A John Dingler Moviette - Dickens Fest 2014 - Fernando Curtsies
Channel: Gianni Trieste
Date: 2014-07-15

• Title: A John Dingler Moviette, Riverside's Charles Dickens Fair 2014.

• Synopsis: 99%er Fernando curtsies before the 1%er royal family. Gordon Highlanders march, shoot, display battle tactics. Dickens Fair's characters perform. I have fun.

• In detail:
I just uploaded today, July 15, 2014 a five min. video, edited with subtitles, of my visit to Riverside California's Dickens Fair that it held in February, 2014 on Main St.

Jonathan Green, the director of the University of California, Riverside Arts Block, described some of my work as if done by a flâneur, that is, usually urban images made, in a general sense, by a "...stroller, the passionate wanderer emblematic of nineteenth-century French literary culture..." wandering relaxed in and about the city. It even implies an indolence.

It can refer, more specifically, to photos taken for the purpose of understanding people and their activities as they embrace and interact with aspects of a city's infrastructure. This kind of wandering is alert, has vigor, and is energetic.

Walter Benjamin in the 20th C., who drew inspiration on the works of Charles Baudelaire, was the first to give the activity modern prominence.

I purposely politicized the moviette to bring it up-to-date in the area of modern day colonialism, and took artistic license in its interpretation to enhance interest because it is not meant to be a documentary, that is, a record of scenes meticulously capturing an agreed-upon reality. I do not do this; I tell stories. I do it after the fact, in the studio, where my task is to assemble parts of raw footage into a story.

A flâneur of my kind records raw footage first. I took about four hours of it for this five minute work. 

He/she does not work from a script, taking pictures and video as it comes. He/she, therefore, can not know what will become useful so there is no reshooting.

This is why this moviette has the lens focusing in certain scenes and jiggle in others. There is no technical way to fix or remove these unwanted effects, otherwise referred to as "bad production values," adequately without removing that needed part of the clip. So they have to stay in.

I expect to make a few more stories from the raw footage.