Festival News 2009 - Magazine of the Tampere Film Festival

Choreographic Reality

Kirsi Romppanen
Sari Mäyränpää, translation
Tampere Film Festival, photos

Acted fight in the film Fisticuffs

In Pennells's movies, familiar everyday things become unfamiliar and absurd when you observe them from a choreographic point of view as the fight on the background of a pub in the film Fisticuffs.

British director Miranda Pennell gets ideas for her movies by observing her surroundings. She has studied modern dance in New York and in Amsterdam, and aspires to portray real life and people with the help of movement and dance. She breaks the self-evident truths of everyday life in her movies.

– A familiar and mundane thing can change into unfamiliar and absurd with different choreographies. For example, Fisticuffs was filmed at my local pub where old people quietly drink their beers. The situation becomes absurd when there is a choreographic mass fight in the background. These two situations do not have anything in common, and to bring them together creates an absurd impression.

Miranda Pennell

According to Pennell, the world is full of absurd things. The absurdness of everyday life is often arisen when things are taken out of their context or when two things that have nothing in common are brought together.

– I aspire to reveal something in people, in ourselves. I think about the interesting and the unexpected in an existing situation. The interaction of people and their surroundings usually create absurd situations. For example, in Tattoo, there are soldiers marching in the middle of a forest. The situation becomes absurd when they perform their ritual marches without an audience, their only spectators being forest birds.

Pennell's movies do not follow a strict script. Usually, she will film a series of different shots, and the final content will not become clear until during the editing.

– Perhaps it is the interaction between documentary situations and choreographies that creates a certain sensitiveness in my movies.

In Pennells's movies, familiar everyday things become unfamiliar and absurd when you observe them from a choreographic point of view. In Fisticuffs, a pub's mundane order of things is broken by a choreographic mass fight.

– My earlier movies follow a script more than the newer ones. I spend a lot of time observing my surroundings nowadays. I film shots with my small camera and think about antitheses and choreographies in order to make a movie, Pennell describes the ideas behind her movies.

Muualla verkossa

Miranda Pennell´s site has information on her works
www.mirandapennell.com/

Updated 03 March 2009 18:54