True black versus Rothko

What a series of tangents this whole project takes me on.
So I have gone back and smoothed out the assembly edit and then reviewed it.
I have already described how I had written into my outline blackouts, breaks in the visual narrative at key moments. In the edit I created these blackouts and then...they didn't work. They broke the narrative, the flow. Did I lose my nerve? I began to think how they might develop the narrative.
First I added sound. I had been working with Roland to create another layer of meaning with the sound and the blackouts seemed to be a logical place to develop the sound design. But I found that sound alone was not adequate.
Then I began to look for means that the blackouts might be see as logical extensions of present images. For example scene 28. Claire is asleep, and is awoken by...? The scene began with a shot her asleep, awakes suddenly and turns on the light. I became interested in the abstraction of the image in the dark.
Then were a few influences.
In October I saw Un Lac, by Phillipe Grandrieux at the London Film Festival. A lot of this film impressed, but specifically the liminal images, inside a cabin in near darkness, the figures and objects just at the edge of perception. I made a literal connection between Claire's darkened bedroom and the idea of a semi-conscious searching or reception of the transcendental.
In November I watched Antonioni's Red Desert. In this Antonioni uses soft-focus to create colour abstractions. Grandrieux also made use of soft-focus extensively.
At the Tate Modern there was the Rothko exhibition. I was especially taken with the the Black-Form paintings, where Rothko layered a series of blacks and different coatings. What happens as you look into these? You might say that you are drawn into them, that they are a void, but they also push outward, they extend beyond the frame. They seem to pulse, move about.
I began to imagine that in these sequences I would develop a series of images from facts, objects in the location, for example Claire's bedroom, which become liminal by way of the lack of light and the soft-focus. I experimented by drawing and painting images in Photoshop, based on top of images from the shoot. So in a long-take of these images there should be sense of searching, grasping for what...always remains out of reach, at the threshold.
Soon it became clear that these sequences had nothing to do with the blackouts.
Now I don't know if I just lose my nerve? Or did I need to find out how the blackouts might work by first discovering how they would not?
However it came to me, I realised that the blackouts did not require sound or any logic, the blacks are true, negation, the absence of sound and image, no extensions to existing image, rather negation of the images. It should be expected that they break the flow. That is what they do. If they failed perhaps they were in the wrong place, or more likely that the place was wrong, that is the edit, the material around it was not strong enough.
I realised that what I had were two different ideas. The true blacks on the one hand and what I called the Rothko sequences on the other.
I don't certainly don't consider the work I did on the Rothko sequences a waste. On the contrary, as I come close to the first version of the edit I have begun to extend the development of these images.
Presently I have developed a language based on three or four colours.
White is an invasion, the exterior coming in, drawing Claire out.
White is images of light entering the flat, or clouds with the sun behind them, over-exposed.
Blue and brown are the interiors, the bedroom at night, they are present but not dynamic like the white images.
Green is the exterior, the location of fear, the world of nature. This past week, as I revised the final segment I began to see how the green images would form a part there.
If the first two segments are about Claire searching trying to construct an identity then the final segment is a realisation that identity in the face of nature is an indulgence. The extinction of identity. Here then I will explore the concept of Claire in the landscape, dissolving, smeared into the pine groves.