"The film actor lacks the opportunity of the stage actor to adjust to the audience during his performance, since he does not present his performance to the audience in person. This permits the audience to take the position of a critic, without experiencing any personal contact with the actor. Consequently the audience takes the position of the camera; its approach is that of testing." *
With this work I wanted to make the viewer aware of his relationship to the actor. It takes the position of a stalker watching footage on a tv trying to find something very personal in there. It is a work about our need to be confided in, to find out secrets. We want to know the actor's deepest thoughts and we want to believe they are real emotions. The stories are made up but it could be possible that this is what the actors are thinking in this pensive moment on film. In the technique of the Method Actor, the actor has to invoke a personal moment to show real emotions for a scene they're acting. The viewer can loose himself in the magic of film; the story, the music, the magnatic attraction of the eyes, even though he still knows that what he sees is not the truth. It is fascinating to see how strong our willingness to believe is in the medium of film.
I wanted to make a work that has the push and pull of sentimental film. It is highly manipulative and obviously so, yet for some reason, despite our scepticism, we can still be seduced by these techniques that are used around us every day. The pieces are short, but just long enough for the manipulation to work. The viewer is suddenly snapped out of the pull and feels guilty about their feelings, about how easily they were 'taken for a ride'. The work is not all cynical though, I believe there is value in this manipulation and want to ask questions about the workings of it but allow for the techniques to work. The steady drone of the music in the background in combination with the monotone voices work to lure the viewer in but also to make the situations more abstract. The drama in the stories are quite banal but yet believable. It is a work that can be viewed with complete scepticism or naïvete, they are both just as valid.
However, it is also a commentary on the disgust that exists for anything sentimental. Our patriachical society has marked sentiment as something weak and feminine, but it can be argued that in the human quest for survival, sentiment is just as valuable as any other form of culture and can perhaps teach us something very practical. This work is a challenge to our preconception of sentimentality and in particular the art world's disdain for anything concerning this.
*From Walter Benjamin's 'The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility' (1936)