Eye Spy
Watch "Eye Spy"My senior project thesis as a film major at Bard College consisted of a feature length documentary on the 1984 Republican and Democratic conventions titled, “Mount America,” an exhibition of black and white still photographs, and my short film, "Eye Spy."
I wanted to create a personal confessional film with "Eye Spy," but I lacked the budget and the schedule to properly execute many of my concepts. I voiced my concerns to my college advisor and mentor Adolfas Mekas and he inquired, “What about all that film I’ve seen you shooting over the last four years at Bard?” He knew that I had been walking around filming with a Bolex 16mm camera throughout my undergraduate career, but I saw all my footage as experimental usage of film stocks and photographic techniques.
At best, I felt I had a lot of diary footage, but I did not want to make a diary film. I soon realized that I could impose a narrative atop my footage and it would become as though the diary footage was the point of view of a fictional character.
I was working constantly in the editing room and in the darkroom at the time, or in my apartment in Tivoli, New York. Cabin fever was setting in. So I thought to express some of my feelings and sensations involving the juxtaposition of going outside in the world, with having been cooped up inside for long periods of time, but to do so within a genre I loved which was that of the espionage film.
My concept was simple; his lifelong enemies have finally located a former spy and the net is now cast upon him. He knows if he leaves his safe house, he will be killed. With nothing left to do and no way out, he ruminates about his life and what has ultimately brought him to this moment.
It was not much different from what I was going through pondering my own life as I prepared to graduate from College. I knew that even if my thinly veiled premise was not easily discernable it would still function to carry the viewer through what seemed like a narrative of some kind, but was really more of an atmospheric piece.
My artificial premise enabled me to experiment with what was very personal material to me by sometimes jumping in and out of what were my own emotions, and what were those of my character’s. It also enabled me to have a little fun at the audience’s expense by being tongue-in-cheek about what I was doing.
I decided to tie everything together with the motive of the desk drawer where the character would pull out various gadgets and iconographic items that would transport him into a remembrance in voice over which emanated from a micro cassette recorder. This voice over would work well to set up the actual diary footage I already had.
I also wanted to play around with occasionally dropping the entire premise and taking the viewer completely out of the nostalgic nature of the piece by interjecting a seeming non sequitur such as a music video into the film.
Music videos tended to be extremely literal at the time, a phenomenon that I found quite narrow-minded. So, I picked a song that I felt was the antithesis of a 1980s music video song. I chose the song “All I’ve Got To Do” from the Beatles’ first album, Meet the Beatles, This song seemed to work very well because the song echoed the motifs I was already working with of, unexpected telephone calls, whispering voices in the ears of secret agents, as well as the emotions of a distanced and perhaps estranged relationship. It began to work much like a Greek Chorus to the film’s motifs.
I am happy with how Eye Spy turned out. For a short student film cobbled together from seemingly vastly different elements it keeps a nice rhythm and depicts the visual and atmospheric qualities I sought to explore.
Click to view Eye Spy parts 2-4 & promotional binoculars:
