Ross McElwee - Time Indefinite (1993)
Wednesday, August 8, 2007
Autobiograhpical filmmaker Ross McElwee uses his camera to record various events and people in a cinema verite style, often taping conversations he is having at the time he is having them. Much of the film is accompanied by his personal stream-of-consciousness voice-over recorded after the footage is shot. In Time Indefinite McElwee deals with many things in his life, but ends up focusing on death in his family and in his friend Charlene's life. The final scenes deal with he and his wife's newborn son.
The defintion for indefinite includes meanings such as "having no exact limits or no limits at all" and "not precise or clear in meaning." A central content issue that McElwee addresses in Time Indefinite is the concept of death. Death is the inevitable limit in boundless time; yet like time it is vague and abstract. After a somewhat rapid succession of events, McElwee is forced to deal with death's presence throughout his family. Because of his chosen autobiographical format, the viewer receives extremely personal, first person reactions to this universal issue as well as being shown its comparable effects on others. Unlike the detachment felt when filming his blood test, the filmmaker finds that the camera does not dissipate or explain the pain of loss. It does, however, provide the medium for an interesting and ambiguous account of man's reaction to something as serious and indefinite as death.
McElwee begins his emotional and intellectual struggles with death somewhere around the middle of the film. He suffers the death of his grandmother, his wife's miscarriage, and his father's death one soon after the other. This timing intesifies the effects of these catastrophic events to the audience and establishes this subject as a focal point for the rest of the film. When McElwee returns to his father's home, he finds life carries on there as it did in the past; the same man mows the lawn as he has done for years, and the unused piano receives its yearly tuning. These small details place death in the context of a "time indefinite" that endlessly leaves things in the past through its continuation. McElwee and the viewer are now more sensitive to death as the film accentuates the extermination of bees at his father's house and the last moments of a fish on a pier. The filmmaker poses the question of existence and its limits but cannot find an answer. Similarly, he cannot find anyone to articulate the pain of his father's passing; he eventually turns the camera on himself to talk about his family and death. Still, he cannot resolve these issues and ends up using voice-over narration to drown out his ramblings.
Unable to cope in a satisfactory manner with his loss, McElwee visits the advisory figure in his earlier success Sherman's March as well as this film, Charlene. The viewer learns of her husband's tragic death in a fire a few years back, and she has also had problems dealing with this issue; she keeps the ashes of her husband stored away in a plastic bag in a closet. It is a disturbing image when she brings out the bag full of gray particles and talks of this jumbled mass being her late husband. Also quite unsettling is the fireman's talk of identifying the presence of a body during the fire by the smell. Charlene expresses a desire to sprinkle Jim's ashes in the ocean but cannot bring herself to do it, worried that the fish and sharks might get them. McElwee states later in the film about how he wanted to keep death from becoming abstract, and it seems that Charlene feels the same way. She refers to the ashes as Jim, as if they still contained the essence that was her husband. Furthermore, she expresses concern over the well-being of the ashes and prefers to keep them safe in the closet instead of sprinkling them in the water. The film shows that Charlene still struggles with her pain, and her way of dealing with it seems both distorted and sad. McElwee has a sense that dispersing the ashes and "letting go" would be the best thing but realizes that his inability to deal with his own situation does not afford him an guiding role. One feels sorrow for Charlene, usually knowing and confident, now seeming very unsure and confused. McElwee doesn't get the example or answer he undoubtedly had hoped for in coping with this situation, except perhaps that there is no answer.
It is vitally important for the film to show the worth of life, and even more so, the great tragedy of death when these issues are constantly cheapened, glossed over, romanticized and exploited in today's popular fictional cinema. Death has become something to laugh at, an unimportant plot device to further the storyline; it's used to give the story an 'edge' or to easily manipulate the audience's emotions. Perhaps that's why the Charlene segment is so unsettling—because it is real. In a dark comedy, a woman holding on to her husband's ashes for fear that the sharks and fish will eat him would be comical. But this film presents this attitude in a way that its absurdity only adds to the feeling that death is too enigmatic and difficult to handle in a normal way. That McElwee addresses this subject in a serious manner by putting his own personal painful experiences onto film is admirable and makes for an interesting viewing experience.
McElwee sticks basically to the verite style he utilized in Sherman's March. There are more static shots and outside footage in Time Indefinite, however, establishing it as a more pensive and serious work as opposed to the improvisational and whimsical feel of the earlier film. The monotone voice-over narration, while adding to the sarcastic wit of Sherman's March, functions equally well in adding to the overall melancholy of this film. The long shots of clouds outside an airplane window emphasize the filmmakers meditations on more abstract and spiritual concepts. Although McElwee finds no direct answer to his questioning of how to deal with death, he finds solace in the love for his wife and child. On the plane ride back home he comments on his failure to "corner death with his camera" but also on how much he missed his wife. The birth of his son overshadows his fixation suggesting that finding hope in new life is the easiest way to cope with death. Perhaps he also finds some comfort in having his family preserved on film in a "time indefinite."
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More about Ross McElwee here.
at 12:51 PM
Peter Greenaway - Vertical Features Remake (1978)
Vertical Features Remake is a playful parody of avant-garde theorising in which academics argue about the life and work of Tulse Luper, Greenaway's best known fictional character. In their efforts to reconstruct one of Luper's early projects, the publically-funded Institute of Reclamation and Restoration (IRR) end up with four versions of the film.
"Vertical Features Remake is a partly autobiographical absurdist fantasy that could have been conceived by Lewis Carroll. It presents the world of the IRR, the powerful Institute of Reclamation and Restoration, which has just discovered some sketchy surviving records of a ‘film project undertaken by Tulse Luper when he was working officially, but it seems reluctantly, on a State landscape Programme.' That programme was code-named Session, and its ominous aim was ‘the creation of a dynamic landscape'. Vertical Features was a document made in protest by Tulse Luper, and Vertical Features Remake consists of the IRR's four attempts to reconstruct that film.
In fact the film is an attack on the whole British film-culture, with the IRR on one side and pedantic academia on the other. Both sides are seen as unconscious partners in a sinister threatening Session 3, laying waste the cinematic landscape. This never becomes a crude allegory or a simple protest, though; the short films-within-the-film are remarkable on their own terms and the musical collaboration with Michael Nyman makes for a harsh lyricism".
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at 12:33 PM
Lars Von Trier & Jørgen Leth - De Fem benspænd AKA The Five Obstructions (2003)
Monday, August 6, 2007
"The Five Obstructions", a 100 min. theatre documentary directed by Lars von Trier and Jørgen Leth. An investigative journey into the phenomenon of "documentary", based on manifestos written by each director. About a filmmaker not only revisiting, but also recreating one of his first films, The Perfect Human / Det perfekte menneske (1967), a document on life in Denmark, containing the familiar Leth idiosyncrasies.
English subtitles included.
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at 11:35 AM
James Benning - Los (2004)
Saturday, August 4, 2007
Nearing the completion of El Valley Centro, I began planning an urban companion piece, Los, that was to be a portrait of Los Angeles. It seemed logical, for the politics of water certainly run from the Valley to the City. Los would have the same structure as El Valley Centro and would look and listen with the same intensity. The two films would be connected with the last shot of El Valley Centro pumping water out of the Valley over Wheeler Ridge while the first shot of Los would show Mulholland’s first spillway (still in use) bringing water into LA.
James Benning, December 2001
Conceptual-art portrait of Los Angeles County, comprising 35 two-minute shots of streams, hills, buildings, factories, gardens, highways, rivers, cattle, trains, people, the ocean, a cemetery, the skyline, policemen, back streets, a jail, soccer players… Bennings’ camera remains static, and in the absence of commentary the only sounds we hear are whatever’s audible in each of these places: snatches of dialogue, distant background music, the rumble of cars and trains.
Benning has been one of American leading avant-garde film-makers for over 20 years, but remains barely known by the wider cinemagoing public, especially abroad – partly because he doesn’t allow his works to be available on video. And while Los is no-one’s idea of ‘commercial’ film-making, Benning’s low profile is an indictment of the timid policies of our supposedly adventurous arthouses: this is much too fascinating a use of film for it to be relegated to art galleries.
Los can be taken as 35 short movies, each of them saying something about the county, each of them posing some question about Benning’s technique, providing Viewing becomes an active, enthralling experience – even when there’s apparently ‘nothing happening’ on screen. It soon becomes clear that the timing, order and contents of each image has been very precisely calculated, and in many cases it’s what we can’t see that’s the ‘subject’ of the shot. The penultimate shot is of ‘homeless people’, and at one point an unseen passerby exclaims “What the f*ck are you lookin’ at, stupid motherf*cker?” But there are no answers – everything about the film is a matter of subjective interpretation, and every response is equally valid. Benning’s gaze transforms the whole of ‘greater’ Los Angeles into a vast work of art, in the process making it even ‘greater’ still – and this is only the central part of a projected ‘Southern California’ trilogy.
The film is full of engrossing incidental details, cross-references, tantalising clues that might mean everything or nothing. Early one we see a DKNY advertising billboard owned by a company named ‘Outdoor Systems’, and this phrase sums up Benning’s real subject – the human and natural processes that combine to form the bizarre anomaly we know as LA: a huge cloud of dust rising from a brush fire; the evening lights of cars zooming along a six-lane highway; the flight path of a landing jet-plane. This is a game with specific rules of form (the length and horizon-lines of each shot are similar) and content (each shot must contain some aspect of human activity; each shot must be outdoors) and, finally, memory test. We’re exposed to each of the images for so long, that by the end, when Benning brings up a series of captions identifying the locations of each, we can run through the whole movie again, in our mind.
Needless to say, Los won’t be to all tastes – in today’s market-oriented climate, such a project necessarily runs the risk of ‘pretentiousness’ accusations – but it’s surprising how quickly you adjust to the film’s unique rhythms, and this is a very straightforward, accessible kind of experimentalism. In terms of an artist using cinema to express himself, it dwarfs almost all this year’s ‘conventional’ releases: if any film of 2001 can possibly change the way its audiences think about and view their world, it’s James Benning’s mysterious, majestic, magical Los.
(via)
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at 2:03 AM
Loek van der Klis - Works of Art by Theo Jansen (2006)
Friday, August 3, 2007
Theo Jansen (1948) studied physics at the University of Delft (The Netherlands) from 1968-1975. He left University to be - come an artist. He painted for the first seven years. In 1980 he built a flying saucer (15 ft flashing lights, beep sounds) that flew over Delft and set the town in commotion. Then he built a light sensitive spray-gun which paints an object on a surface. Since 1986 Theo Jansen has been writing a column for the Volkskrant (national newspaper). Since 1990 he has been working on a new creation: skeletons made of electric-conduits which walk on windpower. These animals have evolved into several generations over the last twelve years. Eventually he wants to put the anima Is out in herds on the beaches, where they live their own lives.
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at 6:39 PM
LIGNA - Radio Ballet (2003)
Wednesday, August 1, 2007
The Radio Ballet by LIGNA was one of the first works i published here. I'm sharing this honest work of art at karagarga for the first time and thought it deserved a repost.
The free radio group LIGNA exists since 1995. LIGNA consists of the media theorists and radio artists Ole Frahm, Michael Hüners, and Torsten Michaelsen, who since the early nineties have been working at the "Freies Sender Kombinat" (FSK), a public non-profit radio station in Hamburg. In several shows and performances they have been investigating the importance of dispersal in radio as well as of the radio. One of the main focuses is to refer to forgotten and remote possibilities of radio use in order to develop new forms of interactive practices. Another emphasis has been placed on the development of concepts and the production of performative audio plays in order to find out how radio can intervene in public and controlled spaces, so that its public nature reappears in the form of uncontrollable situations
The “Radio Ballet” is an excellent example of the latter: it is a radio play produced for the collective reception in certain public places. It gives the dispersed radio listeners the opportunity, to subvert the regulations of the space. Held for the first time in Hamburg’s Central Station in 2002, this focused on how radio can intervene in public and controlled spaces, so that its public nature reappears in the form of uncontrollable situations. Yet, Ligna's performances aim to confront the privatised, controlled production of capitalism with the dispersed, yet collective, uncanny and public production of the radio. The Radio Ballet brought back excluded gestures of deviant behavior were invited to enter the station, equipped with cheap, portable radios and earphones. By means of these devices they could listen to a radio program consisting of a choreography suggesting permitted and forbidden gestures (to beg, to sit or lie down on the floor etc.). These suggestions were interrupted by reflections on the public space and on the Radio ballet itself.
The radio broadcast will suggest ten different exercises to get the city out of your body. The dispersed collective of radio listeners will be able to perform deviant gestures that no one would or could do alone.
Interview (via)
Who is LIGNA?
LIGNA is a group consisting of three people – Torsten Michaelsen, Michael Hüners and Ole Frahm. We’ve worked together since 1996.
Is this the first project of this genre you’ve done?
The first radioballett took place in the Hamburg main train station in May 2002. We asked listeners of our local non-commercial radio station FSK to come to the train station with pocket radio receivers and small headphones and to bring back excluded gestures by following the choreography broadcast over the radio.
In December 2002 we organized a similar project called “Invitation to Public Radio Reception”. We asked listeners to come into Hamburg’s center city with their their radios (this time without headphones), turn them up as loud as possible and disperse amongst the Christmas bustle. At that time, there were quite a lot of demonstrations going on in Hamburg against the eviction of a trailer encampment in November 2002 and against the politics of the local right-wing government in general. Demonstrations weren’t allowed to go through the inner city; officials feared that they could disturb the Christmas shopping. So we decided to bring a dispersed demonstration into the city. It worked quite well; even though our program was not able to drown the whole city, it was enough to change the place: you could meet grinning people everywhere with antennas coming out of their jackets. It was impossible to go shopping that Saturday afternoon without realizing that something strange was going on.
So the radioballett in Leipzig already had it predecessors. It was not simply a copy of the radioballett in Hamburg, although it also took place in a train station. We put in quite a lot of more gestures, like lying down, lighting cigarettes, running around etc. Although both stations, in Hamburg and in Leipzig, are models of the privatization of public spheres, they have a different character: the Hamburg station was renovated in the early nineties and then partly turned into a shopping center. Leipzig followed in the mid-nineties: the shopping mall is much bigger, everything is much cleaner and the whole regime of control is barely visible.
How did you develop the ideas for this project?
We started with a radio show called "LIGNAS Music Box", a regular two-hour program on FSK. This show is still on the air. Every second Saturday afternoon, we invite the audience to phone in songs matching the changing subjects of the show. As well, we developed several live radio shows that, in one way or another, dealt with obscure and forgotten media practices. What all these activities had in common were their attempts to explore the possibilities specific to radio.
We realized that the left-wing radio movement is not really interested in the medium; that it used radio in one of two ways. Either they used radio simply to convey messages, tell their audience about the evil outside and summon them to do something against it beyond the program. Or they believed, referring in a simplified way to Bertolt Brecht, that the revolutionary usage of radio was to change it from a means of distribution to a means of communication. This follows the belief that utopian radio is some kind of "open mike” creating a space where everyone can call in any time and say what he or she wants to say.
We found out that another much simpler aspect of radio was always neglected and even renounced in reflections on free radio: the distribution of a voice to many radio apparatuses; the fact that radio always creates an abstract constellation of listeners. This means that radio reception in any situation where the radio is switched on means an intervention: it brings in the abstract constellation of others. Our regular call-in radio show tries to make this constellation audible.
What we were still looking for was a way to turn this constellation into an association of people. That is, a collective that can change a situation. The radioballett was an attempt to do exactly that.
So the idea was for a very long time very abstract. We knew that radio offered the possibility of an intervention like the ballett, but it took a lot of time to work it out. It wouldn’t have been possible without discussions with many activist groups dealing with privatization and control of public space. In the last years many of them have tried to exceed the regime of control by exaggeration: for example, by going into the main station and acting like security guards themselves, urging people to do silly things “for their own safety”. What they wanted to achieve was an awareness of the repressive practices that have become a part of everyday life. What many of them found was that for many people everything they were urged to do was completely all right, as long as it was good for their safety and usually turned against those who earned it. These experiences made it clear to us that you can only do something against the regime of control if it is hostile to this regime.
What is the political drive behind the radioballet?
Our aim was to develop a collective practice that could intervene in a place increasingly under control of video surveillance, safety guards, police, etc. This space is also home to architectural means of control: benches turned into seats, so lying down is impossible, rooms kept bright and orderly so that dark spaces no longer exist. This regime of control is responsible for driving more and more people and all kinds of “deviant” behavior out of the place. The radioballett did not protest these practices of control in the usual way, such as organizing a demonstration to tell the public that privatization of public space is wrong.
We wanted to find a way to bring back what the regime of control fears most: the invasion of gestures of deviant behavior - holding up your hand for begging, sitting down where it’s not allowed and things like that - in an amount that supercedes control. For us, radio is the ideal means of achieving that: it can be received nearly everywhere and very easily. The dispersion of radio allows a mass to act collectively without gathering as an assembly.
So instead of simply conveying protest as content, the radioballett tried to perform the protest: it used radio to let the uncanny and unexpected invade a place where usually nothing unexpected is happening. Because if something unusual approaches, it is instantly driven out.
What was the intended impact of the radioballet?
The first priority of the radioballett is not to change the consciousness of people. It wants to change the space in which it is performed. It wants to haunt this space with gestures that are normally excluded. It wants to demonstrate that the normality of a space like the main station is based on exclusions that are distinctly invisible, until made visible.
We called the radioballett in Leipzig “Übung in nichtbestimmungsgemäßem Verweilen”, which means something like: excercise in unsuitable staying. For us it is important that this is an exercise. Places like the main station and every other place that is under control have become spaces where you constantly practice being under control. In these places it has become normal not to sit where you want to, because you know that soon the guards will come and disturb you. You know that you can only smoke in the areas reserved for smoking, unless you want to pay a fine. The radioballett wants to be a counter-exercise: a way for people to learn that other practices in these places are still possible, if you have the right backdrop for it. During the time the ballett was performed, the restrictive normality of the main station was suspended.
Was there any particular significance to the hand motions everyone was doing (waving, tying shoes)?
The radioballett in Leipzig consisted of three stages: the first one displayed gestures that are still normal and allowed: like giving someone your hand and so on. The second stage examined the limbo between permitted and forbidden gestures: for example turning the hand from vertical to horizontal for begging. The third stage consisted of forbidden gestures and activities, like starting to smoke. Untying and taking off your shoes or lying down are also some of the activities that quite easily get you thrown out of the building, at least when people demonstrate that they don’t want to get up immediately. Waving is certainly one of the gestures very typical and normal in a place like a train station. But it can get suspicious if you repeatedly wave to the same person, so that it looks like you’re sending secret signs or hints.
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at 12:01 PM
