Documentation of self deprecation

This is a film where nothing really happens. There’s no plot, no one true event taking place, there are no distinct characters and there’s no clear arc. Instead, it’s a meditation on the background texture of our modern lives. The small daily defeats we soften with humour. Joking at our own expense, especially in moments of stress and instability, we are both acknowledging and neutralising our suffering. The self-deprecating jokes become a defence mechanism- not a lie, but a kind of surrender that still allows us to carry on. In this film, humour doesn’t match the scene. Floating shards of essentially sad jokes introduce an internal conflict intertwining with the naturalistic and mundane video footage. The mismatch in media ties to and offers an artistic exploration into Noël Carrolls Incongruity Theory, exploring the rise of humour when mental patterns or expectations are disrupted. Freuds relief theory, arguing that humour allows us to release repressed tension builds the fundamental philosophy to the project of pairing slow and indifferent images with casual self directed humour (a few documented verbal representations of snippets of conversations I’ve had in the past weeks). This short film, with my composition of electronic ambient music, explores the necessity of humours shadow, creating a subtle tension between the apparent serenity of the world and the quiet despair but therefore normalcy of the people in it.