‘Chronicle of a Fall’, a feature-length immersive installation, depicts the fragmented, in-transit, experience of a group of immigrant cultural workers scattered around the contemporary US.
Paying homage to the classic ‘Chronicle of a Summer,’ the project updates the Cinema Verité approach using emerging technologies such as parallel body worn cameras, volumetric capture, and projection mapping.
News and Press
Exhibition website for our installation at Gallery 400, Chicago, May 27 - August 1 2022
An in-depth review of the exhibition on Hyperallergic of the Gallery 400 exhibition, June 2022
Selected for “Best Chicago Art Exhibitions of 2022” by the Chicago Tribune, December 2022
Documentation images of work-in-progress installation, Currents, Santa Fe, June 2019
Synopsis
‘Chronicle of a Fall’ loosely applies Verité classic ‘Chronicle of a Summer’ to contemporary U.S. as we look into the lives of a group of cultural producers, primarily from the Middle-East and Central America, who negotiate ideas like "home" and "happiness" in an increasingly precarious social/political landscape. The participants of ‘Chronicle of a Summer’, a 1960s documentary, discuss France which, while recovering from WW2, is on the brink of war and undergoing social change. The term "Cinema Verité" was coined by the film’s director to describe a truth generated by the camera rather than found outside it. Our project, ‘Chronicle of a Fall’, deals with the experiences of a group of immigrant cultural workers scattered around the US, as they react to symptoms of the country's social/political changes following the 2016 Fall elections.
Like ‘Chronicle of a Summer’, our film begins with a simple question: “What is home to you?” Our participants, all immigrants or immigrant born, exist in a liminal state. Many, including ourselves, have left one country in which democracy is cast in shadow for the US, only to find it too cast in a shadow of its own making. As in ‘Chronicle of a Summer’, our participants interview each other, gather for dinner, work, or wander with only the filmmakers as company. In our project, however, we confront a period in which electronic media itself has become a space to be navigated, a non-place in which our protagonists are immersed, often experiencing two places at once, or one place from multiple perspectives. Our participants exist between homes. To reflect the fractured nature of their experience, and provide an intimate insight into their daily lives, they are all equipped with body-cameras.
In order to create a connective space between their stories/viewpoints that is similarly fragmented and in transit, we capture their areas of belonging, whether indoors or outside. To this end, we make use of an architectural laser-scanner that converts places into 3D "point-clouds." Within the installation version of ‘Chronicle of a Fall’, the first-person, multiple-viewpoint videos are projected on the back of screens hanging from above. Around them, in the larger exhibition space, visitors are immersed in the semi-abstract, intertwined, and constantly slipping 3D scans and soundscapes of the participants’ homes. The latter create a world that envelopes and conceals the more intimate POV stories of love, loss, and longing.
Video
Below you will find two videos showcasing first the overall narrative and experiential scope of the project, and second, a walkthrough of the installation along with some background on its key elements.
TRAILER
For a general sense of the project, see the following trailer, containing excerpts from scenes with several of our participants and the animated worlds we’ve created for them, as well as documentation from the first iterations of the installation.
INSTALLATION WALKTHROUGH
The installation consists of one or more pairs of parallel videos, with each screen depicting the story of one of our protagonists, projected on the back side of a suspended projection screen hanging in an otherwise empty space. Most of this space, including the front side of the screens, is projected on, creating an immersive environment derived from 3D scans of the participants’ homes. Visitors are invited to literally “step into” this world, and explore the back side of the screens, that each display intimate documentary footage related to a character featured in the project. See the installation walkthrough video below for more details on how the it works in the space and a bit of conceptual background for the project and these choices:
Team & Contact
Nadav Assor, Co-Producer, Co-Director
For over 10 years, Assor has performed and exhibited work including short films, immersive installations, kinetic sculpture, and live audiovisual performances in festivals, museums and galleries around the world. Recent venues for his work include Hong-Gah Museum Taipei, Centre Arts Santa Monica Barcelona, Oberhausen Festival, Impakt Festival, Arsenal Berlin, Edith-Russ-Haus, Fridman Gallery NY, Transmediale, European Media Arts Festival, Soundwave Biennial SF, Hyde Park Art Center Chicago, and Koffler Center Toronto. Assor was a 2019-2022 Fellow at the MIT Open Documentary Lab, and directs the Ammerman Center for Arts & Technology at Connecticut College.
nadassor.net | @nadassor | nadav AT nadassor.net
Tirtza Even, Co-Producer, Co-Director
A documentary maker and video artist, Even has produced linear and interactive video work that has been shown at the Museum of Modern Art, NY, at the Whitney Biennial, the Johannesburg Biennial, as well as in many galleries, museums and festivals in the U.S., Israel and Europe. Her work won numerous awards, including 3ARTs Award, Fledgling Fund, Artadia Award, Golden Gate Awards Certificate of Merit, SF International Film Festival, Jerome Foundation and NYSCA, and has been purchased for the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art (NY), the Jewish Museum (NY), the Israel Museum (Jerusalem).
tirtzaeven.info | teven AT saic.edu
Stefan Oliveira-Pita, Editor
Born 1983. Film Editor, Lecturer. Diploma at Film University Konrad Wolf, Potsdam. Since 2009 Oliveira-Pita has carried out numerous collaborations on international features, documentaries and art installation works. Selections include: Atlas (German Film Award Nominee), Furusato (Golden Dove), Lamento (First Steps Award), Portraits of German Alcoholics (Prix Dialogue Berlinale), Civil Servants (Grimme Award Nominee), Only a Day (German Film Critics Award), Family Business (NRW Film Award). Since 2014 he has been a lecturer at DFFB, Bauhaus Uni Weimar, HS Mainz. Alumni of Berlinale Talents 2016. His work has won the best Editing Award for Lamento at Sehsüchte 2014. Oliveira-Pita lives and works in Berlin.
oliveira-pita.com | stefan_oliveira2 AT gmx.de
Julian Flavin. Sound Designer
Julian Flavin is a Canadian artist and educator living in Chicago, Illinois. His work employs film/video, installation, writing, and sound to think through such ideas as: the ideological applications of music, the mitigation of social pain with dystopian irony, and the vexed desire for respite from complexity. His work has been featured as part of SXSW, Osheaga Music Festival, Harun Farocki’s Labor In A Single Shot, and Visions Du Réel amongst others. He has worked as the assistant to artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles and currently teaches at Northwestern University and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
chicagoartistscoalition.org/artists/julian-flavin | jflavin AT saic.edu
Institutional support: this project was developed in part through a fellowship with MIT Open Documentary Lab, 2019-2021, with additional support from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Connecticut College, and the City of Chicago.
