The Sisters B.: Collaborative Film Practice Using Embodied Montage Strategies

Abstract

This article is an invitation into an artistic research project on team-based filmmaking. Its format takes a montage approach congenial with the research ambitions: writings on a film process are interspersed by texts on research methods, script scenes, historical images and facts, while loosely traced by comic strips in the intended film’s chronology.

The Sisters B. project responds to a lack of research on and through collaborative film practice. We situate the project in our time’s flood of media-based storytelling and ecological crises. This project’s multifaceted and exploratory approaches are informed by the complexity and entanglement of consequences – to environment, people and otherwise, directly and ideologically – of both cinematic production and its narratives. Our methodological framework draws from several academic fields and artistic disciplines, manifested through the article’s exposition of a filming week on the Bergman Estate.

The Sisters B. explores loss and conditions for creativity through an embodied conversation with the composers Lili (1893-1918) and Nadia (1887-1979) Boulanger. The article proposes a range of embodied montage strategies; intertwining narrative levels, connecting times, activating audience imagination, embracing friction, responding to circumstances, producing by re-using; porously overlapping fact and fiction, theory and practice by relating biography, ecology and rhythmic gestures to script, performance and film editing.