On Iran Vέritέ

I’m a fan of Digital Poetics. I support his (and many bloggers) committed support and relay of people-made videos coming from Iran in the face of heightening censorship and oppression.

However, I caution on his page:

“When we speak about verite images through the history (and theories) of moving images we must also remember that cinema verite and direct cinema have been challenged in relation to truth claims. As you say, this is ‘in no way intended to diminish the terrible human destruction they document,’ but to remind us to remember that these are always constructed representations of reality.”

My friend Pato and I spent the afternoon discussing what other connected forms of communication, context, analysis and image-making need to accompany verite images if we hope to use these new media with the fullest force of their emotive, indexical, and critical power.

13 Most Beautiful

On Sunday, I saw 13 Andy Warhol screen tests performed with live music created specially for the tests by Dean & Britta. This was outside, at night, at the Ford Ampi-theater, eating a picnic, drinking champagne from plastic cups.

Music, food, mind-altering substance, friends, and the wind all infused meaning into Warhol’s careful attempts at cinematic emptiness (the subject of my last post!) For Fateless, I thought the sentimental music played against the author’s interest in depleting drama from the lived horrors of the holocaust. For Warhol, I can’t imagine he didn’t want context: all the feelings alive in a room of living people infusing the boring with extra stuff.You weren’t supposed to watch Empire straight!

The surface of documentary (as well as life) is vapid. The meaning of documentary comes from the extras.

Fatelessness

I just saw this 2005 film thanks to Netflix. I had recently read the book thanks to my friend Sarah.

It’s hard for me to think about the work outside my own history and family. My father is a Hungarian Holocaust survivor. The language speaks to me in the rich sounds of my childhood. Budapest registers on the edges of places that matter to me. The meaning of my Jewishness is as unclear to me as it is to the boy in the film (and the boy who was my father) who is nearly killed for it. But, I tend not to get particularly personal here (oddly, I think, as so much of my scholarly and video work is autobiographical). I’d rather talk about the film (and book) in relation to interests I’ve continued here, about cinematic representations of trauma, revolt and analysis.

What I loved about the book is sentimentally undone in the film. Namely, the book drains the Holocaust narrative of drama, well really melodrama, and retells it as a matter of time and sense-making. Getting through time, making sense of the meaninglessness of illogical violence and suffering. The film script, also written by Imre Kertész, maintains the affectlessness of the willing witness to madness, and Lajos Koltai’s pacing, and images, let things play out where nothing but time (and violence and suffering) seems to matter. It is the Ennio Morricone score that undoes this emptiness, working its melodramatic strains against the flat surfaces of image and language. I think about how documentary can show the fact of things without necessarily attempting to infuse meaningless reality with sentiment, and feel that, again, in this way, fiction film has much to learn from records of the real.

Dueling Banjos

I get this eerie, bored feeling that internet scholars play but don’t listen. Myself included.

Where boosters see roses: See Howard Rheingold, Vernacular Video in Culture and Education.

Snarks like me see thorns: See Alex Juhasz, The Vernacular and the Visual.

Thanks to Liz Losh for marking this stupid stalemate on her blog.

On Watching Bad Video

I’ve spent a long day at an undisclosed location watching a load of bad video. As with all things tedious, cheap, people-made and yet somehow also pretentious, the hours enjoy the most unimaginable turpitude when marked by unedited real-time ramblings of the self-serious. And yet. I champion bad video across this blog, make bad video myself on many occasions, and somehow still believe my time was well spent today even as I sometimes (I hate to admit, what kind of researcher am I?!) scanned the tapes, while also secretly reading email, and picking my cuticles.

How can bad video be good for you?
I believe it might be helpful to begin to nuance this ungainly term. Here’s a quick attempt. More to come.

1) Is it bad on purpose? To what end?
2) Does it know it’s bad? Does it let you know it knows?
3) Does it not care it’s bad because it’s up to some other good?
4) Could it be good if the author had better access (to equipment, education)?
5) Where does talent fit in? Content?

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!