Several SIU faculty members let their finely crafted films about water flow. 

Seven employees created the seven films focused on the relationship between humanity and water featured in the Big Muddy Faculty Showcase. They presented the projects in Morris Library’s Guyon Auditorium March 27. The films had many differences from one another; while each film related to water, they each focused on an individual narrative.

However, to say the films could be divided into cut and dry sections is quite an understatement, as each film was elaborate in its own respect. Journalism instructor Peter Lemish, along with his publication “Imagining Geographies,” sponsored the event. Lemish said the water films were part of a university-wide theme this year.

Advertisement

“The seven faculty-produced films are exemplary of the research and multiple perspectives contributed by the arts to environmental-oriented discussions across campus and in the region,” Lemish said.

All of the pieces focused on the value of water as it connects to our individual lives. Although the methods of filmmaking differed, each one managed to speak out for water in diverse ways.

Cinema and photography professor Cade Bursell incorporated intriguing and iconic imagery in her two films, “Heron Pond: Boardwalk View” and “Waveland.”

“[The films} are very different pieces. ‘Heron Pond: Boardwalk View’ is about this place in southern Illinois, and how we visit a place and how we engage with a place,” Bursell said. “You are kind of limited to experiencing Heron Pond to this boardwalk. So my question was, ‘how do you get to know a place and become intimate?’”

“Heron Pond: Boardwalk View” naturally found its theme through a stroll down the boardwalk around the pond. Bursell scattered images of a forested area in a grained texture throughout the fragmented narrative.

Bursell’s “Waveland” focused on the state of, and her concern for, the ocean with excerpts from theatrical films and quotes from “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” a famous poem by romantic-era poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

“The ocean is critical for our survival, the health of the ocean is important,” Bursell said. “The more research I did, the more I became aware of how it was being impacted by being overfished, oil spills, climate change, acidification, all of these issues.”

Advertisement*

Bursell created the films with a Super 8 and 16mm film and hand processed the result. She ingrained extra images onto the film, making for an intense appeal.

“I think the aesthetic is similar because that’s the way I tend to work, with the handmade,” Bursell said. “Both (films) utilize hand-processing techniques. One has hand-painted material on clear liter, the other actually took a plant and glued it onto clear liter and re-photographed it.”

Clear liter is 16mm film with no image on it. Bursell said she would apply either paint or duckweed plant frame by frame.

Radio-television professor H.D. Motyl composed his film, “Three Creeks,” on a much smaller scale, yet presented a similarly intimate scope.

“I’m really interested in how stories are told, how people react to them and whether they are open ended or closed,” Motyl said. “A lot of work that I do actually takes stories and interweaves them.”

The film focused on alternating dialogues between two separate narratives, which through careful direction intertwine at times while shifting between imagery of flowing and stagnant water, respectively. One dialogue is between the director and his brother, while the other, a monologue delivered by a woman.

“Any time there’s a frame with a creek on top of a creek, that’s (the woman’s) story because her story was about immersion, like body on top of body,” Motyl said. “The conversation we were having, the water was murky, as there was no answer for us.”

Other films included Radio- Television Professor Sarah Lewison’s “March;” “River Planet” and “The Lens Looks In: Oregon” from Karla Berry and Greg Wendt, respectively, of the Center for Teaching Excellence; and “A River through Illinois,” from WSIU’s Roger Suski Jak Tichenor.

Jake Saunders can be reached at [email protected], on Twitter @saundersfj or by phone at 536-3311 ext. 254.