Representing Pasts – Visioning Futures
Abstract
Metropolis: Blurred Boundaries, Cine Moments and City Symphony explores the visual and theoretical shifting genre boundaries between still and moving image from practitioner experience interwoven with visual theory to form a series of ‘cine moments’ depicting everyday city life on the streets of Sydney, Australia. The theories and visual notions of Dziga Vertov, Henri Cartier-Bresson and Raymond Bellour are the conceptual foundation of the paper along with the rhythm and experiences of filmmakers, photographers and editors such as Joris Ivens, Walter Ruttmann, Elizaveta Svilova, Jem Cohen, Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Frank capturing or depicting city streets in their camera-based work over time. The idea of the ‘cine moment’ is expanded from previous practice-led research to a contemporary re-examination of the City Symphony as a combined still and moving image form. Specifically, a series of black and white still photographs and moving image footage of the same city locations, experiences or seasonal light captured 20 years apart form a contemporary City Symphony composed from ‘cine moments.’
Dr Tamara Voninski is a photographer, filmmaker, educator, writer and visual editor. Her photographs have won international awards including: International Pictures of the Year Awards, and the inaugural Alexia Foundation Photography for World Peace grant. She is a founding member of the Australian based visual storytelling collective Oculi. She completed a practice-led PhD at The University of Sydney researching the liminal space between photography and film in 2020. She is a Sessional Academic in the Master of Moving Image program at USYD.