker, his is deeply influenced by Zen Buddhism and Taoism and visually influenced by the style, spirit and minimalism of early 20th century experimental avant-garde films by artists such as Fernand Leger, Man Ray,Viking Eggleling, Hans Richter, Walter Ruttman and others. Current works visually explore the application to film of design influences from cubism and, in particular, from Russian Constructivist and Suprematist works such as those by early 20th century artists Alexander Rodchenko and Lyubov Popova, by employing the design elements simply as a pure graphic art form without the soviet-era state content.

While remaining avant-garde in the same spirit as those early film pioneers, the work is non-narrative in the traditional sense, exploring the moving image, (whether cyclical, altered, de-constructed, montage, noir or digitized analog) and the interdependency of the movement, timing, structure and evolution of the image on the screen with similar qualities in the sound that accompanies it.These works utilize this relationship of sound and image with each reinforcing and strengthening the other. They explore the relationship between sound and moving image, where sound is not simply a “cue” to “ready” the audience’s emotions or reactions to the film, but is a response to the progression, tone, feeling and textures as the sound and moving image progress simultaneously. The audio is not background but is on an equal trajectory with the image. Nor is it there simply to fill an otherwise empty space around the visuals. It is an essential component, at times exchanging places with the image, where the image becomes an accompaniment to the sound.
Director Statement

DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT

In the spirit of the avant-garde, David Ellis creates films that are on the margin of new independent filmmaking as intensely personal, minimally narrative short experimental works that fearlessly challenge accepted cinematic structure and established “culture industry” norms.
It is an exploratory approach to filmmaking intended to be viewed as pure art of the moving image, where the work is viewed as a segment pulled from the time continuum, freeing the viewer as it is watched without the burden of narrative. Viewers can leave themselves behind and experience the moment to moment connection with the images moving before them. The film is created with the intention of being responded to rather than imposing a strict narrative.
Works examine the idea of one “landscape” imposed upon another, whether audio or visual, and how the addition of one re-defines or re-enforces the other. They explore viewing as contemplation, in a zen sense ,with no answers provided and no neat and tidy start-development-finish as cinema usually provides. Segments of the ordinary “every day” are pulled from the continuum of life’s unified flow of images. The film narrative is minimized to a bare bones “structure” where the viewer is able to construct a narrative based on their own imagination, personal experiences or associations made with the image. The only true narrative is life as a continuum. However, few of us think of our lives as we live them as a narrative.The filmmaker’s experience creating the film and the viewer’s experience viewing it are brief instants of that continuum, and as such, are the narrative.I feel that I am drawn to filmmakers who see, feel, understand and capture “essence” rather than a “masterful depiction” and whose films are distinguished by an uncompromising devotion to personal experimental cinema and low or no budget avant-garde independent filmmaking.