Outtakes: Sharon Lockhart

September 13, 2014 07:49 pm | Updated 07:49 pm IST

Lunch Break

Lunch Break

Who is she?

American video artist, photographer and experimental filmmaker who has made four feature length and nearly as many short films since the late nineties. Lockhart additionally teaches art in California and does curatorial projects based on avant-garde cinema. Her work exemplifies a fine balance between formalist and anthropological modes of filmmaking.

What are her films about?

Themes

A Japanese high school basketball team, an audience in an opera theatre in the Amazon, a group of Japanese farmers at work and kids playing in industrial backyards in Poland form some of the subjects of Lockhart’s films. The virtual conversation between these alien cultures and the predominantly Western audience of these films is one of the central themes. Her ‘American’ films, set in factories and suburbs, look at the relationship between nature and man-made edifices and the individuals inhabiting them. Together, these films engage with and embody the idea of uneventful stretches of time, be it called leisure, boredom or recess.

Style

Lockhart’s method tries to crystallise the dialectic between her two fields of activity — photography and film. In her photographic work, she does this by shuffling the chronological order in which the photos were captured, so as to highlight the highly disjunctive nature of the enterprise. On the other hand, her films are made up of long and static shots that frame the subjects head-on and underline the fluid, time-bound quality of the cinematic medium, while also, with its theatrical boldness, suggesting that the photographic-filmic image hides as much as its shows.

Why is she of interest?

Like French documentarian Jean Rouch, Lockhart’s films, which deal with people from specific (at times, foreign) cultures, recognise the exoticism and exploitation that they risk. Her working method of participative ethnography, wherein the subjects become active participants in Lockhart’s work through performing for the camera as actors who are trained in situ, responds to the eternal dilemma of documentary filmmaking: how to film people without ‘using’ them?

Where to discover her?

The absorbing Lunch Break (2008) consists of a single tracking shot through the rusty corridor of factory in Maine, USA, during lunch time, slowed down digitally to 75 minutes. The superb, eye-deceiving visual patterns and aesthetic tension of the film never undermines its lyricism. It is in this all-too-short lunch break that the workers find a refuge from the grind of work, while the machines continue to drone.

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