granitepoints is a documentary meta-narrative about the making of an auto-fictional film titled Granite Point. The piece uses a laboratory approach to research the social performance of cinema, while doing performative writing for and through film. The result is a meshwork of textual, audiovisual, and material elements.

In the essay, an author, a director and the film itself are engaged in the dance of production. The film is determined to complete itself, promising a dramatic plot. The film’s body, however, sends different signals. The logic of cinema must determine what the work is about. After all, convention matters. Or does it? The loop starts again from the beginning. As the different relationships unfold, the film, the author and the director unite within the materialities of the present.

granitepoints is the outcome of my research into modes of production and writing-through-film during the development of the feature film “Granite Point” with Monoklis Studio (Lithuania) and Vilnius Art Academy (Doctoral School).

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director’s statement

My research has identified embodied technique in making and writing films as a starting point. The kinosomatic lab is the conceptual foundation for this approach. This is a process of relating bodies (and bodying), laboratorial strategies, and cinema, in a non-medium oriented exploration. Starting with my own body, an archive of cellular and physical experience, I investigate the event of being (in) the archive. The body is a kinosomatic archive, as it holds the potential for memory, recall and re-tracing.

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This work is distributed in two versions. 

Single-screen version
19 minutes, 16mm or DCP

Performance version
19 minutes. Triple screen projection, with two 16mm projectors.

In 2022, I received film funding to develop an experimental film. It was a shapeshifting situation. I was not quite the stereotypical film director, nor fully able to articulate why the playfulness of the researcher-artist is necessary. granitepoints is a performative film essay, created to reflect on this process and its material entanglements.

In the work, I attempt to throw into doubt the habit of declaring a single author. Using disembodied voices, the piece speculates on two questions.

One, where does the film we’re making speak from? In an hommage to Beckett's Texts for Nothing (1958), I set out to weave an audiovisual carpet, where an abundance of streams co-exist without establishing a hierarchical relationship to the material. With this experiment, I propose that multiple voices could be considered as a film with a voice-of-its own.

The theme of the experimental fiction film 'Granite Point' overlaps with the question of the essay. How to speak to embodied trauma without a single, situated authorial voice?

The piece uses the structure of an ambient song, where 16mm typographic loops, made by hand, become the refrains to the voice of sound artist Gaile Griciute and the music of composer Filippos Raskovic.