Pravda Pravda Pravda

The various dimensions of truth in cinema have always been the onion skin layers one has to peel back in order to derive intention as well as ethical perspective from a film. Each of these layers has a unique vantage point from which the viewer is allowed to observe the subject.



My interest lies in how some films assume the air of unfettered documentation, when at their essence, the reality of their documentation is lost in the act of the cut. The process of selection that is inherent in film editing, whether intentional or not, reverts the control of the documented image away from the camera and into the hands of the editor. Once two frames are juxtaposed in any way, even if the two shots are congruous takes of the same objects (for instance, in Olympia, not one, but a series of shots pan around the Acropolis, seemingly observing the same structure) the filmmaker has branded the piece with what he or she wants the viewer to see.



Furthermore, the simple act of selecting what to shoot is a form of edit in itself. The filmmaker has intentionally decided to capture an image that he or she finds important to photograph, and thus has edited the present reality into a honed, hunted image taken from the greater physical state. of course, this is about as distant as the filmmaker can be from the product of shooting, and so out of the "documentary" films I viewed this week, my favorite selection had to be Coney Island At Night, simply because it only attempted this one take capture of a prismatic reality, with no presumptions made or artifice intended at all.

An Echo, A Gong

{A DISCUSSION OF SOUND IN CINEMA}

I have a conflict as a filmmaker, one that upsets the tested tradition of how a film should be approached and realized. I have always been a total audiophile, and when discussing other's work, or in developing my own films, I start from the ear and move on to the eyes. This has always been a problematic fixation for me, as stressing the importance of the image seems to be the prevailing orientation for most theory and criticism. So, when given the opportunity to discuss the act of listening to film, I tend to go quite happily overboard...

All of the films we viewed during our discussion of sound in Avant-Garde cinema in my lecture class today had me hypnotized. Whether the score was erratic and impulsive, or haunting and atmospheric, each film is worth discussing in detail. I will try to write one short paragraph about each.




(1) The Edison Kinetescope Films - To find a film that predates the modern timetable of when sound in film was introduced must have been breathtaking. I have never been so fired up about a fiddle in my life. The surprisingly clean recording on brown wax has twice the majesty of sound alone from that era, because of its visual counterpart. I especially like that the massive early phonograph is so present in the frame, in that you can actually see the first synching of sound literally being produced in the image.



(2) Gus Visser and His Singing Duck - Again the quality of this recording exceeds expectations. The image marries the staged, vaudevillian ethos of the early Edison work, with a truly remarkable synch-sound recording.



(3) M - Fritz Lang's brilliant habit of pushing ahead of his time mechanically makes this film a breakthrough in sound design. He utilizes not only negative image space, but also negative sound space to create tension and pass time. The moments of muted horror punctuate the suffocating images he creates, and make "M" a remarkable and terrifying picture.



4) The Third Man - A film that also makes use of astounding imagery as well as impeccable sound, the atmosphere that Carol Reed intends to create is in fact realized by the harmonious nature of the score and sparse but effective sound with the grandiose nature of the footage. A truly wonderful joining of sound and image.



5) Ballet Mecanique - Though I disliked the "mechanics" of the score, what with its lack of order within disorder and its penchant for horns and bells that in my opinion are not well executed or composed, I am able to forgive the maker because of how well the sound matches the pace and rhythm of the imagery. Each bell and whistle carries quite perfectly with the edit and physical patterns of the images, which makes this film a difficult but successful work of sound design.



6) Rose Hobart - Using the found footage format calls for a heightened awareness of how to relate the image and whatever sound is chosen, as the filmmaker is attempting to either create mood or meaning seemingly out of nowhere, with the blending of the two. Cornell mends his footage and score together like a virtuoso, playing with pace and context in a way unmatched by most found-footage works. His piece makes use of the associative nature of film to build an interior narrative that, without sound, would most likely be lost (and, needless to say, pacify the audience quite quickly). I also love the way Cornell attempts to use color and sound as partners to create a sort-of episodic tone in the editing of the piece.



7) Lucifer Rising - Of course you can't really go wrong using
Bobby Beausoleil (which translates to "beautiful light" ironically) to create a composition that fits with a film about ritual and the history of demonism and different perceptions and manifestations of satan. He is sort of a pro in both realms, so its almost like cheating. But whatever, Kenneth is good at making the right friends to score his work. Nuff said.

Kissing One's Own Eyes

As a huge fan of the long take and difficult material, Andy Warhol's The Kiss as well as Stan Brakhage's The Act Of Seeing With One's Own Eyes fits right to my palette, and provides some important perceptual modes that prior to his work had only been explored in the obscure.



The Kiss follows or even comments on the form of staging an act for the camera (instead of documenting life) first cultivated by Edison's work in the Black Maria studio, where the films shot were highly theatrical and artificial. Warhol repeats the same process here, only the artifice he has worked creates not a distant and theatrical space, but an intimate and borderline uncomfortable gaze. The viewer is forced to stand in place of the filmmaker behind the camera, which for me brings out a very uneasy, almost predatory twitch in poaching the images of these young lovers and their long snogs.

Similarly, Brakhage's piece forces you into a space that is not agreeable to most people. What is different about Act is that the visual confrontation does have cuts, and thus, we are pushed even closer to the subject by the filmmaker. One can discuss the thematic separation between to the two pieces, but what I find more interesting is the way both filmmaker's really strap you to the back of the camera and wrangle you in close to what you may not want to see.

Agencement Sentimentale

Each of the three selections shown at the close of my International Avant-Garde class' lecture on "Blink" in cinema (Maya Deren's "Meshes Of The Afternoon", Sergei Eisenstein's "Romance Sentimentale", and Luis Bunuel & Salvador Dali's infamous "Un Chien Andelou") in their own way champion the use of the "cut" as a means of regulating a fragmented reality. The three intersect comfortably in that they seem to be attempting to render an accessible representation of the "dream state." However, each work's individual artistic intention stands as what separates it from its neighbor. In all three films, every break obviously works to orient and control our perception, but what is more interesting is that each seems to work towards a dislocation or "non-reality" while still organizing each image, in the hopes of mimicking the intangible notion of thought.

Meshes Of The Afternoon was created by Maya Deren in an effort to solicit a mythological experience from her audience. Her specific design of the "dream state" lingers on the insular, recollective confusion of unconscious thought, with no premeditated psychological subtext involved (or at least not directly indicated.) Each cut in this work quite successfully facilitates a fluid line of action while sewing together movements and spaces that could only come to meet in dreams. The film's tone is one of sublimated anxiousness, exhibited in the beautifully cautious movements and choreography tactfully performed by Deren herself. Ever languorous, the artist shifts between impossible spaces with a feline grace and intensity, interacting with a realm that to the viewer appears somewhat magical, or even "mythical."

Romance Sentimentale functions in a similar vein. Eisenstein approaches the unconscious from a kind of spatial modality as well, though with less emphasis on artifice and more on undisturbed emotional imagery. He begins by utilizing less authored segments of pastoral, natural landscapes, slowly interjecting the images of these spaces with highly augmented moments of animation, contrapuntal sound, and other blatant editorial hand-work. This self-reflexive "hand" in the work changes the discussion of cut as "blink" because it implies an awareness, even a form of strategy, in the arrangement of images, which Meshes seems to try and avoid.

The final film of the triplet, Un Chien Andalou, stands well away from the other two works in terms of device and intention. Dali and Bunuel were actively working to create an entirely inaccessible dream space or alternate reality that lacked any order or association. Of course, the pair underestimated the mind's tenacity in creating meaning where none exists. The work is well crafted and contains some startlingly attractive imagery, but the work fails in its intention of voiding the images of their inherent meaningfulness. It would be interesting to see the three films cut together as one massive psycho-space; perhaps then a true "Exquisite corpse" could be stitched from each film's individual perspective of the human mind at rest.

Effective Video

{WRITTEN FOR PROF. TOM SHERMAN'S VIDEO ART HISTORY CLASS}

{March 2007}



Typically, when sizing up video pieces I'm a sucker for both multi-monitor array and rapid, carefully manipulated editing and color. There are instances, however, when a slower piece can quietly finagle its way into my prized work list. The best example of this being Steina Vasulka's "Pyroglyphics" (1995).
Inherently, fire will always engage the natural pyromaniac in most persons, especially destructive art students. Yet Steina does not flog a mangled trope by documenting metallurgy, but instead renders both a playful and meaningful context to the most raw and simplistic recording of an element. I found myself drawing associations from the work I'm almost totally sure Steina had no intention of displaying.

As the beautifully paced flames burnt out of the projector, I was finding myself (and you'll have to take my word on this) embarrassingly tearing up, wrapped in thoughts about the Holocaust ovens, and then on to cremating loved ones, and other depressing events that Steina had evoked purely by accident in my overemotional, over-calculating noggin. Being able to inadvertently make a nineteen-year-old man cry with completely separate artistic intention is one form of effectiveness in my view, but other artists, specifically late modernists in the eighties and nineties, have made work that spoke new meanings for itself without being prompted by their creators.

In 1991, Stan Douglas' "I am not Gary" was broadcast in America, unintentionally provoking a handful of viewers into making puzzled phone calls, asking broadcasters if the piece was a part of the prescribed entertainment as a "quiz" or candid, or perhaps simply an editing slip up. Once the work and its look-a-like protagonist's subversive imitation were unmasked to the concerned viewers as an "art piece," their bombinate preconceptions were soothed and the work's power and intention were diminished.

The piece was still greatly effective. Much like Vasulka's unexpected, highly specific emotional reaction (so easily yanked out of my whimpering psyche,) in its casual disruption of a previous state of comfortable convention and cozy pattern, Douglas got something out of viewers that he hardly had a hand in, with modern television programming and the affinity of daily broadcast material taking most of the credit.



A second piece that I find extremely engaging and successful was shown to me both in video art history class, as well as video sketchbook. Ulrike Rosenbach's "Wrapping with Julia" (1972) made the one take beautiful for me again, rather than trapping and exhaustive as is the case with many one takes. Until seeing this tape, the majority of one take videos thrust upon me in class wore a rough patch in my skull with their use of image and audio redundancy for its artistic novelty, while obviously lacking in concept or intellectual dimension.

This piece, however, stood perfect and quiet to me, with no text or narrative lorded over the image, nor stuttered monologue uncomfortably gabbed out for eons by the artist (a typically Canadian habit, most notably in the work of Vera Frankel and Jane Parker, but also shared globally, in tapes like Vito Acconci's "Theme Song", or Lisa Steele's "A Very Personal Story"). Instead, Rosenbach alternately chooses to celebrate the intelligence and diversity of her audience.

By allowing her construct to act as a fountainhead for our own associative interpretations, she lets the image parent countless undefined connective relationships to each individual who watches. Along with this humbling of the artist-to-viewer relationship, Rosenbach is also successful in beautifully meshing recurrent sound and unvarying motion without it getting the least bit taxing.

First the simplicity in her composition and warm organic imagery of the young girl wrapped slowly in gauze by her bare mother gracefully contracts the attention of the audience. The gentle portrait strikes a caring maternal tone for me, but as I explained, this is my own individual connection that her simple plain and effortless piece provides.

Second, her tape does this while never dropping to the hackneyed crutch of shock value, or overtly sexual expose (not that these are always bad, just difficult to use effectively). There's no sporadic, unexpected bodily fluid, or cooking oil, or unleaded gasoline splattering the pair at random, purely to disgust or unsettle the viewer. There's no "kiddy porn" vibe, female exploitation, or sexual agenda embedded in the work. There's no threadbare manifesto inherent in the gestures of the pair. All that is fixed and implicit is the performance, appearance, and duration.

Lastly, the piece is totally replicable, like many other straightforward tapes (Martha Wilson's "Four Short Performances", Bruce Nauman's "Lip Sync"). The distinctly European approach of "Wrapping with Julia" comes off as much more sensual than these other similar easy-to-replicate pieces. Though like them, it effectively acts much like a musical score, or a documented object of thought, making the perceptual experience of watching the tape both enjoyable and conceptually dynamic as well.

Transplanting The Self

To Give Is To Receive Is To Give {Ryan Tebo, 2008}

(okay, this needs a bit of initial background info: the piece under review is a brand new documentary by a graduate of Syracuse's VPA Film MFA program, Ryan Tebo, currently on tour as part of a collaborative multimedia show called "Petting Zoo" with the two central subjects of his documentary, musician Tom Abbs (pictured left) and painter MP Landis. Abbs and Landis, longtime friends + collaborators, recently underwent surgery together during which Abbs generously provided Landis with a new kidney from his own body, in order to counteract Landis' looming kidney failure. Tebo + Co. shot footage of the whole emotional process, and their touring show uses music + painting + video + performance to focus on the complexity of their recent situation, using the documentary as a grounding point.)

WATCH THE PREVIEW

I'm not sure, in the case of this documentary, whether it is really the means that justify the ends, or rather the ends that justify the means. I love the idea of the film being an extension of the "Petting Zoo" principle where a free exchange of input among each medium attempts to dissolve authorship. I especially appreciate that the footage is shot by several different parties, in a sort of 'pot-luck' aesthetic of handing off the torch.

However, I feel that the essence of the film is really made in the edit, and could stand on its own as an arranged emotional progression. This contradicts what appears to be a valid attempt by Ryan to minimize his hand in the work in order to highlight all of those involved.

I blame my calling all of this into question on Ryan's introduction of the work within not only a greater philosophical and metaphysical context, but also within his own aesthetic and cinematic philosophies as an artist. At the same time, I am appreciative of the questions and insight this introduction provided prior to our viewing the work.

Having an understanding of what the maker's ideological intentions can often hinder a viewer's ability to absorb information from a piece, however, in this case I was happy to have a better grasp of the situation (i.e. the context of the tour, the nature of Michael & Tom's relationship and past collaborations) and still see that if not given these through-lines, the film could still be read, understood and enjoyed for what it was trying to document.

Duck and Recover

Atomic Cafe {Jayne Loader, Kevin + Pierce Rafferty, 1982}




It's pretty difficult to pay any more compliments to this film other than those it has already earned. The device of montage and polar imagery is used in perfect form. The scrutiny of the audio and era-born music provides meat to the overriding social commentary of the found footage. The images they use more often than not speak for themselves.

Of course the majority of the information (or misinformation rather) that is cut together does its job of shooting America's Atomic Age and Cold War policies of hysteria in the foot. However, some elements are taken out of context in a questionable manner. What I find interesting, after further reading, is a specific inconsistency on which several sequences of this film thrive. In the criticism of modern agenda-oriented documentaries, this forcing-of-the-hand would have been red flagged from the get-go.

That inconsistency is the use of "duck and cover" reels that have become so well circulated in contemporary wartime satire. Apparently these segments of footage actually misrepresent the intentions of these "preventative" drills. Along with a few internet sources, I asked my mother over the phone about these drills, as she was attending school during the Red Scare of the Cold War era. She said at her boarding school in Rhode Island, her buildings were all loose mortar with weak steal framing, and ducking under their desks was a measure to avoid debris in case of a nearby bombing. Another source on one internet forum addressing this question explained that many school houses at that time still had very high windows left over from the days before electricity, and the drill was meant to protect them from shards of glass loosed by sonic impact. My impression is that these drills were not advertised as "ways to survive" a direct atomic attack, but rather for more practical civil defense regarding low-impact bombing areas (or in short, peripheral damage zones).

Of course the ridiculousness of many of the frivolous cautionary measures shoveled out by the government during the Cold war stand without question as horrific but true. Also, the assumed air of authority by a government as confused about atomic fallout as the general public still rings as an act of smarmy fear-mongering. This "duck" film however, seems to be heaping anger on a plate that's already full enough with our country's other failures at sanity, without any outside help from clever placement and editing. It's a shame that this is the only hole I can find in the film's netting. The rest of the film seems so hard to criticize, simply because of its (shameful) social and historical accuracy.

Bite Your Lip, Hold Their Nose

Titicut Follies {Fred Wiseman, 1967}

Pictures that involve reform, in my opinion, all deserve to be produced under the same canopy of "direct cinema" as Titicut Follies. It is this tight-lipped cinematic style that makes the images of Follies cause a similar delirium in its viewers as in the patients of the facility it documents.

Wiseman seats his camera ambiguously in the back of the room, often cutting only between the figures in full, and then to their faces, which carry a range of both vacant and terrifying expressions. We sit in our auditorium chairs as viewers, staring back ourselves with the same vacant and terrifying expressions. Often the patients walk bare across cold cement floors contrasted by a gaggle of guards clad still in their uniforms accompanying them. This regulatory practice of stripping patients to prevent the transportation of dangerous items (razors, rope, etc.) calls into question a different ethical dilemma when captured so implicitly on film. Does the artistic dictum of ambivalent truth really justify the shedding of these helplessly inturned people's most basic layers of privacy?

Also, what of the film's initially passive but ultimately relentless scrutiny of the administrators present in the institution? Is there an understood right of the public to be allowed access to every minute detail or procedure that goes on in the penitentiaries funded by their tax dollars?

In my personal opinion, there is a strange limbo in the limits of privacy that becomes muddled when someone of seemingly little personal or psychological restraint, who having lost some level of control is accused of a crime and sentenced to imprisonment alongside medical treatment. It seems that the criminal act, if judged correctly by our system of law, should warrant the kinds of humiliating but often sadly necessary statutes that exist within these institutions.

That being said, I am of the opinion that the public has a right to know what goes on behind any closed door, and thus, I feel that Wiseman is perfectly within his bounds as an artist and a public servant in making this film. Now whether or not you think this film is a cake walk, is the real question. I personally enjoy how remorselessly Wiseman shoves his imagery down your nose and funnels it in your tummy, whether you're able to stomach it or not. And we all know, censors and of course federal legislators have the weakest stomachs of them all.

Intimately Lightweight

Primary {Robert Drew & Co, 1960}

As an extension of LIFE magazine's photojournalistic methodology, Primary does something quite outstanding in progressing the realm of candid art. The economy and mobility offered by the introduction of the first lightweight synchronized sound systems certainly spawned the first instances of true reportage in documentary cinema. Also, the collectivist approach of Robert Drew's team in both the editing and capturing created what has become the modern standard of "coverage" in following cultural and political happenings.

What struck me as unique about Primary is the sense of historical present offered by the absence of both interviews and inserted text. This observational film escapes the limitations of narrative reorganization (whether intentional or accidental) by arranging its material in a forthright, highly photographic manner. It shows the two candidates out in public working, not as talking heads, or up on pulpits. It even shows, without a fixed perspective, the mundanely repetitive nature of the work that these candidates assign themselves. The film makes its purpose one of revelation, not motivation, and thus frees itself from being in any way idiosyncratic or commanding in its examination.

Hypersensitive

Czech Dream {Vít Klusák/Filip Remunda, 2004}



Czech Dream certainly calls into question a few ideas that are tough to swallow, but do they chew it up for you the right way? Of course there is the obvious examination of our susceptibility to corporate marketing, but more interestingly, the film corners itself into a whirl of controversy by causing us to ask whether a hoax of this size can really be considered an act of artistic merit. At the film's conclusion, when the facade is dropped and the masses who gather learn that they've been fooled, Remunda and Klusak (who have been present for the entire process as the face of this fabricated market,) take the heat well as they explain their intentions to this reasonably upset crowd. However, seeing those who have gone out of their way in search of lower prices reads to me as an unfair exploitation of the desperation inherent in a tattered economic system. I'm one for seeing capitalism bare ass with its pants around its knees, but if you were to trick my grandmother into waddling across a field on legs riddled with rheumatoid arthritis, we'd have a few words.

To me, it appears that the pair of filmmaker's are assigning a grounded vendetta against capitalism on top of what most would consider a rather harmless product of the capitalist system. Hypermarkets dont seem villainous enough for this argument. In fact, they're actually painted here as a relatively positive symbol of progress in an economically crippled and confused country as the Czech Republic.

However, shedding light on the advertising groups who put together these psychologically attractive marketing packages works much better for the pair's thesis. The segments they have of their arguments with the ad executives are priceless, portraying them as a mesh of the utopian idealist, the sleek corporate gear, and the heady, presumptuous "artiste." They do a wonderful job of fooling those involved in commercial exposure and distribution into thinking they are showcasing their talents, while in reality they are really contributing to damaging their own image as a reputable enterprise.

Edward Scissorhands

Edward Scissorhands {Tim Burton, 1990}



Its really tragic that Tim Burton's inner child as a method of cinematic articulation has had the adverse effect of prefacing a sort of "eyeliner manifesto." For a whole generation of delusional, upper to middle class junior high mall-rats, this film is a fashion staple for those teens bent on externalizing their angst with as much leather as possible. Tim Burton seems to have intended a far more personal allegory dealing with alienation and abandonment, but instead his childhood drawings from which the basis of the film was derived, have been robbed of their originality by the greedy tentacles of gothic cult mania. If removed from its post-premiere ripple effect, however, Burton's magical vision stands as pruned and flawless as one of the eponymous Eddie's garden sculpture's.

The film is a treat for those who are used to sorting a difficult subtext. Its wonderfully straightforward, without relinquishing any of the depth in its social commentary. It's like Burton sits you down in the back yard, in a prim yellow lawn chair, puts you at ease with a shoulder touch of quirky simplicity, and then proceeds to dexterously sheer out a new hairdo without you ever having noticed a thing. Tim Burton makes his film so easy to read that exploring the different platitudes of the story itself seems irrelevant. This is a movie you should just see, as stupid as that sounds, because you'll get it better than if I stammer in this review to summarize this efficient, autonomous piece of film.

Spin

Spin {Brian Springer, 1995}



Calculated Truth

For me, prescience and poignancy are more valuable than urgency or agenda in any work that attempts to properly canvas our country's modern politics. It is especially enjoyable to witness how a piece like Brian Springer's 1995 Documentary Spin homogenizes a sensitivity to bias with an obvious call to action. The uncanny scrutiny provided by Springer's use of the unique informational source of unedited (or "unspun") satellite feeds from major news networks lends his content a level of validity that comes with any form of dedication to research like the kind he exhibits here.

Along with a fantastic soundscape (ripe with the creepy ambient buzzing pops and cavernous space rattle that could make any piece ominous) and a carefully narrated text that uses his title word Spin as a brilliant foundation for both a literal and subtextual discussion of media content, Springer most eloquently employs motivated edits in a way separate from how our favorite blood-boiling, polarized documentarians tend to use their censor scissors to shepherd an audience into their own opinion corral.

Unlike the favoritism and partiality (insert sigh here) that Michael Moore and Alex Jones have a penchant for, Springer strings only a subtle hint of a leftist approach in his composition. Unfortunately inherent in any filtering (or "spin") of media is an air of zeitgeist that most viewers dont appreciate. Instead, here, Springer simply rattles out a thesis that asks "what are we really missing" without asking it with a raised eyebrow.