SIMA CUNNINGHAM - YOUR BONES
Music Video
Directed by Jake Saner
Cinematography and Editing by Jake Saner
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Sima’s peaceful yet haunting song “Your Bones” laid out a simple and clear framework for this piece. To me, this is a song about holding space. About caring from afar and trusting these elastic bonds of love. We wanted to draw tension from the absence of a person, the suggestion of connection and the allowance of distance. As the song swells with a tender and melodic bridge followed by a peaceful and uplifting harmonium instrumental, this tension in the frame breaks with human connection and a more dynamic camera.
For the cinematography, I took inspiration from the black and white photography of Henri Cartier-Bresson and Fan Ho each of whom capture a sense of both isolation and community in urban settings through spacious compositions. As the video progresses this photographic aesthetic evolves into a grainy 1960’s handheld rock-doc quality when Sima finds connection with her people.
We shot on Kodak Tri-X Reversal which compliments both of these aesthetic: creating an otherworldly mystery in deep shadows for the compositional moments and a grainy, vibrant nostalgia in the handheld sections.
Shooting on film was a necessity for this project. Oddly enough, the micro budget made it even more necessary. We needed life and depth in these frames. Life in the architecture. Without the resources to populate frames, control locations or do complex lighting, we borrowed this vitality from organic nature of the medium. Kodak Tri X combined with the loose registration of my old Arri 16 S, gives even static frames a captivating fluidity. Our assets were time and the support of our community. We shot 14 100ft roll daylight spools over 3 days, enlisting friends and borrowing locations. The lightweight and simple Arri 16 S made it possible to for me to be a mobile one-man crew as we traversed Chicago.
