by Dóra MAURER
1981 / 16mm & 35mm / b&w / sound / 1S / 11' 00 |
The description appearing on the screen at the beginning of the film defines TRIOLETS as ‘18 variations for 3 lenses and one voice’. The film’s frame is a collage of horizontally trisected frames in which three views can be seen. Each of these three sections of the image shows a separately recorded one-second-long camera pan shot in the artist’s studio. The camera pans were filmed with a 16 mm film camera equipped with three different types of lenses (wide-angle, normal and telephoto). The resulting footage was divided horizontally into three strips and rearranged into new collaged compositions, each lasting 32 seconds, which were mechanically printed together into a single 35mm film.
The film’s collaged frames systematically juxtapose different focal lengths, pan directions, subjects and moments in time. Dóra Maurer is intermittently visible in a number of shots, including in close-up. In the film’s final variation, pans of Maurer’s face form the centre strip between two pans of mens’ faces. Each of the three shots composited in the frame has a separate audio track assigned to it – a vocal glissando, a continuous slide between two notes, performed by Eszter Póka. The resulting sound for each of the eighteen variations is a different combination of three tracks. These sounds accentuate the movement of the camera. The camera was operated by Béla Ferenczy and the sound engineer was Gábor Antal.