Lockhart vs. The Rest of Structuralist Film Making

Sharon Lockhart has been compared to James Benning, creator of 13 Lakes, and 10 Skies. I have to admit, just as I only made it through 6 of 10 Skies, I also only made it through the first half of Pine Flat. I mention this because both pieces, 10 Skies, and Pine Flat are settings from the first three quarters of my life- the California Sky, and growing up in the Sierra Nevada foothills.

I'd like to start with Goshogaoka, because it is outside of my experience, and yet I feel like it is a better film. Goshogaoka is a choreographed fiction based on Lockhart's study. At no time during it's exploration of movement, frame, and space did I feel pulled out of the film. The cinematography is consistent, as is the choreography and the ideas in motion. Similarly, at no time during 10 Skies, did I feel like the factuality of the document was in question. Structurally it was sound, neither piece ever felt forced. Here too, I think of D'est. Regardless of pace, and structure, I never felt as though Akerman was forcing the piece to behave a certain way.

This is not what I felt during Pine Flat. Although I felt strong identifications with the children, remembering clearly what it is like in rural California, where the opportunity for long hours of solitary play on vast wooded hillsides is greater than anywhere else I have ever been, it still seemed that these children were forced into the scene. I expected myself to be more forgiving, because I have engaged in the exact same activities, in the very same environments. I think part of it may be, again, the artist's buildup of these children that she missed, and her constant intrusion into the space because poor camera use. Every time the camera readjusted during a segment, it shook me out of the contemplation of the subject. This little tiny thing disrupted the piece and brought on memories of less than favorable reviews I had read earlier in the day.

I have to give Ms. Lockhart credit for her effort, as she has never constructed a film on her own. Unfortunately though, it shows, and in showing it diminishes the film for me. In the end, I couldn't help but be poisoned by the review that implied that there is not really any content to this film. That it is little more than a collection of moving stills. That it portrays nothing, but gets by on it's merit as "pure art." In the end though, I became like the hunter in his camo during the film. Forced to sit still and obviously somehow not really willing to; like him, as much as I want to do what I am sitting there for, I can only disrupt it. A hunter, cannot sit and make noise and expect to find game. A viewer cannot sit still if all he can do is be reminded of the artifice of a film that is not truly supposed to be about artifice.

Again, I have to say that there are many wonderful moments in that first half. Especially the boy waiting for the bus he can see across the valley, and the way the mist comes and goes in the forest. Those two moments alone ring so true for me. But the camera movement, and the unrealistic moments weighed me down. Perhaps I am just in a bad mood, or I expect more out of visitors sometimes and may be forgetting that directors are just people. As a late bloomer, myself, it may be that I should be infinitely forgiving to Sharon Lockhart for messing with my childhood in her first go around with a camera in her hand.

What what what?

It's hard not to compare Porterfield's "Hamilton" to Akerman's "D'est." In pacing, cinematography and intent, they share so many elements; the long uncomfortable take, a relentless pace, an absence of action, the desire to communicate a space through the visual nearly exclusively. Both are complex combinations of fiction and documentary, of an exploratory eye. Both films seek to make the viewer inhabit a cinematic space long enough, patiently enough, to grasp that space. Both films punctuate the long steady pace with moments of strange action. An afternoon in Grandma's flower garden (Hamilton), a night in a sparely populated Russian nightclub(D'est). This visual style in Hamilton gives rise to feelings of document.

"We developed this film in Baltimore because it is home..." - Porterfield

However, "Hamilton" is a story, a scripted fiction, where "D'est" was a cinematic study. Reading Porterfields statements and bio, you get a slight feeling that he has something to prove. Self-taught, dropout, particular in methods, and a bit pretentious in execution. This very conventionally shot homage to two ideas, that of Bresson and Thoreau, leaves me a little bit insulted at the end with it's untranslated poem. It diminishes what is a truly open container that invites the constant projection of the viewer to get through the story. There is so little dialog, you must see yourself as someone in the film. However, Porterfield's name dropping explanations are a distraction. If you don't know Thoreau, Bresson, Mekas, Rilke, or German, then there are things about "Hamilton" that fail because he has eschewed convention. There are other things that Porterfield could have done to enhance the story he told without exaggerating conflict, such as better attention to the mise-en-scene. In effect, he is married to his darling of "...Boston, because it is home." Yet, there are few times where home is truly effected by Hamilton. The opportunities for that abound, but are diminished by unconvincing acting (for example with the Grandmother in the garden, or the hugging scene at the end), and that is a convention that can only be effected by directorial choice. The long car ride is the most effective scene in this vien, if not the entire film, so the question has to be asked if it is just a lack of skill with dialog and body language on the part of the film maker.

Don't take me wrong. I liked the look and pace of Hamilton. I liked the concept and most of the execution. I liked the ambiguity of the ending. What I disliked was Porterfield's published insistence that somehow this film is rebellious, or pedantic in some way. He is better than just successful at compressing a window of a long hot weekend where two young people try to make sense of life and probably miss each other by inches in the end. He is clear in portraying his the banality of life. As long as no one has to speak, the acting is good. My problem with this film is more one of a director who seems like he has something to prove other than his ability to produce a film worth watching. Porterfield did indeed produce a film worth watching. I would rather he just left it at that, and left the philosophy and justification to Bresson, Thoreau, and Mekas who were, artists of a different order.

Jennifer Montgomery

Well, I am totally in love with Jennifer Montgomery, as was probably apparent in class. Not in a "Chasing Amy" kind of way. Not in a school girls peeing on rooftops fascination kind of way either.

I am in love with Jennifer Montgomery's completely accessible feminist film style, where she connects the medium she uses to an extension of the body. Each of her films carries with it this theme of how to use equipment, making a strong and subtle connection to the power we gain by our knowledge of tools. It's a funny thing to say, when I read it again. It's very masculine, "tool-user," and yet her exploration of it as extending from the body makes it into an exploration of feminine power.

It is that exploration, from the very plain and simple "How to Use Equipment," where there is only the slightest connections of power politics with the how-to portion of using a door, to the long stretches of girls urinating on rooftops and each other in the most introspective of manners. Each act of bodily experimentation carries with it an exploration of the equipment of the body and the power that it engenders. The connections made are on the order of instructions turned into action, and of sexual curiousity turned into play and experiment; always as an exploration of how to use this marvelous equipment that is the body.

The gross out factor lingers for a moment, but then, after I was used to seeing a naked woman making art with her menstrual blood, it became easier to accept this as more of the same exploration and extension of self as part of an entire package.

Montgomery talks about her style as being modular, as if it were blocky. I have to wind up disagreeing with her. I didn't feel like these were interchangeable modules at all. Multi-threaded experimental narrative is more like it. The themes were not disjointed, I was never confused from moment to moment. It was foreign at times, but it should be, I am a man after all. However, it was great to see an artist exploring lesbian themes, feminist themes without it being couched in some kind of male terms. It was the simplest of human explorations- How do I use this equipment of being.





"How to use equipment."

Hand Processed
Relationship with the apparatus.

How to use equipment, with poorly used equipment.

"Age 12: love with a little l"

Notes on the death of kodachrome

Where are the icons of a movement now?

"Jean Genet in Chicago" was a thief's film in many ways, using stolen footage, stolen words and stolen identities. It explored the dichotomy of labels vs. persons; of power vs. sexuality; and of violence at war vs. violent protest. By the end of the film though, where a mask of Jean Genet leads you through the modern city and remembers the protests of the late 60's, one must wonder why the only icon of protest left must be the mask of a dead man.

"There will be no more Stalins, no more Hitlers. The rulers of this most insecure of all worlds are rulers by accident…"- William S. Burroghs, Dead City Radio 1990

I think this is the most interesting effect of the film. The icons of Burroughs, Genet, Ginsberg, and others are only representable by the masked phantoms that wander the city. They can find no contemporary equivalent. Just as there are no true archetypical heads of state left, there are no archetypical revolutionaries to oppose them. That opposition exposes the very core of today's conflicts.

I suppose it could be said that it is the government who holds all of the icons at the moment. The radicals of the conservative movement could easily replace Genet and his crew. In twenty years, this film could be remade with the masks of Ann Coulter, Oliver North, and Karl Rove, wandering empty streets reminiscing about their own crimes of revolution.

I think that this is why this film is appropriate now; as a plea for the rebirth of a resistance to conflict (as silly as that may sound). The mistakes of the past are clear in the film. The icons are outed as persons, with the most basic of human impulses. Yet the conflicts are still necessary, and the need to protest is part of the democratic process. I imagine the best question I arrive at due to this set of movies is, since we know now that our icons are human what will be the new model of successful protest? I think the piece is also the answer, in a world driven by media: media itself is the model.