Output details
34 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
University of Chester
Truce Tableaux: American movie stills recreated by Barking teenagers
Led by Dr Simon Grennan (Research Fellow in Fine Art) during 2011 and 2012, the international project team included two academic researchers (Grennan and co-author Christopher Sperandio, Associate Professor of Fine Art at Rice University, Houston, Texas). ‘Truce Tableaux’ documents the recreation of eight stills from American movies by a team of 12 teenagers from the London Borough of Barking.
The movie stills each include a moment in the movies' plots when protagonists arrive at a moment of truce with each other: a moment when differences between characters are set aside, but not resolved. Each reconstruction was constrained by a prohibition on theatrical effects such as props and costuming: the recreations were undertaken with the teenagers selecting movie stills, acting, directing and editing the documentary using only locations and props habitually familiar to them in their life experience in Barking.
Two public screenings of the documentary in Barking, and (uncounted) numbers of screenings on BBC Big Screens nationally were produced. 500 copies of a DVD of the documentary accompanied by a ‘story-of’ production feature were distributed in Barking. 55 people participated directly in the production of the documentary, with research being undertaken collaboratively in the UK and the US.
A series of performance workshops, theoretical discussions on the subject of truce and depictions of truce, location scouting sessions, movie evaluations and rehearsals with 12 teenagers from Barking resulted in the development of a paradigm for recreating stills from existing movies using only items and locations in Barking. As a result, the genders, ages and ethnicities of the characters and actors were visibly brought into question.
The eight small films constituting the documentary also disturbed the professed seamlessness of the broadcast environment created by the BBC Big Screens, on which only feel-good news, advertising and sponsored entertainment usually features.
