"AIZKOLARI (Basque woodcutter)"
16MM Film
Colour, Silent
1' 50"
An aizkolari is a participant in a traditional Basque sport which consists
of competitively chopping wood.
In this film an aizkolari is recontextualised in a disused Bethnal Green
housing estate.
I am interested in how a British audience seeing the film will percieve
its subject when he is set in this environment. Will they bring preconceptions
of the Basque Seperatist? Will the film evoke impressions of a horror
movie with its desloate setting and axe-weilding maniac?
The film takes a more fragmented form than "It's not done to say
oh yes!" The framings are closer and tighter; the viewer cannot get
a sense of the entire figure, his identity is literally in pieces. This
series of cuts echo those that we would expect the woodcutter to make
in this film, yet which are absent from his actions.
As with "it's not done to say yes!", the woodcutter is displaced
from his national identity, one shot through with political instability.
Except that here, there is an absence of potential spectators. Rather
than being lost in the crowd, he is lost among the abandoned buildings
and in the physicality of the film's cutting and framing. Here I am more
responsible for his being lost in the presentation of him than in the
other film, and am aware of the frustration in the viewer that might result
from this. I wanted to heighten the sense of alienation and displacement
that the aestheticisation of national identity in foreign media can produce.
