Sunday, May 6, 2007

Jennifer Montgomery

Jennifer Montgomery showed two super-8 films. The first was How to Use Equipment, which was from a New York film club project, and was pretty funny. It was basically people trying out super-8 filming and projection, and featuring the amateurishness. My favorite scene was a woman on the telephone with an early 90's computer behind her. This clash of technology between the old (super 8) and the new, relatively, is viscerally exciting for me. Recording my lp's onto my computer is probably one of the most satisfying activities there is in my opinion.
Her structure for Notes on the Death of Kodachrome was emblematic of this juxtaposition; she starts with her friends in a very strange art film from the early 80's w/ naked people and such on super 8, and then spends the rest of the time looking for the equipment she used to make that film. She films her quest on digital video, revisiting with all of her old friends, who are now fairly famous folks. She talked to Todd Haynes, writer and director of the film Far From Heaven, and recounts a dream about a super 8 projector she had. After the conversations which seem to go around more than through any memories of the 70's and 80's, she has a vignette on super 8. The vignette is her dream, where the projector is made out of kitchen apparatuses, and she is an oriental emperess. I found it to be quite entertaining, and wished there would have been more comic super 8 vignettes instead of all that talking.

New Art

On Monday, one of the TA's lectured the class on New Media, which is basically any art that involves a computer. A lot of the ideas she discussed we had already encountered in 115, but she brought up some new material for us to consider.
The most interesting piece was DJ Shadow's short assemblage, 911: State of Emergence, a collection of images spliced together to create associations between our leaders and the violent fundamentalists in the middle east. Because it was such a fast paced piece, it created these connections without a lot of reflection; it was like a typical Fox News production, except for its conclusions, which were opposite of the usual cable news network's. Of course, the fact that it was on the web also points to the community that's viewing it. It's for everyone w/access to a computer, and it's goal isn't to make money. The fear mongering practiced by the administration after 9/11 was mirrored by the media, attempting to keep people glued to their TV screens so they could make more money on advertising. There's no profit goal for the website on which DJ Shadow's piece was displayed.
What her presentation made me think most about was technology, and how it impacts the work that artists--especially filmmakers--produce. For example, the short film made w/a low pixel digital camera in 2003 was inspired by the blurry, blocky look of broadband video, which nowadays is much clearer. Her work is now pretty much irrelevant, but it makes a lot of sense for the time it was made.

Friday, April 27, 2007

Goshogaoka

In discussion on Wednesday, all of the questions we asked each other eventually led up to the penultimate, scratching inquisition in everyone's mind: why did Sharon Lockhart make this film, Goshogaoka? The answers lie in her still photography collection that she showed before the film. One of her film heroes is Cassavetes, who was a very inclusive filmmaker; in other words, his professional work involved the efforts of a lot of amateurs.
With Vito Acconci we talked about performance, and i think this film is mostly about performance. We are definitely not just peering in on a normal basketball practice, but the kids in the film are normal basketball players. The parameters of the lens bring out this quality of performance aesthetically, as the camera never changes position, evoking the idea of a stage. The hand of the maker, however, is pretty much always evident, because they are moving these kids around (she hired a movement coordinator from Belgium) and having them exhibit skills that they didn't practice.
This dynamic still doesn't answer the question, however. Did she just make the film to prove this point about performance and film, or to show the performance qualities in everyday people? I think so. The total lack of anything interesting in the film forces you to examine the techniques and the movements of the kids--that's all there is. This doesn't mean it was an easy film to make or anything--she didn't let anything into the film that she didn't wish to be there. It was a very controlled production; maybe this lack of ambiguity of content left too little room for the viewer, or at least me, to explore the space of the film and feel anything strong about its images.

Tuesday, April 17, 2007

Hamilton

The writer and director of Hamilton, a story about two young people with a baby, chose to include as little dialogue as possible in his Baltimore portrait. He also didn't include the introduction of new conflict into the story--he depicted peoples' lives after the problems had been introduced. Joe, the young father, is a growing boy trapped in a fatherhood predicament. The result, besides bitter silence and coldness towards his girlfriend, is a ranging body, yearning to escape. The seminal moment of the film probably comes during a walk, when Joe traipses about, smoking, and for a while, cars cannot be heard. Then, he is picked up by his mother, and we sense that he does not have a lot of freedom. The director won't give us the satisfaction of really knowing anything solid about any of the characters, which gives us some weird character pairings, like the house Joe lives in, for example. He seems to have black sisters, which is just a sort of odd thing when he's white, unless he or they were adopted. The director did not think it was important for us to know. Maybe being a foster child could help explain Joe's loneliness and seemingly constant discomfort?
The scene where this strategy of silence and plot absence works is in a scene that would have been at home inside of any type of narrative film. Joe is in his girlfriend's bed, and wakes up at 3 in the morning to play video games. The woman tries to get him to go back to bed, offering the warmth of her body. By the way Joe reacts, or doesn't react, we get the deep sense of resentment he has for the mother of his child, and we see the effect it has on the girl, who gets up to wash her face, presumably frustrated.
For all the time spent on the faces of the characters, however, there are some really stilted and boring performances. Joe, who Carl informed us is a semi-professional actor, is pretty interesting, but the girl is just toneless and expressionless, even though the camera is on her face when she's on camera, and it doesn't really move. And as Dan Kelly mentioned in class, the grandmother's speech about her flowers to the little boy was kind of creepy, and sounded as if she was reading off of cue cards as she went.
People talk more than these people talk, so the search for realism cannot explain this movie's lack of extraordinary or more melodramatic events. I appreciated the scenes where the strategy worked, such as Joe's walk, the car ride with his mother, and the walk to meet his girlfriend. Other than that, the style was much more apparent than the film's subjects, who appeared to simply be unprofessional actors, not real characters.

Sunday, April 1, 2007

Learning to Love You More

On Yoko Ono's website, there are assignments anyone can do to explore their world, and the resulting media is pretty entertaining. My favorite assignment was "Make a documentary about a small child." My Star by Roger Scott is about his son, Dylan. It has a great soundtrack that actually makes the baby exciting, maybe giving the audience a sense of the astounding amount of discoveries the baby makes each day. There is a hilarious shot where Scott zooms out and we realize that Dylan is lying in a dryer, which his mom programs to start like the liftoff of a space ship. This short and sweet style of documentary is like a yummy after dinner mint.
I also enjoyed exploring the guest curators' (or Ono's friends) choices, presenting some very interesting portraits generated from the assignments. The effect of taking a tour through the assignments allowed me to see the greater vision of the website coalesce into a jagged collection of artists and everyday people. This was probably the best example 201 students could get of daily practice, or personal filmmaking.
I was amazed at the amount of work put into some of these, especially the neighborhood field recording from Erin Thompson and Hanna Vachs. They took time with each person who accepted to draw their portrait and record their musical talents or performances. It wasn't especially entertaining--the bad musicians were very boring, but i did enjoy the first performance by the acoustic guitarist. The drawing allowed me to listen to the fingering and picture the performance in my mind.

Abstraction and Projection

For this class, the theme was light. Projection was examined as an action, and the capturing of light on film was featured in the films. The most abstract films concerning light were Available Light: Shift and The Dark Room.
For Available Light, Luis Recoder set up a fogged lens apparatus that captured unfocused light on a 16 mm camera, turning everything into it's color-on-film representation. The film was long for such a project, but the effect was still pretty engaging. It was interesting that color was used as a key for vision, and that color on film was examined--it calls into question the realism aspects of film that viewers take for granted when color is paired with a film image.
The Dark Room was a roving trip of dark blues and greys recorded on 16 mm in a camera obscura. This film was a lot more difficult for me to engage in than Available Light, probably because nothing was ever sharp or definite. I didn't feel like i was in a camera obscura though; i just couldn't tell what was going on, and the set-back screen was just too hard to focus on.

Monday, March 26, 2007

Vladmaster rocks the auditorium

I came in late, as usual, with a special greasy snack in hand and, to my pleasant surprise, found that i would not be watching five or more abstract films in one sitting. Instead, i would get to play with a cool toy. Well, i didn't really get to play with it, the directions were pretty clear, coming from an honest, NPR-type-voice from somewhere.

On the whole, I found the Vladmaster medium fresh and interesting. The experience is a very controlled one however, and put me in a meditative, obedient, almost hypnotic state. Especially with the lack of blinking, my narcolepsy got me a couple times as i caught myself dropping the Vladmaster. For this reason, i went ahead in the slides a few times, and listened to the soundtrack as i clicked through to the right spot, and really viewed the things as two seperate works. From Vladamir's comments, it appears that the processes are a bit separate, but she does still write the stories.

My favorite disc was the one about the construction equipment. An amazingly inventive story that begins with a fairly abstract picture of crumpled construction paper with an airplane's shadow on it, it also provides proof for the effectiveness of the authoritative power of direct eye-to-lens contact. It was a story that was made up, but told in a TLC, UFO sighting style, even referencing reports on the evening news that left me questioning why i had never seen anything about this event before.

I believe the soft miniature scenes were also effective in throwing the audience into another world where they couldn't quite make everything out (i already referenced the fuzzy first picture) and had to listen to the voice to help tie everything together.

This medium is totally fresh, but, again, it's filmed with a 16 mm camera, which is pretty crazy. Everything abstract seems to be in that format, one which i have technical difficulties with. I want to do digital stuff like Rodriguez, where i can be a rebel and not have to worry about dirt in the shutter gate that ruins a roll of film.

Saturday, March 24, 2007

Laura Marks

To answer one of Rob's questions, when I think of Beirut I think of a group of people that are trying to live their lives the best they can. Lebanon's economy was on the rebound until the summer of 06, but scars of the eighties still remain. Do they think of themselves as a cursed people? Or just trapped between the pincers of land-grabbing hawks in Israel and the moslem extremists who fight them? Of course, everything is more complicated than that. The films Laura Marks played in class gave voice to the agony concerning a history and a nation whose fortunes shift abruptly in a volatile area of the world.

Especially representative of this entrapment and powerlessness that the people of Lebanon rebounded from and are currently re experiencing was the film Dead Time, by Ghassan Salhab. A short, easily shared quicktime film, Dead Time gives us snapshots of the wreckage left after Israel's bombs bombarded southern Lebanon, a place too dangerous for journalists to detail too closely. Even if journalists wanted to get in, however, they would have had to get there before the Israeli military demolished all roadways and bridges out of central population areas; the red cross was even stuck.

Again, all the enterprise of the Christian and Moslems and everyone else living in Lebanon was reduced to a battleground. Self-determination proves fleeting. This is why Salhab wears a superman t-shirt--he is expressing his angst for all those who cannot, people who are just like him, except for the fact that they are without a camera or other means to deliver their stories and pictures.

Self determination turns into a struggle in Lebanon for the main character of the animated film, Sad Man, who must be determined just to walk out the door in the morning. He has been robbed of his emotions; it is all he can do just to get out of bed. He saves happy faces like relics in his restroom, just to remind himself that he's human, and that even if he feels like a prisoner right now, he should persevere.

The short film never tells us why though. That is the fleeting aspect of the normality of life and the constancy of things in America one takes for granted--an operational government, a functioning military to depend on for protection (even though it is grossly misused) instead of militias to whom they owe debt for their guerilla residency and defense of their neighborhoods. The length of these films was an aesthetic and conscious decision, designed to report on conditions of life in Lebanon. Personal looks at a geopolitical struggle in which the residents can never claim victory.

Wednesday, February 21, 2007

you tube

On You Tube today, I watched a pretty funny video entitled Smosh-Boxman. This music video format is pretty popular online, and i think it hasn't totally dried up its potential. This video is the best when the lyrics explain something going on in the picture, like when he says that some kid "wasn't that intelligent," while he's chugging windex. That's pretty funny.

Tuesday, February 20, 2007

Vision

this essay was a reaction to the artist colloquium on february second, and i believe the history and future of projection relates to the viewing experiences we've been discussing in class:

Gavin Jackson
Extra Credit Colloquium--2/2/07

Last Friday, Perry Hoberman and Anne Friedberg of USC came to speak about the “parallax between theory and practice,” especially when it came to projection technology and art. Hoberman, an installation artist, was interested in stereoscopic imagery, and his 2004 installation, Public Objects, displayed an anamorphic image 4 times, that was only visible in 3-d at a certain point.
Anne Friedberg showed her website based on her book, The Virtual Window, which examines viewing technology’s history, and how it has shaped our perception. Both talked about treating “the screen as an object,” or recognizing the importance of the viewing experience and its context. For example, Hoberman showed video of a piece he did where people had to line up objects on a screen from three different locations: a computer screen, actual life-size objects, and I believe the projection already on the screen. Interactivity such as this is one reason they both sort of hinted that new ways of projection are on the horizon that will change our perception of art and the world.
Friedberg and Hoberman’s websites also emphasized the viewing experience as one subject to the tools and technologies available. Hoberman made a point in his vectors article of classifying the eyes as a tool of the mind, and nothing more, for the mind arranges and classifies all the images, as proven by the different forms of malperception he researched.
I’m very interested in reading The Virtual Window, for the website, at least as presented, looks less cogent and ordered as the book sounded. I still got a good idea of a few things from the viewing tool she brought up though, with a silhouette watching Uncle Josh at the Picture Show. The question for artists of the future, and film viewers everywhere, is how will that silhouette be engaged in moving images in the future?

Monday, February 19, 2007

D'Est

1) This film addresses the viewer as nearly one and the same as the camera, putting you in places where a person would normally feel uncomfortable. Like Micheal Snow's film, it doesn't reveal itself in short bursts of frames, but develops its themes and action over long takes taking many minutes.

2) Filming and editing D'Est in the way Akerman did allowed for both long takes and inclusive takes. The pans seem to be in slow motion, not staying on one person as long as it does for the man on the bench, but it appreciates each subject pretty equally, with a large depth of focus. It's really in the space, without manipulation or fast editing. It reminded me a lot of a movie which i forget the title of, but set the record for the longest single take in a film, for there were no edits in the film, just a single camera touring the Kremlin and watching characters from different time periods walking in and out.

4) I would say that Akerman's film isn't fiction, but it is stylized reality, especially because a lot of the subjects aren't their to spread knowledge, but to be visually studied. The subjects also interact with the camera, looking at it, even pointing out their fruit for sale. In a documentary, the camera has a much more journalistic and less visual purpose.

5) David writes that "the suspension of a gesture or the nearly intolerable stretching out of sequences" really replicates "the strange banality of life in the former USSR." I would agree that such a bleak, oppressive society would burden people, reducing their motivation to do everyday things, to the point where they almost need to force themselves to complete every activity. The fast exposure speed, or slow motion, creates an illusion of weight and resistance, externalizing the peoples' struggles.

7) I believe the ideal position for viewing the film may be the three-projection installation. The only reason is that time would be even more stretched out. Instead of getting lost or controlled by one pan or image, you can shift your focus, and then return your attention later to possibly the same tracking shot, giving an enhanced feeling of the lengthening of time and coldness in the Russian streets.

8) I thought sound was used very effectively in this film, with certain intrusive noises fading in and out, and music dominating the soundtrack. I thought the music always seemed to sync up with the image really well, especially when there were instruments playing. The blending of recording a performance and a performer performing for the camera reminded me of Altman's "The Company," which doesn't have a guerilla type documentary feel, but a more prepared and stylized version of reality.

9) I noticed that the interior shots looked warm, and the people were balanced within the frame. Unlike the outside shots, which had harsher noises and a more random assortment of individuals. When the camera was inside, an inner peace was felt, like when the country house with the open door was featured. Almost to say that when one goes out into the public, they're going to be confronted by some zombie like characters and the droning of vehicles and a very un-personalized space, where one doesn't own anything except the appearance of their own face.

Sunday, February 18, 2007

jonas mekas-february eighteenth

Jonas Mekas' february 18th video is a digital short chronicling an event for opposition to the war in Iraq. There's a banner with the famous phrase, "War Is Over; If You Want It." It's paired with very somber music, even though the event itself appears to be quite intimate and warm, with people packed to the rafters dancing and celebrating around a cake of some sort. The bittersweet quality of the film makes sense when he reveals the date it was filmed: february 18th 2003. There's a lot of nostalgia to go around as the film reminds one of the seventies and John Lennon and Yoko Ono. Now, however, the nostalgia only puts february 18th 2007 into sad perspective as the war rages on, and Bush's wish to invade Iran may just be granted.

Sunday, February 11, 2007

Reaction to a Barrage of Video

"If both the image and the sound in video are only "basic," only "outlines,"...be humanly "pushy": I can push up against the screen, as if to throw myself on the viewer," so writes Vito Acconci, writer, director, and star of Theme Song, a video invitation for love. The point of Theme Song is not only humor, which is present, especially when he changes the background music by switching tapes on an off screen cassette player, but Acconci also seeks to put his ideas about the video format into use. No better way to create the human to human contact that Acconci wishes to wring out of video than acting in one hundred percent direct address. Only by laying down, close to the camera, staring at his close audience, can the viewer's attention be grabbed. Acconci's performance is all about humility, maybe even humiliation, and it works. Without seeing it, one would probably be apprehensive about watching this guy for 36 minutes hit on him/her, but, when one is confronted with the video image, it's kind of hard (at least for me) to look away; i was pretty entertained.

Another attention-grabbing performance comes from the Uma Thurman from Pulp Fiction like Lisa Steele in Birthday Suit-With Scars and Defects. In the piece, she is totally nude, pointing out her scars in closeup in a very objective fashion, configuring her poses for the camera by looking at the monitor. This interesting use of video as almost a mirror seems a bit self-indulgent, but it works, especially, in my opinion, because of the intermittent nude shots.

Most of the pieces were void of narrative, focusing more on performance. In Beneath the Skin, however, Cecelia Condit blends these two aspects into a funny and creepy voice over, weaving a story about a boyfriend and the corpse in his house over footage of the woman telling the story, along with pictures. The beautiful woman laying in a bed has a face projected on her face at times, as if the dead woman is trying to invade her brain space or something. The pictures of mummies were pretty funny, obviously historical pictures, not the actual corpse she was referencing. The subtle effect of this video lends to the general creepiness. As the voice slowly reveals the real horror of the story, the images speed up, and one gets an idea of the trauma this character may experience from living this story.

Friday, February 9, 2007

Silent and Colorful

Dealing with time some more, we watched some very interesting, and silent again, films in class. All of them were filmed on a walk also. The first and most intriguing was Variations, shot by Nathaniel Dorsky on 16 mm @ 18 frames per second. The effect of the slower exposure speed was pretty captivating, it almost gave you a chance to appreciate the images more, as if they were fragile or something. It reminded me of a hangover, waking up to the world in a way, where everything is sharp and you start to again appreciate reality.

Stan Brakhage, whom we read some quotes from also, shot Comingled Containers, a 16 mm film with extreme close ups and underwater exploration. Brakhage seems to be really into breaking preconceived notions about images and how the eye and the mind should interpret them: "Imagine an eye unruled by man made laws of perspective, an eye unprejudiced by compositional logic, an eye which does not respond to the name of everything but which must know each object encountered in life through the adventure of perception." This quote struck me as very apt when i was at Perry Hoberman and Anne Friedberg's presentation on windows and stereoscopic vision. Perry's Vectors article on brain visual quirks had clips of what that affliction would look like if you had it, reminding us that the eyes are really just tools--the brain is where we arrange the image according to our comforts.

Wot the Ancient Sod, examines time and objects in a silent, color, 16mm format. In this film, Diane Kitchen films close ups of decaying leaves, at some points obscuring detail with such close leaves, showing only the flapping borders of foliage. It takes a much more specific bite out of the theme of "going on a walk." People usually take for granted leaves, the existence of which are defined more in the hundreds/thousands on a plant than in singular form. The theme of the importance of each leaf and its decay to the natural balance of nature brings up time as a subject. Time kills, rejuvenates, and continues. These are basically just clips of that process.

Dealing with time and film using a segmentation technique, Tomonari Nishikaka takes bursts of film with different shapes continuing throughout a sequence, and "an adjustable slit" with a camera on auto mode to get the correct exposure and create continuity in the frenetic, chaotic assortment of images. Of course, chaos is only the effect, the truth is that the shots were meticulously planned out to go with each other based on positioning within his animation viewfinder.

Along with experimentation with time, these films can be seen as an expression of freedom, something which Maya Deren cherishes in her "Amateur vs. Professional" article, writing, "Like the amateur still-photographer, the amateur film-maker can devote himself to capturing the poetry and beauty of places and events and, since he is using a motion-picture camera, he can explore the vast world of the beauty of movement."

So Is This and There There Square

Our first class featured one very confrontational film, along with an interesting digital video from the eighties. Both helped to reorient and widen my senses about what it means to watch a film. For example, Micheal Snow's silent film, So Is This, consisted of words, usually one at a time, appearing on screen for various amounts of time. It was a difficult film for me to watch; i would have much rather read a coffee table book where i would be allowed to read a lot faster. One of Snow's objectives as an artist is to examine time as an artistic medium, which is really why he started making films. I think his film works to make time seem a lot longer than it actually is. One example of his playing with time was the play on words he developed with the word this. It was a very slow developing piece of dry humor. As far as it being a protest against the censorship board, i thought it worked as a parody of how the Canadian censorship board wanted to treat its citizens like children, boxing in their artistic experiences.

There There Square, by Jackie Goss, was a very effective short digital video laced with interesting interpretations of North America's land mass and funny facts about surveying and cartography. At one point in the film, she examines the border of Tennessee, explaining why the northern border wasn't a straight line. Apparently, the surveyor's compass got knocked off course by the iron ore in the mountains, and once he realized it, he tried to go down a river but didn't go far enough. Instead of using different methods, he just kept the border that he made, defining reality through a map that he drew. Goss also brings up the fact that maps denote ownership, and tells an interesting story (with words again) about you looking at your house from a hill, watching your dad drive by it just to see what it looks like to passersbys. She also morphs and spins maps to show land masses from other cultures' points of view. I used the example of being in the south pole, where the ideas of direction are totally different from those in the contiguous United States, whose perspective is dominated by the Europeans who came from the East and ended up dominating the country.

Both films challenged my sense of what is interesting and engaging on a movie screen. They both used words, one in a playful, though drawn-out and laborious manner, the other in an entertaining, involving manner. I have to say i prefer the latter.