How Technology Alters Art

INT. - ART VIDEO HELL

I'm looking back at this video over a year since I released it to see what I've learned, or what observations I can draw that have some chance of being anything but trite and obvious.

If you choose to view the video, please watch it in HD. You may want to seek out the mirrored version that probably works better in Vimeo, and which also contains more direct links to the discussion that led to making it. I'm not really sure what species of self-sabotage inspires me to embed the YouTube version, aside from some fairly pointless technical curiosity.



Resisting the temptation to speculate, it seems to me one of the main lessons about this work, and its practical invisibility, is that, whereas James Benning (whose long form films were a source of inspiration) would only show his films under controlled conditions, usually in a loft or artist space where distractions could be kept to a minimum, this video is only available online, except to myself. One other reason for revisiting this one is that it was my submission recently for the Guggenheim Biennial, though I suspect, having heard nothing back they too had no patience for something this indirect and coy.

One benefit of following the video to YouTube would be that the related videos there include at least some of James Benning's work, though many would likely argue that you can't really view them on YouTube and fairly comprehend or appreciate them. But if you're open-minded and interested in the issues they seem to address, you can at least get a rough sense of them that way.

My goals with this piece were mainly to see how and whether viewers would respond to something meant to elicit a degree of free form association and questioning, rather than elicit a more specific and manipulated response, as is the usual pattern for most commercial works, and perhaps even more so, the pressure that exists for most artists (and practical people too) who make online streaming videos that must fight instantly and aggressively for a viewer's attention, often in the face of many, many distractions.

It seems clear to me that a video like this has very little chance of having the desired effect in the context of daily, ordinary levels of distraction and bombardment by multiple sources of noise and spectacle. I'm not saying this is a surprise. It seems to confirm many of the things I'd suspected at the time I was talking about Benning with other art film makers, though I still wonder whether my lack of any serious promotional effort was not also a form of self-fulfilling prophesy?

But I welcome any comments you might have, especially those who for some reason manage to view the entire 8 minutes 20 seconds without turning to something more "gripping." Also of interest would be comments from those who found it too hard to watch in its entirety, though I'm fairly sure that's most of those who may have watched it.

James Benning and Direct Cinema

(adapted from a posting on vimeo, in the group The Pictures Don't Move)

I want to profile an interesting independent filmmaker here, James Benning. I first heard about Benning from a vimeo user, Made for Full Screen. Benning fascinates me first of all for at least one of his films that I haven't seen, but that I wish I could find and view, in part because it happens to tie into my own family history, and I'd really rather talk about it from a base of experience, rather than what I infer from what I can find to read about his approach.

The film I'm thinking of is Deseret (1995), reviewed at the link.



While I don't want to make too much of it without seeing it, there seems to be a difference between Benning's practice and what used to be said about Direct Cinema or Cinéma vérité, often characterizes as filmmaking that consisted of plopping down a camera on a tripod and recording directly whatever happened in front of the lens.

While there's an element of that in what Benning is doing, there's also far more. What I have managed to see, mostly in the form of low-quality YouTube excerpts, since Benning's work has not been released on VHS or DVD, but has been broadcast on, for instance, German television. Most of his films seem to run between 90 and 100 minutes. They consist largely of long static shots that apparently illustrate particular lines of text, or audio readings of particular lines or statements.

The divergence is even greater with his Utopia, excerpts of which are found on the Yoob, and are reviewed here where parts of the soundtrack from another documentary are set against his static shots of mostly Southwestern U.S. landscapes and "townscapes."

The shooting style is similar, but there is editing going on here, editing that seems to imply some meaning, some guidance or direction of the viewer, at least in terms of selecting statements to illustrate, and choosing the order in which they are presented. I'm reminded of Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali's landmark film Un chien andalou, or at least the received wisdom I was given as to what it was "about." The irresistable human impulse to find patterns in chaos, to make sense of the random and the senseless.

I really want to see both films in their entirety, in part because it seems refreshing compared to the commercially-dictated sort of editing one might see if the same subject were shot for, say, a History Channel or Discovery Channel "documentary," where topics are discussed, dumbed-down, and manipulated, all to apparently conform to the convention of commercial "breaks."

I don't know about anyone else, but I know I find that particular structure fairly annoying, especially when it comes to my attention (and it usually seems to after 10 minutes or so).

Anyway, as I've said elsewhere, I'm looking forward to any dialogue to be sparked by the films/videos presented here (The Pictures Don't Move). On a number of different levels.

I think I need to go out and shoot something. I said that almost a week ago and yet I am almost paralyzed about doing this, and have instead spent a week looking for every possible distraction from creating anything or recording anything, up until, at least, putting together my first rough, shared cut of Ockham's Razor.