13 Most Beautiful
June 23, 2009
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.
June 24, 2009 at 5:01 am
Hey there,
I don’t know if you have seen the documentary SALT already or not!
I did and it is amazing.
I hope you read my review on my blog Not Sure…
http://mouhanad.wordpress.com/
Mouhanad😉
June 28, 2009 at 4:34 pm
[…] movements (or images) reminds me of my recent attention to questions of meaning(lessness) and the indexical, and the related role of mise-en-scene. (This was also the subject of the avant-doc conference I […]
July 12, 2009 at 11:10 pm
[…] the relations of melos/music with (documentary) meaning that I have been recently ruminating on here are forefronted: what does it mean to force ordinary, structureless life into the heights of […]