View MASTER

If you cross your eyes and make one image in the middle...

Oh Stanley, your adventurous spirit will not soon be forgotten. Actgeon maybe it's time you got out of your home.

I was introduced to Valdmaster shows last spring. I think they are wonderful, not only in content, but in the way the isolate and bring forward some very important aspects to film making. Pacing, sound and image relationships. It's like your grade school film strip on steroids. Like the pacing in "D'Est," Vladmaster shows envelope the sound of the audience in the viewing experience. All sound become show sounds.

I would like to say more about the show, but what more is there to say? It's funny to think that a simple little toy could result in such a sweet and engaging show experience. Yes, it was a little hard on the eyes to go through four sets, and yes it might be nice to own a set (or maybe four for a party). Otherwise though, there's not much to complain about. It's as if you held a living storyboard in your hands.

The question came up as to whether or not they could hold up as "normal" films. I don't really think that any of them would fail if they removed the bells and the images moved on their own. It seemed like maybe in class there was some sort of feeling that the pieces relied on the novelty of the transmission. I really don't think so (and I was really kind of sickened by the discussion about whether or not Disney [Pixar] would be interested in them). If they had been as lovingly crafted as traditional films as they were Viewmaster discs, I think the experience would have only been different, and not less.

Flashback: March 9 at the Green Gallery

I have been meaning to write this blog, because it was so fun to go somewhere the modern equivalent of what we see in class was going on.

The Winter Field Trip at the Green Gallery was nice. It made me think about the kind of community that used to exist in larger theaters. There was a group of maybe 25 people all gathered together for hot chocolate, several shorts, and a running video installation of various artists. It is in a third floor commercial space. I have been there for screenings before. It is always changing and it's never quite clear if someone is living in the space or not. So it has a living room kind of feel, along with that "we're all in a punk band" so you're not sure who all of this stuff belongs to.

There were two films that really stuck with me. The first was the very first, a great 16mm color short called "Hearts Breaking in Slow Motion," by Matthew Stenerson. It was just so simple and lovely. A close up traveling shot of a woman, her hair in the wind, and another close up traveling shot of two men on a snow mobile. The film speed was the key to the emotional content of the piece and it was so perfect.

The other was a video "Hautology" by Wes Cline. There's some mention of Nathan Leopold in the program note. I don't know anything about who he is, and as far as the work went, I really didn't care. The haunting that went on in the Illinois wetland was so wonderfully expressed in video that it was inescapable by the end.

For the most part, all of the shorts in the program made such wonderful use of simple singular moving image elements, that almost every one of them was a little jewel. It made me very happy. It may have been the atmosphere, with the hot chocolate and the sweet young curator introducing the films over an over involved mother in tow, but who cares. Often it is the environment that makes films better, like seeing a movie in 70mm at the Egyptian in Los Angeles. Sure, Blade Runner is a great movie, but seeing it that way, with my Dad made it a great experience, just like seeing these shorts in a little gallery up the street curated by a fellow student's sister (and her parents) did as well.

The world turned upside down?

I am at the Kenilworth Building for Ethan Jackson's "Polyopticon #1." It's amazing sometimes how something made out of four holes in cardboard can be so wonderful. As usual, there is something nostalgic for me that makes this piece connect with me personally. When I used to drive a truck, the sleeper compartment was separated by a vinyl/leather curtain. Someone had cut a long slit in the curtain. Often, after a nap as my partner drove, I would wake up in this stretched out dream world, the road outside with all of the cars, coating the interior of the compartment. It was, as Ethan said, "somehow more beautiful" than any capturable image, "a living image."

It was definitely one of the more comfortably imersive installations I have been too. The presentation of his documented work "16 Windows" while obviously failing to completely capture the true effect of an installation such as this, was still so beautiful in concept as to have a very strong effect on me. I wish I could have gone to that work and sat all day.

This simplicity, reality, and such a literal idea of containership as well as Jackson's wonderful awareness of his viewers and his obvious love of image and the creation of it as space were also sweet.