Minute 04

 

Minute 04 (by Sarah Gutsche)

I remember looking at minute 4 for the first time and immediately thinking of smoke and bombs, so the topic of war was not far off. While in school I had developed a (slightly macabre) fascination with World War One, which means that I still had a lot of books on the topic, as well as old maps my grandparents had gifted to me years ago. 

I decided on making a video, something like a very low budget short film. I had been making videos (fan edits, video diaries and similar things) since I was a teenager, and I barely have the time to engage in that hobby anymore, so I was very happy to get the chance to use my editing programme and my video camera again. After deciding on the medium, I wrote down some notes as to what I wanted the story to be, and went on to make a storyboard, planning the individual shots I wanted to film. 

The most difficult part, for me, was really being able to capture on film what I had planned out in my head, getting the angles and the lighting right and all of that only with things I could find in my parents’ basement and childhood bedroom. Then again, sorting through various boxes of Halloween decoration and family heirlooms was very fun for me. More than just looking for props and set decoration, I was engaging with history, and especially history of my own family. There was, for example, a map of the coasts of Germany my great grandparents had used on holiday with my grandparents when they were kids. I used my mother’s weeding shoes in another shot, or books my parents had loved as kids (which had to be handled very carefully, or they would just fall apart in my hands). It was a great experience.

The story, in the end, turned out maybe not exactly as I had imagined at first, but I am happy with the result nonetheless. I think there is a lot of room for interpretation, but for me the film is about digging for memories, and, coincidentally, looking at the same things in the same place a long dead family member was a hundred years ago. I used two songs in the film, Vera Lynn’s “We’ll Meet Again” from 1939 and “Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight”, originally written by Theodore August Metz with lyrics by Joe Hayden in 1896. “We’ll Meet Again” was an easy and somewhat obvious choice for musical accompaniment, since the song is all about meeting again, maybe not in this life, but at some point, definitely. It is also infamously a song used to bid soldiers going off to war goodbye, which is exactly what one of the characters is doing at the end of the film.

“Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight” on the other hand I had heard for the first time in the movie “The Power of the Dog” (which I wrote my BA thesis on). The melody and lyrics are quite cheerful, and it contrasts the scenes of combat, gun sounds, and blood-smeared face in one scene in a grotesque way. As a fan of Halloween and SFX make up, getting to use fake blood for a university project was another great experience.