Lapsúlyos || Certain Solitude

Being in a gym.
Running on a treadmill.
Letting the perception shift, in which shift you may notice the choreography of the space around.

Being inspired by the persistence of muscles, by the body-fluids, the sweat, and the skin, the film oscillates between "everyday movement" and "dance". Contemplation and action. Contemplation in action. Sensing and feeling the space. Touching the space.
The work is part of my ongoing research on embodied filmmaking. Touch and space are playing an important role in my research: how we touch different material qualities? How do we let ourselves been touched by the material, by the space, or by other people? How our eyes as beholders touch the screen while meeting with the images, and what the images may touch in ourselves?
Skin and metal. Warm and cold. Inside and outside. A pause. Longing. Certain Solitude.

The process: as a method we combined the "classical" pre-planned way of shooting with structured improvisation, inviting collective intuition and real time composition into the process. This means that the cinematographers are as well part of this improvisation and composition within the given frame. The process of editing is also the combination of pre-set ideas (wishes), mixed with intuitive choices. Besides using the images which I clearly wanted to and was able to capture, I also let the material "work on me". This way I could choose moments what stayed with me, in my memory as images after I've seen the raw material a couple of time. After: rhythm. Blindness at a certain point. Leaving time to settle, revisit. Re-edit. Let go.

One point of departure before te shooting was that I don't want to have a clear narrative line, also I don't want to have one (or few) protagonist. This practically meant that either there was a group of dancers as one body or that in each scene (with each fitness machine or location) other performers had lead role. Therefore the motion, the affective spacetimes, and the qualities of presence and images have to form the guiding thread.

The title: 'Lapsúlyos' is a Hungarian word, naming the fixed weight machines in the gym.