Media Arts

Florian Thalhofer is a documentary filmmaker and the inventor of Korsakow, a software to create a new form of film and a principle to create a new kind of story. Florian's system allows video makers to create nonlinear and interactive films and to tell stories through a number of links generated by keywords. Thalhofer's Korsakow films include Planet Galata and The Other Fun Stuff. Starting from a SNU (Smallest Narrative Units, as he calls them) his film are polyphonic representations of our world. Florian gave a keynote at the first i-Docs Symposium in 2011, and has been an active and deeply committed member of the i-Docs community ever since. ASTON: In your i-Docs 2016 talk, you explained how the dominant tropes of Hollywood filmmaking encourage us to see the world in terms of conflict, of winners and losers, and of individual heroic endeavour. Could you expand on this please and say how you think i-docs could help us to create a different approach/response to storytelling that might help us to respect difference without letting it divide us? THALHOFER: Stories function best when they are spectacular. This is especially true of linear narration. In my talk at i-Docs 2016 I explained how film became spectacular and developed a strong tendency to exaggerate and show things in black and white. Linearity leads to exaggeration and this produces a distorted view of reality. There is, however, another systematic problem that also skews the view. The organising principle of film is simple: one thing after the other. A leads to B, B leads to C, and so on. Because film is so popular, it has shaped the minds of billions of people, who are now thinking according to this principle. Nature sometimes, but not often, works like this. Most frequently, things don't cause each other, they influence each other.