The Safety Dance

My blog reader (Vienna) has been over-stuffed with videos of culture jams.

The song above is thanks to Open Culture. “Last Thursday, in London’s Trafalgar Square, a big crowd of 13,500 got together and sang ‘Hey Jude.’ The project (arranged somewhat spontaneously by T-Mobile)…”

The one below comes to you, and me, via Groundswell.

“Last Thursday at noon, forty revelers invaded Barcelona’s unemployment office.  Members of the Spanish art collective En Medio brought levity to the typically frustrated and forlorn faces of those waiting in line, the victims of capitalism’s latest crisis.”

Detournement/recuperation who knows? T-mobile/art-collective, who cares?

Watermelon Woman: Release Our Print!

Although the film I produced, The Watermelon Woman (Cheryl Dunye, 1995) was a festival and art house hit, we never saw any money, and our master rots at DuArt. We owe them $3000 or so. We’re using a screening at Redcat in LA to ask for your help. If the print can be freed it can be re-mastered and saved by the Outfest Legacy Collection (where my own Women of Vision is already proudly archived).

Here’s info about our May 11 fundraiser.

Phyllis Stein Art would like to invite you to please join us for a reception honoring Director Cheryl Dunye.

Emceed by Dalila Ali Rajah (of AfterEllen’s Cherry Bomb.) The evening will include special guest appearances by members of the original ‘Watermelon Woman’ cast and crew. Burlesque performance by Malaika Millions. DJ set by Anna Margarita Albelo

The night will include an art auction, all proceeds go towards adding Watermelon Woman to the Outfest Legacy Collection at UCLA. Due to economic constraints, labs notoriously discard film elements – please save Watermelon Woman! Placing the film into the archive is the first and best step against film disintegration!

Notable artists contributing:
Nichole Eisenman, Ceres Madoo, Sharon Bridgeforth, Kaucyila Brooke, S. Lee Robinson, Eve Fowler, Nolan Hendrickson, Rachel Maxi

Contact: cheryl@watermelon.phyllissteinart.com

LongForm/YouTube/OxyMoron

Thanks to Chuck at the Chutry Experiment for alerting me to the fact that the docs on snagfilms are now, magically, on YouTube. You see, beyond the many feature docs that this now makes available, as well as the many other feature films and TV shows delivered via other corporate deals bent on maybe, finally, monetizing the site, this also means that my very own SCALE is on YouTube.

My reaction is ambivalent. Lots more people might view my anti-war documentary; all these people will see it in a context that is not ideal for activism, analysis, or community. Chances are they’ll watch a minute or two, and click elsewhere. However, its 60 minutes (as is true for all features) is crafted to grow and change and build, so the first few minutes relay little of what it becomes and less of what I hope to say.

When I make YouTube videos, I speak in a messy fast vernacular suited and situated for this medium. My “professional” work, is long form, produced collaboratively with a crew (cameraman, editor, producer) and is made to be screened with the lights down in a room of others driven to be there, talk after, and perhaps even do something against the war later.

These distinctions have become at once more relevant and irrelevant. As all media becomes available all the time, the careful conditions of shared activist viewing become increasingly absent and therefore more valuable and necessary. As the differences between amateur/professional and alternative/mainstream wane, our needs for “pure” acts outside of capitalism escalate. As corporations take on a larger role in alternative distribution, artists beware. When I tried to make the feature version of my documentary SCALE the main video selection on my SCALE YouTube page, I got this banner from YouTube: “We are unable to show you the original featured video for this channel due to age or location restrictions.” Snag’s corporate umbrella got my long doc onto YouTube (thanks!) but controls its terms (there’s also ads embedded!).

Dream Of Life

While the reviews of this film labeled it pretentious, I found it to walk the line gracefully, if dangerously, on just this side of inventive.

What saves it is its clear, if inexplicable commitment to collaboration. Patti Smith narrates, performs, and interacts with the faceless, mysterious filmmaker/friend? Steven Sebring. Thus when it veers to the absurdly avant-garde or unnecessarily existential we must give this all to Patti, who certainly has earned this right.

An experimental biography of a living artist like none I’ve seen, the artful filmmaking bounces about in time, identifies no one, gives little biography or background but loads of philosphy in an esoteric style well matched, it seems, to Smith’s dreams, muses and poems. The film makes the feeling of her.

Two Recent French Films: One Sings the Other Doesn’t

Here we have the 2009 Oscar nominated foreign film, The Class (Entre les Murs) exhibiting the real will and best practices of an experimental documentary: actual teacher and real students playing version of themselves in a classroom-bound, talky depiction of what and how it means to teach and learn how to be “French” in present-day multi-racial France. Disaffected from the “Camemberts” who are their chalky white and cheesy teachers, these African, Asian, Arab, and European French kids insolently and understandably find little of value from the lessons, histories, and manners dictated to them by their bourgie once-colonizers. The film presents few answers, but lots of points of view, often changing, about the meaning of education, discipline, and cross-cultural respect. Its “simple” “documentary” form allows the viewer to watch the ethics of complex social interactions play out in scene after scene lacking, or re-thinking closure, about who should be in control, and how things might change.

Meanwhile, Witnesses (Les Temoins) shows them camemberts at their unselfconscious and stereotypical worst. Revisiting the scene of AIDS arrival in France in the mid-80s, it utilizes the overly-sexed, sentimental style of dominant French cinema (everyone looks and walks like a model) to deflate the fear, anger, and the community engendered in the earliest days of HIV into a weepy set of bi-sexual love and loss stories. Boo hoo. As I’ve written about in this blog, at length, revolution (and other complex social dramas) demand more than a love story. Mainstream cinema’s will for closure, story, identification, and simplicity yet again proves only to disallow its much needed participation as a potent vessel for our engagement in the politics of culture: so, heres to the ballsy cinema experiment once again!

Hildebrand/Juhasz on Joanie 4 Jackie

I attended some of the “Media Studies in Southern California” conference sponsored last weekend by the Cultural Studies Department at Claremont Graduate University. I was most taken by my friend and colleague, Lucas Hildebrand’s presentation on the video chainletters of Joanie 4 Jackie, formerly Big Miss Moviola, once the project of Miranda July, and now the labor of love of students at Bard College. Lucas’ presentation was from his eagerly anticipated Inherent Vice: Bootleg Histories of Videotape and Copyright (Duke University Press, 2009), where he writes on analogue video, in its many forms, including these chainletters where grrls add their small private videos to a tape and it gets mailed from home to home. While at first look these VHS chainletters seem to be a dead or dying form—given the ease, access, and cost of sharing video on the internet—I realized that what they will always have over YouTube is the actual, small community that can only be created by the painstaking and careful act of choosing to attach your work to a tape/object that already has a community built on to and within it. The VHS chainletter permits the safety of the slow in the space of a movable box.

I’ve been a fan and supporter of Miranda for a long time, but hadn’t looked at those tapes from the late 90s for quite awhile. What seemed most critical was how they anticipated YouTube (in particular the vlog): lonely rural girls using video to speak to you straight from their rooms about the oppression in their home and hometown. What I didn’t think about so much at the time was how a lot of these isolated grrls being empowered by video, were actually making their tapes (about rural isolation) while attending the progressive colleges in bigger towns or cities that supported the lo-fi, autobiographical project of Miranda July. Take my student Erica Anderson, whose tape Lucas showed, and who made her amazing, minimal, camcorder video about rural life in North Dakota while living in Southern California.

While the private stories of the girls are undoubtedly true, Joanie 4 Jackie highlights that a shared, messy, home-made aesthetic that lives across the work in the tapes, even for college coeds who could make “better,” speaks volumes as a carefully constructed formal choice. This is at once another version of the retro-futurism I’ve written about earlier in this blog in relation, for instance, to Be Kind Rewind. While also being an example of why people (women) choose “bad” video as a suitable formal register for their process and place. In all cases, a fond feeling about a manufactured authenticity and wistful ethics of community registered within VHS is at play.

Art and Social Change: The BOOK

Dear Will Bradley and Charles Esche,

I chanced upon a strange booth at the book fair at the College Art Association Meetings a few weeks ago in LA. Two youngish art-boy-hipsters manned the few, eclectic books on their table. But they were engaged in a lively conversation, and couldn’t be bothered by middle-aged me. I picked up your book, Art and Social Change: A Critical Reader. What a delight! I asked to buy a copy, but this one was not for sale. Hmm. The following week I ordered it on-line, from London, paying I don’t know, maybe $65 USD, and it arrived in the mail fresh from the Tate’s bookstore a few days ago.

This letter marks my attempt to communicate several things: my hearty thanks for your collection; my interest in conecting it and you to my significantly related project Media Praxis: A Radical Website Integrating Theory, Practice, and Politics; and my hopes to raise some questions with you about books, and radical social practice.

So, your book is a huge and heavy, a weighty proof and compelling compendium of “an international selection of artists’ proposals, manifestoes, theoretical texts and public declarations” that draw out the “relationship between art, politics, and activism” across four “sections, which are centered around particular moments of conflict or upheaval: 1971, the year of the Paris Commune; 1917, the year of the Russian revolutions; 1968, a year of political turbulence on several continents; and 1989, the beginning of the end of the Soviet empire.”

My “Media Praxis” began as just such a book: a collection of writings (about revolutionary media) organized around 10 periods where a theorized practice of mediamaking was linked to a project of world changing. But, mine never became a book. It sat at two lofty American academic presses for many, many years. Both were interested enough to keep me waiting, and both eventually decided it was at once too expensive (to get the re-print rights) and too narrow in its goals to justify such costs.

Which raises my first question: about institutions for radical publishing. Where this once, not so long ago, was the University Press, we all understand that they are not currently able to take such (economic) risks. Your big book came out from Tate Publishing, as part of an art exhibit held in Holland. How do you understand the role of art institutions in our world of increasingly decreasing radical public spheres?

With no publisher to be found, I was forced to re-think my book as a digital “publication,” easy enough, given that I’m a Full Professor and have little to gain from anyone’s stamp of approval.  My first thought (digital novice), was just to plant the words up there: text for free on the internet. As you can see, after consideration and conversation with others more versed in web-publishing, the project grew into media praxis itself: activist media invested in interactive engagements in history making, media theorizing, and media making in the name of change.

So, back to your BOOK. Our goals are similar: introducing committed artists and intellectuals to an archive of inspiring historical documents. But yours is expensive. and hard to get. It is linked to something that was in a room, but no longer available. Mine, meanwhile, sits on the internet, used and seen primarily by my under-graduate students. What thoughts does this raise for you about radical social/art practices? Given that I will be continuing to grown the “publishing” of my current writings about YouTube on-line this summer, I am particularly interested to think about questions of access, use, method, interactivity, and ephemerality in relation to radical culture (on and off line).

I look forward to your response!

Alex Juhasz

Attending to the 6th Anniversary of the War in Iraq

March 19 marks the 6th anniversary of the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq.

As one small gesture against the ongoing war, I announce the launch of the website for my anti-war video documentary: SCALE: Measuring Might in the Media Age (2008).

My quirky feminist documentary plays the drama of two leftist sisters (Antonia and I) against the big stage of US empire, corporate greed, and media escalation.

You can watch “SCALE” for free at snagfilms.com.
Or see activists discussing scale on youtube.
You could also set up a screening of SCALE with friends, family, students, or colleagues.
The documentary raises questions about the power of activism and media that seem only more pertinent in our hard times. There’s also a discussion guide on the website.

In any case, I urge you to take a minute, an hour, or the day to mark your continued opposition.

United for Peace and Justice calls for action.

Learning from Fred: Published at TCR

It appears this commentary was published in September. Since you have to pay to see it at Teacher’s College Record, here’s a version for free:

In this commentary, I will look at the highly popular video production of 14-year old Lucas Cruikshank, known on YouTube as Fred. With a quarter of a million subscribers (who are primarily, it seems, other kids who—unlike me—must find the unfettered quality of Fred’s juvenile humor and subject matter delightful), and with no interfering adult (or corporate) input, the fact of Fred points to the relevance, and obstacles, of YouTube for education. Yes, regular people, even kids, can (squeakily) speak as they wish and be heard without interference, but what, we must ask, can Fred teach us, and how might he lead us to learn?

In the Fall of 2007, I taught an innovative course, Learning From YouTube, attempting to get to the bottom of this recent phenomenon by situating our class entirely within its strict confines. All course assignments took the form of comments or videos, all classes were taped, uploaded, and made public on YouTube, and research was limited to within its pages. As a class we learned many ways that this poster-child for the wonders of web 2.0 is not well suited for the hard work of teaching and learning. In this commentary, I will attempt to apply some of these lessons to the highly popular video production of 14-year old Lucas Cruikshank, known on YouTube as Fred. In his videos, this rural boy, the illegitimate son of a mannish, drunken, largely absent Mom and an imprisoned, murderer Dad, uses basic editing software to speed up to the highest of squeaks his unscripted, direct-to-camera rants about life at his place: learning to shave his face like his Mom does, wildly jumping on her bed when she’s not around, flushing his meds down the toilet when he’s home alone. With a quarter of a million subscribers (who are primarily, it seems, other kids who—unlike me—must find the unfettered quality of Fred’s juvenile humor and subject matter delightful), and with no interfering adult (or corporate) input, the fact of Fred points to the relevance, and obstacles, of YouTube for education. Yes, regular people, even kids, can (squeakily) speak as they wish and be heard without interference, but what, we must ask, can Fred teach us, and how might he lead us to learn?

YouTube has two primary forms: the corporate video and the video blog (vlog). Fred runs one of the site’s most popular vlogs in its history. His videos are the typically “bad” videos of regular folk: paying little attention to aesthetics while making use of low-end, home technology to carefully attend to his daily life and thoughts. When he speeds up his voice, and jump-cuts it even faster, the form goes from bad to worse, which is part of the fun and also the main joke (making it almost unbearable for sensitive adult ears: ha ha!). All this bad form (and content) verifies the hand of an amateur and the space of the mundane while propelling Fred’s images around the net, for these very same formal qualities are the mark of his authenticity (kid made, adult scorned, kid approved). Like all vlogs, Fred’s videos are word reliant and accrue their value through Fred’s “suffering” (his Mom is missing), “talent” (he gracefully dives into his teeny-tiny back-yard kiddie pool: “it’s so big!”), and “humor”(he cuts up his Mom’s pantyhose. What a bad boy!). Notably, all three of these qualities are questionable enough for me to situate within scare-quotes; the ironic mimicry of Fred’s enterprise is also definitive. Suffering, talent, and humor are less ambiguous in YouTube’s other signature form, the “corporate” video. These always look good—like mainstream media—because they are made by professionals, are stolen from TV, or are re-cut mainstream productions. They express ideas about dominant culture, in the music-driven, glossy, vernacular of music videos, commercials, and comics.

Although Fred’s videos are almost unwatchable for those of the calmer generations, we geriatrics still capable of sentences expressed in real time, have much to learn from them. Their popularity among the under-15 set is not a fluke. Rather, it marks Fred’s fans’ appreciation of how Cruikshank plays against and with the already calcifying (two-year old) stylistic distinctions I set out above. I mark his popularity as an indication of how well Fred effortlessly situates himself within the amateur/professional divide and between three other live tensions that define our media moment, and our lives within it:

Boredom/distraction: Fred (like his teen-viewers) makes these trifles because he is stuck at home with nothing to do. He’s BORED. And yet, Fred (like his adoring fans) couldn’t really be exactly bored, as he’s never still long enough to get to this fully depleted state. He’s jumping from YouTube, to texting his friend Judy, to his back yard and garage. Too distracted, speedy, and hyperactive to have time to get really bored (like we used to in the oh so media-pure days of hay rides and 4-H). But Fred knows this. His self-awareness is marked in both his rapid form and his ADD content. Fred’s hyper-drive parodies the hyperactivity that is said, by grown-ups, to be borne of a life lived within, and never outside of media. Perhaps Lucas’s life is actually slow?

Real/Parody: Fred is watchable, and lovable, as is true for all vloggers, because he is visibly himself. A regular, rural kid from Nebraska in a tract home made apparent through his consumer camcorder: plush couch, wood-paneling, corn fields. And yet, this likably real Lucas is notably and obviously playing the character Fred: a boy with an alchoholic mother who probably is a prostitute and a father in the State Pen. Fred artfully blends several familiar media languages of the moment. First hurrying up the mundane, boring vlog, he then inserts the comedic preoccupations of a current Hollywood favorite, the man-boy genre where adults play men who cherish the lives, loves, needs, and habits of adolescents. Fred skews it only slightly younger, creating the boy-boy genre, I suppose. Not a true picture of any boy, Fred does truly depict what boys find funny by making use of two YouTube languages (bad and good) already overly familiar to over-mediated kids.

Isolation/Community: Of course, Fred is alone in Nebraska, which initiates his boredom which drives him to the web, and there he meets endless, interchangeable youths, also so driven to the internet; and there they parody him, in less-worthy homages, and so meet, sort of, still of course stuck in their bedrooms, but endlessly reflecting each other’s loneliness and boredom. This is ever the state of youth, or ever more so the state of today’s digital youth who don’t ever go out to play together perhaps because they’ve been convinced that this “community” of dopplegangers has a higher value, allowing them, as it does,  to make another video…

YouTube draws users by fueling a desire for self-expression and community. While many come to the site to be seen and heard by others, to make friends, they are much better served by places like the real world or MySpace. For the very tools and structures for community-building which are hallmarks of web 2.0—those which link, gather, index, search, version, and allow participation, commenting, and networking—are studiously refused on the site, even as YouTube remains its poster-child. Why can’t you comment in real time? Why aren’t there bulletin boards? Why won’t the site allow you to post other things next to your videos? YouTube is a place to upload and store (and move off) videos. The very paucity of its secondary functions underlines its primary purpose: moving its users’ eyeballs aimlessly and without direction, scheme, or map, across its unparalleled archive of moving images and associated advertisements.

Despite, or perhaps because of the same time paucity and popularity of his oeuvre, it seems critical to consider what Fred might teach educators, people interested in media literacy, or youth media. First, our work with young people needs to enter at the same precarious fault-lines that Fred highlights so well: professional/amateur, boredom/distraction, real/parody, isolation/community. Fred teaches us that these are the current pre-occupations of his audience. Certainly the live classroom is typically structured differently: around an assumed expertise, attention, depth, and community. Fred’s pedagogy asks us to consider whether it is possible to maintain the best of these traditional methods, while unsettling others, as kids are doing without our guidance in their mediated worlds. A quality classroom can best the quick highs of isolated YouTube distraction when we also dare to bring to it some of what works well on YouTube:

1)

Media Literacy on YouTube: Now that more and more people can and do make media, media literacy must become a central component to this practice. Access to tools of production and distribution are a first step, but never enough on their own. Rather, students need to learn media history, aesthetics, story-telling, and analysis as they play with, and enjoy, newly accessible technologies. This can be part of the fun. Media literacy is a tool in itself, allowing for better images, more artful modes of expression, and access to a history of talented people who’ve figured out many things already. Media literacy needs to happen at school, and it should be about what students love, Fred for instance. However, given that young people are learning what YouTube videos should look like on YouTube, media literacy must also come to them via YouTube, without adult interference.

2)

Kid authored, Laugh filled. So, who better to do this than kids? Fred’s viewership proves that kids are there, watching and making. How do we tap this sea of bored, lonely teenagers to create stuff that they want to see (that is funny) but that has a media literacy content as well? Certainly, videos like Fred’s—by kids for kids that kids love to watch—tell us much of what we might want to know about their current tastes, habits, and interests. And this is a form of literacy, as I’ve attempted to indicate above, just one focused on the more banal and juvenile of aims. Couldn’t these be productively mined and focused towards aims that include, but move beyond humor and YouTube? Couldn’t this be organized on YouTube?

3)

Get Off YouTube. Kids and others go to YouTube to waste time. YouTube is an at-home or mobile, viewer-controlled delivery system of delectable media morsels. On this private postmodern TV of distraction, discrete bites of video are controlled by the discrete eye of each viewer, linked into an endless chain of immediate but forgettable gratification that can only be satisfied by another video. The best way to stop this cycle is to get off. YouTube needs to be complemented by more focused, communal, and expert-led sites of learning. Even the most moving of videos needs to be connected to something (other than another short video)—people, community, ideas, other videos to which it has a coherent link—if it is to create what education does best: action over distraction, deep knowledge instead of free-floating ideas, connection over the quick link, community instead of the isolated individual.

Cite This Article as: Teachers College Record, Date Published: September 08, 2008
http://www.tcrecord.org ID Number: 15367, Date Accessed: 3/10/2009 1:23:32 PM

Avant Avant-Doc: Painleve goes to the Woman’s Building

I’m stuck in Peoria. Really. Trying to get home for my daughter’s birthday dinner (I failed. argh) after participating in an invigorating conference that attended to intersections of avant-garde and documentary film and was organized by a hard-working team of grad students at the University of Iowa. While the whole day of talks that I attended was impressive and edifying, I want to highlight a few presentations that introduced me to new work, and new ways of thinking about documentary, which is always the hoped-for take-home from a conference. Alive Lovejoy presented three historical moments from her extensive research into the experimental documentary production of the Czech and Slovak Lands: an amazing body of diverse, complex, and unique films, formed before, in, around, and after multiple regime changes, that used a range of documentary practices to evoke subtle critiques (often expressed within the aesthetic not the rhetoric of the frame) of lived situations. Dennis Hanlon introduced me to several radical uses of the sequence shot (long take) by Latin American documentarians, the Bolivian, Jorge Sanjines, in particular, who invested in imagining the incorporation of indigenous interpretations of time into his documentary practice. And James Cahill introduced me to the strikingly weird docs of Jean Painleve, a French surrealist, who used scientific and medical documentation to evoke the sexual and psychic undertones of the natural world.

Interestingly, terms Cahill mustered to make his argument about Painleve will end up well serving my project on the Woman’s Building, albeit from different angles and hisorical moments. Using John Grierson’s terminology about lower and higher categories of documentary (the former being footage of people, places and processes, the latter interpreting these brute documents through rhetoric or artisty), Cahill suggeseted that Painleve does both through surrealist additions and the “suggestive shimmying” visible within Painleve’s erotically clinical shots. Similarly, I will attempt to argue that the unedited documentation of women’s building processes are a form of lower and higher documentary: a careful and thoughtful body of work that is structured and theorized through a format and politics of simple documentation.