Week 9

Class 9 – April 2

THE ARCHIVE

Portrait Piece Due

We survey the use of found footage as a documentary practice. What is the added value of recycled images?

LOOK (IN-CLASS):

·       Bruce Conner. “Report.” 13 minutes, 1963-1967.

·       Santiago Álvarez. “79 Springtimes for Ho Chi Minh.” 25 minutes, 1968.

·       Martin Arnold. “Passage L’Acte.”12 minutes, 1993.

·       Craig Baldwin. Excerpt from “RocketKitKongoKit.” 30 minutes, 1986.

·       Naomi Uman. “Removed.” 5 minutes, 1999.

·       Morrison. Excerpts from “Decasia.” 70 minutes, 2002.

·       Elias Heuninck. “Lyrical Data.” 5 minutes, 2010.

READ:

·       William C. Wees. “In the Domain of Montage: Compilation, Collage, Appropriation.” Recycled Images. New York: Anthology Film Archives, 1993. (couldn't find)

·       Catherine Russell. “Archival Apocalypse: Found Footage as Ethnography.” Experimental Ethnography. Duke, 1999. (personal library)

·       Negativland. Tenets of Free Appropriation.

·       Cross-Cultural Filmmaking. Ilisa Barbash and Lucien Taylor. Part 3, pp. 280-459. (personal library)

Assignment 4 coming up in two weeks: Found Footage Film

Use your mad editing skills to re-contextualize and subvert a supplied selection of found-footage and found sound clips from their originally intended message. Create a final two-minute clip to screen in class. Have fun,experiment, learn.

DUE April22

Assignment 5: Project Proposal

Write a one-page (500 words) proposal for your final project. It should include a hypothesis, a detailed description of who or what you plan to document and an explanation of your stylistic objective. Also, include an additional one-paragraph artist statement.

PORTRAIT PIECE: AVAILABLE HERE

I have accumulated hundreds of hand inked portraits as a result of a collaborative art project that I started with my partner, Damon Ayers, a few years ago. The portraits were collected during an interview process and sculptural installation where we asked people to enact and reflect on their notions of citizenship. This project gave me the opportunity to think about what I wanted to do with the portrait collection, how to synthesize the images into some kind of cohesive whole.

About a month ago I was asked to create a video piece for the Hong Kong artwalk about "digital communities" and it seemed like the portrait project and this one had something to say to each other. I started with the question: How are our notions of selfhood integrated (or not) with our changing relationship to community, within a digitized world?

All the portraits are of friends, from my long time home base here in Portland or from Berlin, where I spent the last few summers in an artistic community. Dogged by questions of our changing identities, limited financial and artistic opportunities, and the endless pathways that serve to entice and confuse us somehow the project began to be about the physical unraveling of relationships in a digitized world.

I composed the music for the piece on my friend's vibraphone- a melancholy and mechanized instrument, it seemed appropriate for the tone and subject.

REFLECTIONS ON THE ARCHIVE

This week's selection of films was a revelation, and an overwhelming one at that. While I have seen many archival works, the breadth, variety, and intensity of these films astounded me. I have been exposed to ideas about remix culture in a few classes that left me absolutely cold, and these films gave me a feeling that I was coming up for much needed air.

A real difference in this collection was that every film was strongly conceptually integrated, in terms of ideas and content, without noticeable gaps or wavering. From Passage L'Act, which painstakingly revealed how monotonously orchestrated the image of American family life can be, to Removed, which attempted, and failed wonderfully, to erase a stereotypical image of feminine sexuality, these critiques never relented with their crushing grip on the hypocrisy of American culture.

These images were especially remarkable for the ways in which they informed and exhibited, but did not illustrate or mythologize. Decasia and Lyrical Data perhaps came close, because the aesthetic qualities of the pieces were more at the forefront. But the painterliness of the manipulation involved was limited in scope, and so the overall effect was one more of movement against the seduction of image, not a submission to that quality of film.

My two favorite pieces, although it is hard to choose from amongst such a set, were 79 Springtimes and RocketKitKong. There was manipulation in both, beautiful at times, but these were firmly documentary works in a way that Decasia and Lyrical Data were not. I marveled at the mastery and balance that was struck between experimental art and documentary form in these two works. And it must be noted, 79 Springtimes is remarkable in its use of sound. Sometimes music serves to lull the viewer, but then choosing to cut music entirely weakens the content. The music is 79 Springtimes is emotionally powerful, but because of the variety and the way that it flows throughout the piece, we are stimulated by the music, never able transcend what we see in the frame.