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Time’s a Revelator: Structuralist Filmmaking on Instagram Stories
An Interview with Julia Petrocelli by Ivy Lockhart
An Interview with Julia Petrocelli by Ivy Lockhart
Julia Petrocelli is an experimental filmmaker focusing in analog processes. She will receive a BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in the spring of 2024 where she studies interdisciplinary art with a focus in video and animation. In the spring of 2023 she attended the The Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague, or FAMU, where she learned to film and edit in 16mm mainly focusing in narrative film. Most of her work examines processes archiving and collecting on film-strips creating a singularity and ephemerality to her individual film prints. Because of this process, her work resides somewhere between artwork and a cinematic work.
To set the scene, Julia and I are in our living room right now. We’re roommates, which does not violate any sort of journalistic bias code. And we just ate eggs. She’s wearing a striped brown and purple top, and it’s inside out. Today Julia is finishing her residency on the Currents Instagram which has been over the last six days.
Ivy Lockhart: How would you explain the project?
Julia Petrocelli: It’s structuralist filmmaking on Instagram stories, mostly focused on collecting daily moments of abjection. I used photos and videos from my living spaces and my daily life. I structured the project as occurring over a day, as a day in the life or daily vlog. So the first day of the residency was waking. It’s not explicitly a narrative, but towards the edge of it.
Most of my work deals with collection. In Time’s a Revelator I thought of myself as collecting instances, which people do on Instagram, but I was interested in playing with the way that we see time on social media. And disrupting that. Structuralist filmmaking traditions were important to employ here, with long durational shots and a still camera. However I didn’t use a tripod, which created a shakiness to the images, which I thought of like a signature or evidence of the filmmaker. So it borrows from that tradition, but I think it’s a bit more personal than your typical structuralist filmmaking.
IL: Revelator features so much of your own body or environment, to what degree is it a self-portrait?
JP: It was important to me to include fragments of myself in the way that I’m collecting fragments of, you know, my washing machine in hopes of subverting the way we traditionally construct ourselves on social media. You’re seeing my feet, and me on the toilet.
It’s like an anti self-portrait.
Walking a line of auto-fiction which is present in other forms of Instagram performance art. The images are curated from my life, but are the excess that you wouldn’t necessarily want to see, trash and mold. The street. And Revelator has such long shots of these things. And so if you were to watch the whole shot on Instagram strories, it would be to change your mind about what you are doing on Instagram. To decide to experience slowness, mundanity, and an art experience instead of swiping between content. And that becomes a very conscious decision.
And then I liked how there were like two ways of watching the film. Watching it while I put the stories up, which felt more like a performance piece, and instantaneous and ephemeral. But then also when you piece it together, it takes out those gaps of time between posts. Kind of is like, I don’t know, it’s just like editing a reel of film where you take out the leader or the shots that you don’t want, but in this case it’s the spare time.
IL: Yes! There’s sort of multiple forms you are engaging with, including structural film and Instagram. Both of which are familiar to you as an artist.
JP: I wanted to bridge the gap between shitposting and durational cinema. I talked about the act of collection being important throughout my analog work, but then that’s also there with shitposting. An Instagram grid is an archive of posts and moments in the same way. And my other recent film Dust is about collection. I wanted to bring that in, collecting and curating these fragments from a performative day.
I was also thinking about how cinema appears and structures the everyday, advertising we see, and what moves across our phone screen. And I wanted to push my practice by using Instagram, and the iPhone camera, since most of my filmmaking work is analog.
IL: Could you talk about the audience for Revelator? And how does the work play out in an online public?
JP: I had never really seen a movie made on Instagram. So the newness was exciting, finding different ways to create cinema is another pillar of my practice.
It was awesome because on the whole thing, all of the posts, I got a total of three likes. Which shows how difficult the piece is to digest there. Duration and Instagram don’t go together. But I wasn’t trying to alienate people from the work. It was an attempt to bridge the two forms, and while subverting them I found a new common ground.
I added a song, Revelator by Gillian Welch, to help structure the film and allow the audience to enter the work in a more intentional way. Something to bite onto.
James Benning does this sometimes, a whole shot being a five-minute song. I think it’s an entry point to sitting with something for a longer, or a different way about thinking about duration. I knew I wanted to have the shot of me brushing my teeth and humming it at the beginning and singing it in the shower at the end. That structures the piece.
Those shots have an element of voyeurism to me and are very connected to Dust, in that I’m washing all these tiny particles off me and observing it happen. And inviting the audience to join in. Documentation becomes another way of holding on to my own discard which is on display now.
IL: Any wisdom or advice or recs or blah blah for thee Currents reader?
JP: Well, my favorite... Brown Cow right now is really good. Brown Cow yogurt. You know how like some yogurts are inherently salty, and some are sweet yogurts? It’s a really sweet yogurt. Sometimes when I’m making lentils or something I’ll put some yogurt in. I wouldn’t do that with Brown Cow. But that makes it a lot easier to eat in large quantities. I can go through a big thing of Brown Cow in two days. It’s the perfect snack food. I like to eat a whole container of yogurt and then go to nap on the couch.
You can watch Time’s a Revelator here!