A CROWD Trilogy
This film uses a film scanner, but it is not a film. It is the assembly of images scanned frame-by-frame. A Crowd forms a trilogy:Belief, Crossroads, and Dinosaur. The film focuses on what we see. Each work of A Crowd trilogy features different types of crowd images and smoke images. Belief has concert crowds, football audience, and spectators at the monumental sites, etc. Crossroads captures the numberless crowded streets of cities. And Dinosaur has images of discarded materials.
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(Belief)
Starting slowly out of focus, towards in focus again, over the pixelated texture of animation images, the film presents the sequence of heads of concert crowds, football crowds and monumental site crowds. Each time the head is falling to focus, one sees that they too are also focusing their attention on their focal point of interest. Thus the way the work was made unites visually and economically with the content it presents, such as a crowd can resist to be individually identified and controlled by the technological surveillance systems. - Alternative Film/Video
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Using an assemblage of illustrated images, Yeonu Ju explores mass gatherings in her tripartite work A Crowd. The first part, Belief, considers crowds gathered at concerts and sporting events. In Crossroads, people teem the city streets. Finally, Dinosaur presents us with the eventuality of humanity en masse: image upon image of waste. The pixelated images go in and out of focus, their unsettling instability echoing the inherent fickleness of crowds themselves.
Yeonu: A Crowd considers a certain flow, as well as people, physically gathering. As if people are interested in something or enthusiastic about it. When we look closely at what we think we know well, it can look completely different from what we knew. Also, there are things that are overlooked. This film applied this as a methodology. It consists of thousands of images scanned by cutting photos printed on A4 sheets of OHP film. In addition, each film can be connected individually and as one. In this context, you can also find ambivalence.
Alchemy: And the sound by Yeji Gu is a consistent wall of noise, which suggests something machine-like, non-human…
Yeonu: Sound is either directly connected to the image or not. It consists of sounds in the air, ground, and underground. Indeed, the sounds of a rocket launch, urban noise, factory machinery, excavators, drills, etcetera were sampled. The sound was designed with the same methodology as to how images were constructed, except in ‘Belief’, the first part of A Crowd. The reason why the sound persists in ‘Belief’ is to indicate that people gathered are focus on something. The sounds of the second and third parts of the film were designed with parts of the original sound source being cut into frames and then overlapped and repeated. This methodology seems to have further enhanced the interrelationship between image and sound.
- Alchemy Film & Moving Image Festival
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A Crowd is not strictly speaking a “found footage” movie. Stock shots from various sources are reworked frame by frame before being scanned. It is produced through a series of weaves and screenings of images of varied diegetic status that construct a mirror that sends us back to the status of a spectator double that of a subject dissected on the screen. It is a crowd (or crowds) that opens this “plastic litany” which then knits dense textures of divine waste (bottles, cans, torn posters) that an opening towards improbable skies closes (temporarily). The feeling, here powerful and intoxicating, replaces any attempt at elucidation. And then, is it necessary to elucidate all the works? The visual experience often takes precedence over any declaration of intention.
- Festival des Cinémas Différents et Expérimentaux de Paris (FCDEP)