Promises & Premises (by Beatrice Moumdjian & Lars Preisser)
Turku, FI 2017
Drone video, sound: motivational speeches extracted from movies
Variable dimensions
The promise of school is to educate and prepare for a good life. The promise of cinema is to enrich and inspire the viewer and to present life in all its facets. In school, too, we are presented with prospects and the possibility that we will be able to achieve what we want to achieve, and so we have to make choices. Caught within our own personal storyline of promise and failure we can escape it at the movies to gain insight into other realities. The enrichment of cinema and the twists and turns, the successes that are achieved in films, one desires them in one’s own life, and one remembers one’s school days when the twists and turns where still a possibility and a promise of the future. School is on the one hand a place of possibilities and on another hand also the site of their limitation.
Movies are meant to enable us to forget the limits and constraints of life and perhaps to inspire positive change. The motivational speeches gathered in our video usually stand at the turning point of a story, and we overlay them in our film with images of schools, the places where lives are put on track. We want to inspire thoughts about school, movies, life, promises, choices, transformations…
Motivational Speech Archive was started by Beatrice Moumdjian in January 2016 and consists of mostly fictional motivational speeches that she has extracted from movies and TV shows. They are collected on various social media platforms and can be shared, listened to and used by others. Beatrice wants to know, has the meaning of these speeches shifted after they have been ripped from their place in a narrative, a storyline? Cinema can hold such great power over its viewers, and sometimes its stories seep over into real life.
What do these motivational speeches feel like in their abundance, what do they become? Are they suspended? Are they, at their core, a positive influence or do they become oppressive in their simplicity?
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