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THE GUNSHOTS AT VASAPLATSEN on the School of Film Directing's website
News: Mar 23, 2011
Now on the School of Film Directing’s website:
The film THE GUNSHOTS AT VASAPLATSEN – Six Criteria for the Use of the IMAGE in the Digital Millennium. A Pictorial Essay by professor Göran du Rées
This film is the first major artistic research project to be carried out in Sweden within the field of filmic interpretation. The project deals with the narrative of the image and the problems of reality, and is based on the School of Film Directing’s Professor Göran Du Rées’ own artistic experience as a filmmaker.
His research focuses on the events at Vasaplatsen during the EU summit of 2001, where the police opened fire on demonstrators, and on how the prosecutor’s “evidence film” came to be used in the trial of Hannes Westberg, who was injured in the shooting.
Professor Du Rées was contacted as an expert by SVT’s Uppdrag granskning television programme, which is when he saw the prosecutor’s testimony for the first time. This was an unusually long and clearly dramatised personal account. Anyone who works with images knows that “the truth” is always a matter of selection. Every camera setting and every clip is a distinct choice and a point of view. And our choices are always made in relation to our will, our intention and what we want to assert.
One of the outcomes of this research project is that the Swedish National Police Board now uses the guidelines formulated by Professor Du Rées in relation to how the IMAGE can be used in legal processes. But the questions are just as important for the entire media industry, and must constantly be asked: Can we rely on what we see? What is the intention? Are the images documentary or fiction? Where, when and how were they taken?
THE GUNSHOTS AT VASAPLATSEN was first shown at the Little Film Festival in Båstad in August 2010, where it won the Gold Potato for its outstanding contribution to Swedish film.
Professor Du Rées has been nominated by the University of Gothenburg for the Ångpanneföreningen’s Foundation for Research and Development award for outstanding achievements within knowledge dissemination for 2011.
Issue 9/2010 of the University of Gothenburg’s artistic research journal, Art Monitor, included a review of THE GUNSHOTS AT VASAPLATSEN and a DVD of the film.
The film has subtitles in English.
THE GUNSHOTS AT VASAPLATSEN is 105 minutes long, and was financed through grants from the Swedish Research Council, as the research project “The poetic theory of the documentary”, one of four subprojects within the overall interartistic project “Passion for reality: about documentarism and art”, the School of Film Directing, the Swedish Arts Grants Committee, the Foundation for the Culture of the Future and the Board for Artistic Research and Development (NKU) at the University of Gothenburg’s Faculty of Fine, Applied and Performing Arts.