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.