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Manon Bovenkerk - Julia/guiliana

8:30, 2008, Experimental
 
Julia/guiliana is an intermediate form of animation, cinema and graphic novel. the story is narrated in filmstills, comprised of delicate charcoal drawings and photographs of impassable modernistic architecture. unable to truly relate to her surroundings, julia sinks deeper and deeper into solitude and doubt. is the woman she thinks she is seeing really her doppelgänger or just a hallucination? the film is an exploration of the possibilities of ‘sequential narrative’, as well as a personal declaration of love for a famous actress from the cinema of the 60’s.
DirectorManon BovenkerkProducerManon Bovenkerk/impakt WorksWriterManon BovenkerkCameraNvtEditorManon BovenkerkCrewSounddesign: Danny Weijermans
 

CountryNetherlandsEdition2008 ScreeningsPortable film festival, melbourne
tent. event, tent. rotterdam
celluloid digitaal, cinema de balie, amsterdam
amsterdam shorts!, amsterdam
impakt event/filmtheater "t hoogt, utrecht
 

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Interview

 
Who is Manon Bovenkerk?
I am an artist and filmmaker from Rotterdam. I make drawings and animation films, and occasionally books. You can find my work at www.manonbovenkerk.nl.


Your film is about?
Julia/Guiliana is an intermediate form of animation, cinema and graphic novel. The story is narrated in filmstills, still images: both drawings and photographs. Since there is no spoken word, the music is very important as it leads you through the narrative: sometimes contemplative, sometimes sorrowful or melancholic.

The film is about a woman who feels disconnected to her surroundings, and who is slowly retreating further into herself. She thinks she sees her doppelgänger, but is remains unclear if this is happening in reality or just in her mind. The storyline is suggestive and associative, to allow personal interpretation for the spectator. Most important is the main character Julia and all her moods and expressions that pass over her face. Her face in full close-up becomes almost a filmscreen itself, a blank onto which all emotions and thoughts of the spectator can be projected.
The film is also a declaration of love for a famous Italian actress of the 1960’s, Monica Vitti, on whom the character of Julia was based


How did you start with film? And do you have an educational background in art or film?
I don’t have a formal background in filmmaking or animation - animation wasn’t part of art school education the way it is now. I started out with making drawings, and this is still the base of all my work. Drawing is the most important thing to me, only after a while I decide if I want to make a book, or a film, using these drawings, or if they should just stay on their own. I feel my films are in a big way about drawing, too.


Could you explain how you work, what themes or concepts and what is important to you?
In my work I try to find a form that connects to cinema, to drawing, to comics and graphic novels. Cinema is very important to me as a way of telling a story in images, and because of the aspect of time. But time can also be suggested in graphic novels by the lay-out of the pages. And a filmstill can be very potent as a defined moment in time, suggesting an action that is not actually shown. What I want is to be somewhere in that borderland in between these discliplines, finding a form of drawing of my own.

Thematically my work is about the impossibility to connect, for things to be really ’right’. Fear, longing, melancholy, to be both drawn to and repelled by what feels strange to you. To feel that there is something inherently ’wrong’ with the world and still trying to find a way, to understand. It sounds quite serious but I think my work is sometimes very funny as well, that futility is funny.

Apart form the characters I develop, architecture and cityscapes are important features in my work too. Cities that are impassable, or in decline, architecture that is closing in or shutting out. I use it as a metaphor but also because it feels very real to me, this sensation of not belonging in a city.


Where do you get your ideas or influences from?
Films, obviously, comics, graphic novels, newspapers and magazines, other artists and musicians who share the same mentality. A series of drawings, and eventually a film, usually starts with just a couple of images that I picked at in my mind for a long time.


How does content relate to the form of your work?
It is almost the same thing to me. Drawing is so important in developing my images, it really is a method of thinking, of coming up with ideas and verbalizing them. I can’t imagine coming up with a scene first and then filming it with a camera.


How important is sound in film, and if you use sounds, do you create your own or use existing?
It’s very important, but have made a silent film as well and maybe will do that again. I can’t make sounds or music myself, so I always work with other people who design the sound for me. For Julia/Guiliana I worked for the second time with composer and sounddesigner Danny Weijermans. I wanted a very cinematographic sound, and he writes a lot for movies, so he understood what I was looking for.


How do you finance your projects (by yourself, sponsors or subsidy)?
Usually I pay for the developing stage myself, and later I get some subsidies to produce the film.

 

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