PUCE Put Under Conditional Extremes (a Maverick Postcard)

My box-o-postcards is less than half-full and I wonder how you make your stack stay still. I imagine them flying around and poking you in the head whenever you forget about me. Perhaps its just that I remember about you too much. I asked an artist, Nayland Blake, about how he did such personal work and he told me that you only feel bad about what you do when you start to use the word "too" too sappy, too sentimental, too sexual, too risky. People are always warning everyone to stay away from extremes. But don't we make art to push people out of their comfortable shells? Yet here I am, making art so that I can build up some shell.
I wonder if women shave of all their pride when they shave their legs - like Sampson. Occasionally, I wonder if I would like my hair more if boys didn't. This is what we get from all our feminist movements. Swaggering and staggering under to opposite forces - a push from our mothers to independance and a pull from our lovers of magnetic dependance. No wonder women can't make art. It's a wonder that we can stand up.
I write it cramped straight lines. I wonder if they are straight because they come from a rule at the top of the page or if it is because they are squeezed in such a small space that they remain perfect. Or if it is habit. Years of college ruled paper that my writing only used 1/4th of, so that all that regulation just seeps from this pen.
The Empire State Building is blue, white, blue, tonight and I wonder at the fact that I never knewbefore living here that it switched. It is my movie-insert snapshot for the passage of time.
I'm listening to In Between Dreams and its theme song for long distance relationships. I must admit to feeling slightly lost in my unspeakable ability to relate but. and yet. however. I must gather up all my verbal conditions to state thoughts. Unconditional. Who ever found a use for that word. The Church? And this is where my sanity comes under my questioning. But who ever heard of something that was "too" conditional? TOO much in context.
For her next trick - she will make art about fainting women caught in the nick of time by our hero. Or should we call it a trust fall? Then, in a feat of genius, she will tell the audiance what selecoxib is and why estrogen, testosterone and a certain brand of metabolic fungi have the same basic chemical structure. And finally, this brave young soul will wake up in the morning and carry out her day without puting on the slightest bit of armor. Yes, ladies and gents, she will stand up and, yes, walk outthe door without reassuring herself once. Your gasps are understandable ladies. But rest reassured that she can do it. Yes she can.
Yes she can.

Soft/Hard - a manifesto-ish

Oh blogger. How long since I've used you. I think I need to think. and not at a person. but typing seems to help. I'm beginning to think that I've been soft in a way that is unnatural for me.

I think the truth is that I don't care about nostalgia or exploring my feelings. What I really want to know is how much nostalgia has to do with the chemicals in my brain. If some day we will go into smoothie stores and can inject our kiwi juice with one shot of protein, one shot of iron and a double shot of Italy-flavored nostalgia.

A thought from a website; http://www.exitart.org/site/pub/about/mission.html "The first exhibition in this series was Paradise Now: Picturing the Genetic Revolution (2000), which provoked widespread discussion about genetic research and bioengineering in the cultural community, and brought a new scientific audience into Exit Art."

I suspect that all of my feelings are really just a series of chemicals. A complete illusion made of tromp-le-tete instead of tromp l'oil. I've spelled that incorrectly but I'm not sure that I can bring myself to care. Perhaps I will edit it out later but I rather doubt it.

My chemicals are unbalanced and I feel just a little bit dizzy sitting on the 6th floor of a building whose name I cannot pronounce.

My heartbeat is fast. good thing nothing about emotion has anything to do with my heart rate. just too much espresso.

Fuck kisses. What I need is espresso.

"I need to have my meds adjusted"

on I go.

I think I need everything except romance.

It'll be tough finding music for that state of being.

William Eggleston and the Real World

Standard Oppertating Procedure - Errol Morris

Moving Midway

Experiments and Sound

The first thing we hear upon entering any film studies course is the theory (that is assumed by theorists to be about as much of a theory as the theory of evolution or relativity). Eisenstein was almost as obsessed with the film-as-language idea as he was about montage. It then makes sense that he would assume that montage was the answer to all the world’s communication problems: if all the world could learn the language of film, than we would have universal mutual understanding. According to him, this worked – at least in the “developed worlds.” At that point, though, film was strictly visual and the language would have to change with the introduction of sound:

“Sound used [as an unimaginative imitation of the “dramas of high culture”] will destroy the culture of montage, because every mere addition of sound to montage fragments increases their inertia as such and their independent significance; this is undoubtedly detrimental to montage which operates above all not with fragments but through the juxtaposition of fragments.” (Eisenstein, Pudovkin, and Alexandrov “Statement on Sound,” 316)

Eisenstein feared that adding this other dimension to our ability to process filmic language would create among the viewers a false expectation of reality from film as well as ruin the universalizing capabilities of film. Rather than easily exchangeable inter-titles (which he also disliked) separating montage sequences, there was now audible language to segregate audiences by their language. He was, of course, correct in these fears: the invention of sound and, later, color destroyed the film language as he knew it. Not only was it now easier to understand, that world looks at least a little like ours.

Experimental film does not play along with this game. If you will permit the comparison: Experimental film is to Hollywood what Jackson Pollock is to Michelangelo. What’s truly bizarre about film history (as apposed to art history) is that what you think of as typical film techniques are all conformed experiments from the art house cinema. Yet artists still turn to the experimental. In class, I hear a lot of people asking “Why would you try? I think it is because you can comprehend a completely different layer of meaning

Whether or not you understand the ideas, you do leave the theatre with a message – the same way you would understand the general message seeing a couple fight on the other side of the tracks in Grand Central Station with the sounds of the subway raging in your ears. If you become curious, you can easily glean more simply by paying more attention. As for narrative: the main difference is not the lack of narrative but the lack of a guide into, through, and out of a distilled story that is, in some sense, meant to be representative of real life. Rather than emulate life and provide commentary through the emulation, experimental film to examine pieces of film.

I think one main difference lies in the level of your ability to identify with what you are seeing. Because most experimental film does not take into account continuity conventions such as shot-reverse-shot sequences, the viewer does not become sutured into the film. Because of this lack of continuity, the viewer imagine itself to be lost in a twilight zone of film, where the idea of floating among clocks and doorways in space is just as good as any because you have no frame of reference.

I personally like the lack of an overt frame of reference. Though I often find narrative films comforting and beautiful and I like them very much, I find that they are too didactic for my taste. While no form of artistic expression can be void of some sort of guide – from basic compositional concerns to a straightforward narrative voice over – experimental film has the loosest of frameworks. You are then free to decide for yourself where you stand and how to look at the imagery yourself. No p.o.v. will attempt to force anything onto you, but rather, images will exist for your contemplation. On that note, I will leave you with a quote from Trinh Minh-ha’s interview “Framer Framed” about sound’s place in the lack of viewer placement.

 

“I do think that silence has more to offer than just being disquieting or disorienting. It suspends expectation (music usually tells you what to expect) and is necessary as a moment of restfulness of pause, just like the black spaces in the film.” (Trinh Minh-ha 227)

Repetition in Montage and the Persistence of Memory

In his essay “The Dramaturgy of Film Form,” Sergei Eisenstein almost preaches the values of montage in creating meaning. In class we saw the value of this beautifully exemplified in an educational film on editing. This broke down four shots of the famous “Odessa Steps” sequence. The first shot (A) was of a baby in a carriage. The second (B) is a medium close-up shot of one of the soldiers making a downward slashing motion. We retrospectively read this as the solider cutting the child with what we presume to be a sword. The third shot is essentially the same as the B (the solider slashing), yet this time the shot is a full close-up, so we’ll call this shot B2. When first confronted with B2, it is read as a repetition of the action: the solider continues to attack the child. Yet B2 is followed by shot C, which begs a similar relation: a close-up of a bleeding face. Again we read this retrospectively: the bleeding face has just been hit by the solider. We read the same action (the soldier slashing) as existing in two simultaneous but separate settings because they are paired within different contexts. The conflict between the first pair creates meaning and the conflict between the second pair creates a different meaning entirely. Both share one image but create different implication: this is the Kuleshov effect expanded upon – toying with the memory of the former meaning in relationship to the most recent meaning - the recognition of repetition.

Rea Tajiri’s experimental documentary, “History and Memory,” takes advantage of this element of montage. Through the course of her film, she uses often two clips – neither the type the layperson expects in a documentary. The first is the abstract reenactment of the woman filling a canteen (presumably her mother or grandmother). The other, which more particularly interests me, is a clip from the black and white period of Hollywood: a couple walking through a train. The woman, walking ahead of the man, says “Why to they have all the blinds down?” and the man, disgruntled, replies, “It’s because they don’t want the people to see where they are going.” At first it seems to simply provide an out-of-context reenactment that can fill in for an un-filmable occurrence in history (an idea which Tajiri is clearly interested in) that Hollywood firms in our social memory. In the mixed media age we live in, we take it for granted that filmic images can be used as such: nothing more and nothing less than a montage cell that acts to set a mood or even just to provide a minute of film time in which the voice-over can make a point.

But it is in the repetition of this montage cell through the evolution of our film-comprehension that the clip reaches its full potential to toy with memory. Originally the footage functions darkly as a comic relief – an ambiguous and disassociated clip that one reads as additive to the tone but not in the least directly associated to the plot in real history. It is only 3/4th into the film that Tajiri informs the viewer that this clip is actually from a Hollywood film directly related to her subject. We then understand the complexity of her allusion to the film. Instead of just one more moment in which the montage creates an over parallel between Nazi Concentration Camps and the so called “Internment Camps” in the US, the revelation that the clip is from a Hollywood movie suggests a connection between the collective memory of the US and it’s entertainment industry. We then think back onto the first moment the clip was introduced to us: set within the context of personal memory. This historically relevant clip gains a new, more accessible dimension by using it first under sentimental rational and secondly under historical rational. Thus the clip functions with a similar duality as the “B” shot functions in the Odessa Steps sequence – first creating one meaning and another simultaneous and opposing. The two meanings together form a holistic view of an event that is unattainable without such repetition.