I have a habit of cataloguing similarities between movies. What movies take place at a hotel? How many movies depict takeout Chinese food? How many movies could I think of that place scenes at a gas station? As my list grew longer, I became interested in how the gas station contributed to the narrative arc of the movie as a whole. Was the gas station the site of rising action? Crisis? Denouement? Could I look at gas station scenes as a mechanism for affecting characters and plot?
I created a random gas station scene generator that would shuffle individual narrative components of gas station scenes from different movies and play these dissected clips consecutively, from the start of the narrative arc to the end. Could I abstract elements of these clips into phrases that I could then use as a set of instructions to be acted out or designed?
Having watched
The Five Obstructions, by Lars von Trier, I began to see each randomly-generated combination as a script. What might the resulting film look like, however absurd? Maybe these scripts didn’t manifest in a movie, but in a series of storyboards or graphic novels. I decided that building a model—and inserting myself into it as an actor—would not only allow for greater creative control but also result in more visually interesting results. What ensued was my first foray into immersive world building. Though my initial interest stemmed from graphic design, the gas station acted as a larger gesture away from objects and into spaces, similar to Jean Dubuffet’s
Closerie Falbala.
