Laura Marks- not a figment of the imagination

I really enjoyed the presentation today. I thought about things like the connection between geometric decoration and the contemplation of numbers (an arabic invention) during "Allahu Akbat". I also thought it was interesting to think about whirling Sufi mystics imagining those types of mandala images as they spun themselves into a religious trance. I often enjoy the electronic crossover you get from the Middle East. I had a short run of watching YouTube videos from Turkey last semester.

I often think about how amazing it is that so many sensual and textural elements exist in art that comes from a region we all learn to think about as evil and repressive these days. In reality, we are talking about a small minority of people who would fit the representation. "Les Egares" acknowledged that idea, in imagery- where the decidedly western looking people in it were still connected to the architecture of their religious culture, still facing the direction of prayer, and praying in the end even as the poem expressed a more modern sentiment in French.

I said in my last entry, I cannot imagine growing up with that kind of background noise. As in dead time, where the distant rumbles have no effect on the people in the street. They don't even look up to see who is coming up the street. It's just normal. Even in the superman shirt, there is no outrage, indeed the very thought of protest is explained away as something funny, that he just didn't have the mood for. Even "In this House" brought out that impossible idea of the real spectre of bombs accidentally buried in your backyard, and having to have three government agencies involved in the recovery of a simple letter. (Also, I was going crazy with the guy digging because he just kept digging in his own direction and didn't listen to the obvious directions to dig closer to the house.)

I think the letters from Beruit more than anything show how insulated we are from that kind of existence, history is not on our heels, at least not yet. Perhaps in 500 years, as things get clouded by time it may be. After all, I recently saw some online postings about how great the 80's were. By people who couldn't possibly remember. It's like my friend who wishes it was the 50's. So not quite on our heels, but working towards it. The 50's? Yeah, we have forgotten apartheid and the real belief that we could drop the bomb if we had to. The 80's? Yeah, we've already forgotten about the beginning of a class war fueled by HIV, crack cocaine and trickle down economics. It's a real good question, how and whether to represent history. I don't have an answer. Chakar's footnotes give the best light on history: it is constructed for the moment from our own memories, the memories that suit the story of the week, some songs and the Discovery Channel.

Laura Marks- Actually just a vector?

Although I was not fortunate enough to attend the Colloquia presentation of Professor Marks, I have spent a large part of the weekend looking at her website and the readings we were given. Does Laura Marks ever sleep?

In the letters she speaks to things I have wondered about, like the intensity of the psychological power that jet noise must wield over the ground bound people in a conflict. When I lived in Madison and drove a taxi, sometimes they would scramble fighter jets from the airport. The sound is incredibly loud, and the most that I even heard was 5 or 6 taking off one after the other. I cannot imagine the sound of the tens of thousands of sorties flow over Middle Eastern skies in the last 15 years, punctuated by explosion. I cannot imagine that sound as a familiar backdrop to childhood. We are a spoiled populace, and truly I must include Dr. Marks in that as well, for as she rails against policy makers and her treatment in the evacuation, there is a sense of the left out- that for thousands of everyday people everywhere who are simply bystanders in every conflict their only hope is not homeland, not righteousness, but simply safety and deliverance. Today I am left wondering what the world would be like if it were suddenly stripped of the armed and protestant minority of insulated policy makers and their holy envoys were to suddenly disappear. What if suddenly we were left only with people who attended only to the needs of population, without the needs of power? What if suddenly we stopped being so primitive? The world is so often like an adolescent not living up to its potential.

This is not a railing rant. I am certainly quite grateful for my own spoilage. I am also quite excited that Professor Marks is coming to class. I like the fact that she brings with her ideas that take on questions of responsibility in representation through media. Questions like how and whether we should represent the past, what is encapsulated in our images besides the image itself, and the political questions that are raised in the letters from Beruit. It sparks all kinds of questions of my own. And she can answer my french question...

Puns Accepted

Just a little note on blog reading, and continued thought about Chantal Akerman. I found that the movie title translates as "From the East," which I think is just wonderful in the use of French double meaning. I don't think it is unintentional that the title is open to such a misinterpretation as mine. In fact, such a title use is readable as a Michael Snow influence. A crazy non-multi-lingual ugly American misinterpretation, of course, but still interesting.

I am still thinking about her I think because of a level of appreciation gained from having to shoot on film. Those long rolling shots amid crowds of people really deserves some respect. It's not just Chantal with her camera, it's a setup with wheels, mobile lights, someone pushing, someone tending to the lights- film is complicated.

Bio Sphere

It was a little difficult to write the bio in today's class. I kept switching back and forth between first person and third person. When asked to recount my life in accordance to making movies, I'm kind of old and it gets a bit complicated. It's really better to just say, I've been trying to be here doing this since I was twelve years old and everyone always told me it was foolish.

So instead, I thought I would start sharing my pre-film school stuff, and go on a quest to see if I can't get a hold of that action movie (unlikely, but you never know). Until then, I am going to work in a sort of backwards fashion with things as I find them, at a rate of once a week at the very least. It may not last long, but I have some Hi-8 tapes that haven't been looked at in a few years, and a VHS comp as well I think, so it should get us back a few years (maybe 1992?). Today's installment is from 2003 though, as I leave the world of rock and roll and head out to be a truck driver.

I think that biography is interesting in relating to film makers, although I also think that too much time is spent in speculation with the minimal information we get about film-maker's lives. Really, it is possible to imagine all sorts of things about a person with the tiniest bit of information that could be (and usually is) more about the speculator than anything else. Take Chantal Akerman, and what we read into her today in class. Without the reading, it is difficult to separate ourselves from what we saw.

I also think that I mis-spoke today when I used the word boring. My instructor actually used a more appropriate word: Tedium. I can't say I liked the film. It didn't make me feel very good. But, like my class-room neighbor, I couldn't stop watching, and there is definately a fantastic artistry to its construction that could not be denied.

It's alright, it's alright to be standing in a line, standing in a line.

"D'est" is one of those damnable non-literally translatable fragments. "Of is" is what it comes to. I should have paid more attention to my one semester of French. Interesting though is to think of "d'est" as a literal translation. "Of is" becomes strangely appropriate. As I got more and more into the film, I found I could not escape a mood of recent disaster in the long rolling takes across people waiting, waiting... what happened here? How can they stand to wait? The film draws a strong picture of cultural distance between ours (the "west") and theirs, even if it is a line that has faded. Only the children at play seemed familiar in action.

It is this "permanent sense of fear and disaster" and the unwillingness to question the film crew (which couldn't have been hidden with bright moving lights and a dolly) that reminds me of Akerman speaking about talking on the telephone after it was no longer dangerous: "what they have to say, they don’t feel like saying." Perhaps when they were young, they would have looked into the camera, they would have asked impertinent questions (like the occasionally surly sounding adult did), but now, after years of learning to watch what they say, they have become mute because survival favored those who spoke the least.

What you do hear is a background noise that absorbed the sounds of the auditorium we viewed it in, really, blending almost perfectly with the shuffling of however many very quiet people in our theater. When my change spilled on the floor (was it even mine? I still don't know-somehow it rolled up hill) or the snoring a few feet away, or the trying-to-be-so-quiet whispering, or the sudden floods of light happened, they too, for me anyway, were absorbed by the film space. This is definitely one of the few time the word "immersion" has been used before a film and become completely true for me. "D'est" absorbed a room full of people with its own.

Of course, it is a partial fiction. It was Akerman's choice to capture that mood, and it just so happened that she had an easy target, one that she understood from her own life. In that way, "everything that moves me" becomes a different meaning, or , more pointed at the the title of the film in my blog here "everything that is moving to me." Then, it becomes une question "d'est" et "d'était." It is a fiction of what she chose to show, a partial but moving truth that she created with her camera and her pacing to capture a certain feeling at a certain time. That feeling I think is unique, and I think that is the function of the opposition of the countryside to she slow moving cars and the quiet waiting crowds. This countryside is like any other, but this mood is unique to this place and this time.

So what's up with my title? Well, by the end of the film, my mind began to toy with me. I couldn't help it. The people in lines began to look familiar. I started naming them, like in a National geographic way. I am terrible with names, but there were so many instances by the end that when I thought I recognized one I would try to get a name that would stick. Finally, I just wanted them to be free of that feeling I had lost myself in, and Stevie Nicks, great sufferer that she is, offered her line to theirs. And I walked around in the cold as I often do and stood in line for food and thought about how they are now able to stand in the same line at Taco Bell now as well.

Rejection! Yay! (Wait, what?)

I got 2 film festival rejections today, and I am so happy about them.

"Ok, we know you're a psycho, but what?"

Well, because

1) I am keeping on track with my idea from the beginning of last summer- No work will be done that is not for display or submission.

2) Because of what they said (Wisconsin Film festival is actually one of the better learning experience submission opportunities):

From their letter:

Some members of the jury asked me to send the following comments about your film:

"I loved this story-- perhaps the piece would come together even more if the images related to the narration a bit more closely."

Well, I guess then that there are few pieces we would see in class that would be accepted to the Wisconsin Film Festival today. Super sweet, and besides the important parts of the above quote were "I loved this story" and "...come together even more..."

I'll take those two things over the boiler plate rejection from an inappropriately selected festival (which was my other letter) any day of the week.

On those notes, I'll share some test photos for my basic film class that I just put up for my actress this week (they're re-photgraphed with my digital camera, so they're imperfect reproductions). I offer them as a part of what really is a daily practice of collecting images
simply because of my class-load.

How do I relate these to class? Well, in a way, they are, and this is, a diarist's entry. This entry is what's going on in my life, and the art that is coming out in response to it. Really, that is what daily practice is best suited for it seems to me, a filing cabinet of capturable memory. Daily practice not only changes your format of the moment, but creates (at least, is creating for me), a basis for examining my own work in the context of the everyday, while giving me a storehouse of images for the future. Am I going to try and connect my images to the narrative more? Highly unlikely, given the nature of this program, my own current influences and what draws me to other works. Am I pleased that I kept up with this challenge? Hell yeah. I'm not going to make any promise to keep it up for the entire semester, but it might happen. Of course, promising it will happen would be kind of like Chantal Akerman swearing she'd never get behind a big money project ever. (And no, this isn't my girlfriend, and yes the pictures are extremely artificial and directed and lit.)

Early Morning deas

There is something very exciting about the readings for Monday's films. I'm not sure what it is. It's in the collection of quotations for the film. Phrases like "no pretense of realism," "very rigorous systems of thematic and formal opposition," "collective non-memory, and the loss of the real;" It's no lie that these ideas are making my head spin. Akerman talks about shooting "everything that moves me..." in such a way that connects with an idea of reality in the sense of visual object that has come up in my Basic Film class. I am nuts about dialectic and rhythmic structures, so D'est better be all that has been promised (actually I trust it to be at this point).

On the other side, outside of our chronology, YouTube gives the trailer from Juliette Binoche's own page:



Which just increases my curiosity. Mainly because this film, "A Couch in New York," looks a bit on the silly side. Hmmm... directing a romantic comedy... are there two Chantal Akerman's? IMDB says nope.

"I probably didn't find the money in when I went to L.A. because somewhere I just didn't believe in this kind of project."-Akerman, 1979. Well, a lot can change in 17 years I suppose.

I actually believe this is something that shouldn't be left out of discussion. Mainly because I hear so much grumbling about what we watch in this class as being weird or boring, and yet we never talk about the derivative ends of what we see in early work in real life- Deren's "Meshes of the Afternoon" connected to Lynch's "Mulholland Drive," or Chris Marker's "La Jetée" being the basis for Terry Gilliam's "12 Monkeys." I am not sure of what that something is that we should be talking about, but it is definitely worth noting I think. I do believe it leads to a more interesting connection with both ends of the work, the major film and the artistic reference. Not in a nerdy name-dropping asshole way (I had to check my ideas as I wrote this, so there, up to this point it was more rumor in my head until I started verifying), but rather in a range of appreciation. It may very well be that some romantic comedy that I've never heard of will come to life after seeing D'Est, just as knowing "12 Monkeys" brought an entirely different dimension of connection with "La Jetée." This may be a conceptual opposition appropriate to the spirit of Monday's screening according to the reading: one of art vs. entertainment perhaps?

Decline?

I have been thinking lately about the work I produced when I began school here a year ago and what I've made lately. I started thinking about it with my viewing of other Acconci works on YouTube (the one with him "masturbating" under the table in particular) and have been revisiting the idea with each artist that we look at now that I have returned to this classroom while working on actual film only. Revisting the idea in part because there were a lot of things I like about my first pieces that I find pushed away by working through all of the conceptual ideas (just as a matter of tape and idea space, not as any kind of discard on conceptual grounds) that I miss.

I think about Jonas Mekas's website and how 365 movies is a tall order for anyone to really feel like they've done well everytime, and about the idea that "you make a film every time" so it's a lot like practice many times. I think about it most right now because as far as quality of work goes, this challenge project is not likely to produce anything that marries aesthetic to concept well. On the other hand, working every day gives me a body of collected images to go back to and search for images or ideas that do work and remix them for the future.

Jonathan Rosen visited my 115 class last semester and presented Gotik Aztéques. Along with his presentation of his film, he talked a lot about he combines his personal works with his extensive professional work, often arranging to shoot certain scenes or tests or animations for commercial work so that he can later use them in his personal projects. It's this revisiting of work as an artist, real remixing, that I think about these days. Camera movements, compositions, concepts that have fallen by the wayside in the rush of all this work, as well as all of this new work that I am thinking about right now.

Since the end of last semester, I decided that there is nothing that I will produce that is just for class. All work is public work. Every blog, every 5 day challenge. Because every work is a practice, whether it be daily, like it is now, or my usual stream of whatever you want to call it whenever I get around to making it. After all, someday I may make something worth seeing, and once I do, like any artist, it will either legitimize all of my previous work (something that I can't stop believing leads to what we see in class on some days) or create an example of just how much happy accidents can count for.

Either way, there is no harm in putting work out there, but there is in holding it back. It would seem that that is also well documented by what we see in class on some days.

Hurumph

This my post for February 14th. I am such a fucking clown sometimes.

Hungry? I am...

The changes I notice today in having to post a daily blog are interesting. It's easier if I just decide to come up with something a little more reality-like. I say reality-like because I don't feel like it's a departure from my usual process. I still start with a few ideas that are narrative in nature and start abstracting them. I've been at this seriously now for nearly two years and process-wise I have observed a regular pattern in myself that I enjoy. It causes me some trouble in school sometimes, but it basically goes like this:

• I look at the given idea and there is an immediate narrative that comes to mind. I plan that, and it begins to abstract itself.
  
• I narrow down my images to basic ideas of form and relationship.
• I connect the work to my school work as a whole somehow, either in name or structure.
• I remove the personal and focus on my moments impetus (here, it's I'm hungry, I'm stressed, it's probably time I focused outside of myself).
• Edit.
• Present.

This is personal process, because I like it. The daily practice makes elaborate structures and formal elements a little cumbersome, but in this case it's fine to let those darlings go. Also, I wouldn't normally do this kind of work because I personally feel it's a little over done. I thought a lot about that when viewing two things this past week, Umali's still collection and in Variations when he is watching the plastic bag scene. Here are two works that are clearly far in advance of their popular counterparts "Noah takes a picture for 6 years" and "American Beauty." I spend a lot of energy trying not to copy. V-logs, and plagiarism just seem a little done to me. This is not to discount influence and it's function, but if I am going to make something that looks like someone else's something, I kind of feel like I'd like to have it be accidental, or at least attributable as an abstraction.

That said, I guess I have to take a look at whether or not that is just another darling I need to let go. Like my recent questions in my two black and white film classes, which is the personal element this video kind of addresses- take a step back, eat something, do some things for other people and release my pursuit of certain ideas that I have been obsessing over. They may be unnecessary, and my hunger may be clouding my judgment. Simplify. Release some creative control.

So, if you happen along this entry, there will be cinnamon rolls where I work tomorrow. Meat and dairy free, if that matters to you. They are part of the piece. They might be a little weird, but I think they'll be really good. Of course, we'll just have to see.

Today's i-fluence:

Small world day

I was sitting in class and it was near the end. "All My Life" gets it's introduction and he mentions the light of Northern California. Sweet. I loved living there, so I am super curious. I am imagining all of the places it might have been filmed. As the film rolls out, the scene is so familiar, the climbing roses, the redwood fences. Personal note to Mr. Bogner, should you read this, it's not just the film stock, it really does look like that there. Such a wonderfully simple piece and it captures the memory of those colors in a way that connects with my own. I am certain I lived within 100 yards of where that was filmed. Strange. It was so funny to see "filmed in Caspar" at the end.

This idea of daily practice, that is a staple here it seems, is seductive to be certain. I certainly have enjoyed the times in my life where making is a part of my everyday. I don't necessarily have documents of it. Being offered a reason to do it doesn't much change the way I have been doing things either. I make things. I always have. I think the difference here is how much I make them public.

I could've done without "Data Diaries" today, which I must admit was a little different for me. I usually find something I like in just about the whole program. It just seemed like it didn't belong, like a parody almost of the rest of the work we see. Anti-performance I think is what that was. Thank you for stopping it. It wasn't even a little ru-ru. In a way, I think the video I made for this blog has a little bit of that to it.

Well, as I look back here, it seems the difference that this challenge makes to me is to change my tone a bit. It also seems from the email I just received that I have once again given myself more work than necessary. Which is fine. I will be more conservative for a while.

Blogtastic rantosaurus

Do I have a blog buddy? Oh, the sadness...

Hope I didn't bother anybody by commenting on all blogs. It is possible that I am avoiding some other important classwork. However, there are some questions rolling around here that bother me.

Like what? Well, like questioning things for instance. Yes, I totally believe we should be questioning what we watch, especially since that is often the intent of the work itself. That said, there being no stupid questions and all, shouldn't we be careful about how we are questioning so that we avoid making up questions that have no point. For example, is the word "point" in the last sentence really appropriate? Should it be "purpose?" Am I being vague? Let's leave it at that then.

Another question I've got under my skin is this question of "truth." We are all children of video now. We all know that in whatever format you get a moving image there is a component, at the very least, of artificiality as soon as the choice is made to capture, even if it's only the choice to capture one image over another. If you want close to absolute truth I suggest last year's screenings of 10 skies or 13 lakes. The truth is, we are looking at the work of people, as people. Either there is a resonance with us in the image, or no resonance. My question is how much does it really matter if there is truth going on outside the space of the frame? It is entirely possible that "Birthday Suit" is a total fiction, especially when we consider the quality of the image. Yet the truthfulness of it's content resonated most in the blogs I read. Almost all of us who didn't get tied down by the naked body saw something of ourselves in that piece that was true inside of us, even if it was just the idea that yes, she is quite accident prone; or for me, I am glad that I am lucky enough that I don't really scar too badly.

For a more modern example of total fiction that appears as truth, we have only to look at lonelygirl15. Here, I think we have a good collision of another idea with this truth idea- that of what is experimental. Lonleygirl15 is experimental video: it is an experiment of convention, not unlike "Forgotten Silver" or the "War of the Worlds" radio address. The truth in all of these pieces is the same and is different than the surface content of the pieces themselves: We as a collective believed in them because they spoke a conventional language, through a conventional outlet, and we should question the reality of those pieces. These are reminders of the truth that the created/captured image can lie, and is often the most moving when it does distort reality in some way.

In the end, I think talking about the truth in these pieces gives way too much room to loose our way in tangential argument about what the truth is, and leads us away from what was true, what we found resonant, in each piece for ourselves, which is the thing that gets discussed the least. The truth is we are people watching things made by people. (Except for you- yes you know who you are- I know you're a machine. For now your secret is safe with me...)

Video interviews

Ideas of daily practice are very enticing to me, in video anyway. It's so easy now.

When I watched the Vito Acconci videos this time, I realized that they had so much time on camera, reworking, playing around, being ridiculous, that there was so much to the new medium.
I have little doubt that in amongst the never ending waves of fake porn (which I can't understand why anyone falls for anymore) there are some real gems of self expression on the internet. Aside from the lonelygirl15 videos, I enjoyed most of the pieces at the cogcollective site. Right now though, I still think that internet video is little more than file sharing and the reinvention of an imagined self (not that this is a bad thing). Just as film-making, and early video work, we still imitate what we wish we were more often than showing what we really are. So I made this, out of some footage I've been working on for a DVD to send my parents. Of course, I picked a few parts that my parents are never going to see, and mostly parts that reveal more of me than one would believe on the surface viewing. It's funny when you ask people to be you, and let them go from there. There's something in the act of them being themselves while they are playing you that is connecting.

In making things like this, I almost always stay in agreement with Acconci's note about video being a place to "keep moving." After all , it only takes a second to realize you've got your face 12" from a tiny screen before you realize you're going to ruin your eyes. You must keep the camera or the content moving to maintain the connection with your viewer. You also have to show yourself, or a self that at the very least causes some kind of visceral reaction in your viewer. The remote has noting on the speed of a mouse to spirit you away from what was just on.