From the long list of journals, blogs and magazines (obviously lengthened by the current strength and growth of internet publications) Film Comment was the publication that was something that I most wanted to have another look at. I had haphazardly picked it up years ago and remember being impressed by the respectfully prestigious and academically intelligent work. I hadn't expected, perhaps naively, to find such obscure film references coupled with evocate choices in photos and modern film pieces. Despite the initial pleasure I received from finding the publication, I haven't looked at it since. Now going back to it I was again surprised. It was better, more engaging, and more independence inspiring than I remembered!
The publication seems to be a well rounded work featuring articles from around the world. (In this particular issue Sept/Oct. 2008 main pieces were on the Japanese, French and British supplemented by smaller articles and reviews also mentioning world issues with and in film.) It also seems to spend an equalish amount of time on films of the mainstream, art house, and more obscure rarely seen works. Two pieces in this publication caught my attention, were the first that I read, and seem indicative to what the magazine wants to represent. These two articles are not, outright, about media making currently. But they are about a film and art culture and ideas of resistance that I believe are just as important and applicable when thinking about making film in 2008.
A Samurai Among Farmers: Rejecting the orthodoxies of postwar Japanese society, Nagisa Oshima created a radical and uniquely protean body of work/By Tony Rayns
The first thing to remark on this (as with the next) article is the remarkably drawing title. Halfway into the first paragraph Rayns states that had Nagisa Oshima been born French “he'd be as well known as Godard--and probably more influential”.(p53) This a bold statement to begin an article with. Luckily the article takes a thorough look through Oshima's filmography with reasons and inspirations for his work. It left me to feel his work does contain this potential (without ever seeing one of his films!)
. Oshima left his contract at Shochiku Ofuna Studio and pursued his own work. Oshima worked without the constraints of any particular allegiance and felt himself free to criticize any thing that moved/angered/inspired him. Throughout his career funding was not easy to come by as he refused to standardize and censor his work. He would work doing TV spots and receive small art house and foreign funds to complete his films. Now most of his films are, unfortunately, hard to come by but some are currently on a touring retrospective organized by James Quant. (This tour will be in Minneapolis Nov. 5th through the 23rd and in Chicago Jan-Feb).
While many of his Japanese contemporaries were content simply adding their touch to genre films, Oshima continued to make films of different structures, techniques, and ideologies. This article brings one of world cinema's greatest yet nearly forgotten artists the attention he deserves. I think that is a main point of what this publication tries to do, investigate and discuss work and people that deserve to be acknowledged from a thorough, entertaining and critical standpoint.
*Ideally, I hope to attend some of the viewings.
Invocation of my Demon Brother: Actor, filmmaker, and mystic nomad Pierre Clementi-the French undergrounds missing link/By Michael Chaiken
I think I may have fallen in love sitting at the counter of a downtown George Webbs. Not with the random man starring at me as he sipped his cola from a tall styrofoam cup, but with a small thumbnail picture towards the back of the magazine. Pierre Clementi, as the article's title suggests, was a French actor and director. He, similar to Oshima, didn't work within any industry boundaries. He would take projects that would coincide with inner quests. He would take projects where he collaborated with friends. He also took work for and in big name projects such as Bertolucci's The Conformist and Buñuel's Belle Du Jour. Essentially he did whatever he wanted, however he felt inspired. Pierre allowed the work to transform him, for his body to become an avatar for roles. Life and film work became blended. He was a beautiful genius (as the article suggests) that sacrificed himself for art. The works that he directed himself were shot with a Beaulieu 16 mm camera. Clementi's approach to creating was a very, to apply a modern term, diy approach to film.
*It is also important to look at this, in our age of media, where many artists justify creating and lending their works to commercials or major motions pictures with the reasoning that it is the only way that they can make money and produce more work. There are other ways to go about it as in Clementi's case, and ways of actually staying true to that reasoning, taking that money and putting it towards passionate independent productions as in Oshima's case.
Wednesday, October 29, 2008
Monday, October 27, 2008
Field Report 2 Act/React: WorkTogether
Control, control, control, control. The exhibit currently inhabiting the Milwaukee Art Museum (MAM) features interactive works from some of today's most prominent and imaginary media artists. These artists have reached new places in the inclusion of the audience into art piece installations within the museum and gallery experience. This particular sort of audience/art convergence was not possible before the technological advancements and eventual economic availability of video equipment. Lev Manovich, media theorist, points to the idea that people have always been participating in works of art. With books and movies the person engaged with the material is relied upon to fill in the gaps of the storyline. Video games function in a similar way to the sort of works on display at MAM. They both require the participant to step up and into the work, to make choices and create changes. Roger Ebert felt video game works were inferior to classical film work because the artist hands over some authorial control to the participant. Is this so? What are the limits that surround some of these pieces residing in the Act/React exhibit? How they are formed and what is the way/potential for people to change them?
These sorts of works now showing are examples of how people can interact through technology. It has already been shown in many different ways that people can come together to create and change works. For example a drawing can be posted as a base for others to add to, changing the images and meaning. Sculptures can be movable objects for a person or people to manipulate and rearrange. The Act/React installations allow the viewers to change the representation and works in a variance of ways that are particular to each piece. These projects all rely on strong complex technology to function. It seems to beg a question as to how much an artist has to do with the project or how much the technician rigging the technology has to do with the piece. Assuming the artist happens to understand these technological issues and has the ability to assemble them, they themselves would be solely responsible for creating the world that the audience enters into. (If not, the process would be one of collabortion with the technician) The artist would set the parameters for the world and what can go on in it.
Camille Utterback and Daniel Rozin both use specialized computer programs , cameras, and a projector in order to create their works. Utterback, with her untitled works 5 and 6, invites the visitors physical actions to be captured and turned into lines or splotches on a screen where a work is already in progress. Depending on where a person would stand or move, a computer generates a line or shape that represents them on the screen. It is essentially an abstraction of the participant working in conjunction with a preset computer program. The marks that others before them created are in constant flux as new viewers engage with the pieces. The marks that are made on the screen are done by the viewer, but it is only due to the computers programming that this piece is possible. Therefore even though the viewer is participating in this event, it is the artist and her use of technology that has made every movement on the screen possible. She has decided how the world of the piece will be mapped and how each participant will have the potential to the visually represented. In this way Roger Ebert's statement is right and wrong. The artist is giving the illusion of handing over control to the audience when, in reality, they are a sort of god presiding over their work; just as they would over a traditional film.
Rozin's work functions in a similar way to that of Utterback. As mentioned, they both use the same devices to create and make their works possible. Rozin takes a less abstract approach to representing the participating audience. As the viewer enters the piece Snow Mirror, pixels (the smallest digital particles) cling to the human forms transforming them into fuzzy snowy outlines. The room in which the exhibit is installed is pitch black which throws one' s perception of spatial relations as if you were engulfed in a snowstorm. When looking at your image and the image of the another in the work, it is hard to tell how close or far apart you actually are from that other person in the relation to the space both inside and outside the piece . Again, though each person will have a different experience in the snowstorm, it is only because Rozin has created its world and laid out the parameters and restrictions.
All in all the experience of the museum was a pleasant one (though one that, as it was commented to me, would have perhaps been enhanced by the use of certain hallucinogenic substances, which would have made for quite the collaborative interactive process. Artist, human, computer, and nature...or chemical) It was very fun/entertaining to watch people react to the pieces and to do so yourself. The artist as ultimate creator still seems to reign, but the new processes in art engage people in new ways to spark interest. To quote George Fifield in saying “at its best” the art in these exhibits will inspire people to re-examine themselves, the way they interact with each other and the world at large.
These sorts of works now showing are examples of how people can interact through technology. It has already been shown in many different ways that people can come together to create and change works. For example a drawing can be posted as a base for others to add to, changing the images and meaning. Sculptures can be movable objects for a person or people to manipulate and rearrange. The Act/React installations allow the viewers to change the representation and works in a variance of ways that are particular to each piece. These projects all rely on strong complex technology to function. It seems to beg a question as to how much an artist has to do with the project or how much the technician rigging the technology has to do with the piece. Assuming the artist happens to understand these technological issues and has the ability to assemble them, they themselves would be solely responsible for creating the world that the audience enters into. (If not, the process would be one of collabortion with the technician) The artist would set the parameters for the world and what can go on in it.
Camille Utterback and Daniel Rozin both use specialized computer programs , cameras, and a projector in order to create their works. Utterback, with her untitled works 5 and 6, invites the visitors physical actions to be captured and turned into lines or splotches on a screen where a work is already in progress. Depending on where a person would stand or move, a computer generates a line or shape that represents them on the screen. It is essentially an abstraction of the participant working in conjunction with a preset computer program. The marks that others before them created are in constant flux as new viewers engage with the pieces. The marks that are made on the screen are done by the viewer, but it is only due to the computers programming that this piece is possible. Therefore even though the viewer is participating in this event, it is the artist and her use of technology that has made every movement on the screen possible. She has decided how the world of the piece will be mapped and how each participant will have the potential to the visually represented. In this way Roger Ebert's statement is right and wrong. The artist is giving the illusion of handing over control to the audience when, in reality, they are a sort of god presiding over their work; just as they would over a traditional film.
Rozin's work functions in a similar way to that of Utterback. As mentioned, they both use the same devices to create and make their works possible. Rozin takes a less abstract approach to representing the participating audience. As the viewer enters the piece Snow Mirror, pixels (the smallest digital particles) cling to the human forms transforming them into fuzzy snowy outlines. The room in which the exhibit is installed is pitch black which throws one' s perception of spatial relations as if you were engulfed in a snowstorm. When looking at your image and the image of the another in the work, it is hard to tell how close or far apart you actually are from that other person in the relation to the space both inside and outside the piece . Again, though each person will have a different experience in the snowstorm, it is only because Rozin has created its world and laid out the parameters and restrictions.
All in all the experience of the museum was a pleasant one (though one that, as it was commented to me, would have perhaps been enhanced by the use of certain hallucinogenic substances, which would have made for quite the collaborative interactive process. Artist, human, computer, and nature...or chemical) It was very fun/entertaining to watch people react to the pieces and to do so yourself. The artist as ultimate creator still seems to reign, but the new processes in art engage people in new ways to spark interest. To quote George Fifield in saying “at its best” the art in these exhibits will inspire people to re-examine themselves, the way they interact with each other and the world at large.
Monday, October 6, 2008
Field Report: Handmade Emulsion and Crab Cages
“The Planning” of Film
The planning of a film is something that has always sort of interested me. I have recently been enrolled in a film studies class where it was stated that ALL films are very carefully planned. Down to every attentive detail. When this was said it was actually only (for the purposes of the class) in reference to pop culture cinema. I think that this was just said to provide an easy outline to look at a film for the first time film students. It kind of distressed me though. It was not a wild or necessarily wrong statement but personally, I believe that some of the best stuff in cinema comes from accidents and coincidences or randoms that occur during the filmmaking. That's what can make magic. It is sometimes the planning that can outline a film and create a frame for something beautiful. An outline that is willing to accept what the medium and its influences can add to a piece. Like in the case of Robert Schaller or David Gattens What the Water Said nos 1-3.. It seems to be precisely the mix of careful planning and the acceptance of accidents.
At the Robert Schaller screening a man from the audience remarked that one of his films seemed very calculated. (The film that had been screened featured a musical composition with dancing woman and 3 sideways projectors.) He was wondering what Roberts plan had been. Robert had in fact worked very closely with the choreographer (who also danced in the piece) to present their interpretation of another written work and use a series of complicated math equations to evoke and pull from the readings. They did this through dance movements and the insertion of lines chosen from the previously written work by this complex math equation. They worked very had to create this framework without necessarily knowing how it would actually all come together and speak through the screen. It was this very deliberate set up to allow random seeming magic to happen.
David Gatten set film out in crab traps, let it wash along the beach etc. to get the marks that he show up in his film. He also recorded the water sound. Here he planned out these creative ways to bring movement and marking to film. He had no real way of knowing how this would turn out. What the water said was probably just as interesting or new to him as it is to an audience, yet he lined up a way to make this happen I think there is this parallel between how the two artist mold and allow their art to form,
The planning of a film is something that has always sort of interested me. I have recently been enrolled in a film studies class where it was stated that ALL films are very carefully planned. Down to every attentive detail. When this was said it was actually only (for the purposes of the class) in reference to pop culture cinema. I think that this was just said to provide an easy outline to look at a film for the first time film students. It kind of distressed me though. It was not a wild or necessarily wrong statement but personally, I believe that some of the best stuff in cinema comes from accidents and coincidences or randoms that occur during the filmmaking. That's what can make magic. It is sometimes the planning that can outline a film and create a frame for something beautiful. An outline that is willing to accept what the medium and its influences can add to a piece. Like in the case of Robert Schaller or David Gattens What the Water Said nos 1-3.. It seems to be precisely the mix of careful planning and the acceptance of accidents.
At the Robert Schaller screening a man from the audience remarked that one of his films seemed very calculated. (The film that had been screened featured a musical composition with dancing woman and 3 sideways projectors.) He was wondering what Roberts plan had been. Robert had in fact worked very closely with the choreographer (who also danced in the piece) to present their interpretation of another written work and use a series of complicated math equations to evoke and pull from the readings. They did this through dance movements and the insertion of lines chosen from the previously written work by this complex math equation. They worked very had to create this framework without necessarily knowing how it would actually all come together and speak through the screen. It was this very deliberate set up to allow random seeming magic to happen.
David Gatten set film out in crab traps, let it wash along the beach etc. to get the marks that he show up in his film. He also recorded the water sound. Here he planned out these creative ways to bring movement and marking to film. He had no real way of knowing how this would turn out. What the water said was probably just as interesting or new to him as it is to an audience, yet he lined up a way to make this happen I think there is this parallel between how the two artist mold and allow their art to form,
Wednesday, October 1, 2008
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
