We Interrupt this Short Film with a Brief Announcement
By Collier White
In keeping with Quodlibetica’s flexible interpretation of visual art, co-editor Collier White will use this space to discuss film and video as visual art. Or, to be more precise, in this space we will, whenever it suits us, approach questions of linearity, narrative, and other comparative modes made possible by the addition of a temporal dimension resulting in the illusion of animation.
THE SHORT FILM AS DIGITAL ART
Six years after YouTube revolutionized the distribution of short films, the engine’s potential to recast film as visual art is largely unrealized. This may be due in part to the – until recently – slipshod quality of the video presented: muddy, pixellated video and sound that slipped frustratingly out of sync. Recent improvements in the site, as well as the arrival of more arts-oriented competitors like Hulu, Apple TV, and Vimeo, have addressed this objection, yet the sites’ bad reputations persist.
Perhaps the works on these site are the video equivalent of what Jake Ramberg identified in Quodlibetica 13 as “coffeeshop art.” Unsupported by a critical or curatorial structure, streaming internet video falls into two categories: the previously canonized (Stan Brakhage has enjoyed a revival) and the unimportant curiosity (e.g. the thousands of student films uploaded daily).
All of this does nothing to help the reputation of short film, a medium that suffered the market forces of the cinema for a century and has yet to enjoy the renaissance promised by these new modes of delivery. Go to Netflix on-demand and type in “Short Film.” Keep looking: the paucity is shocking.
Of course, short films are all around us. Whether it’s the double rainbow guy or the Songify This crew’s auto-tuned “Double Rainbow” song , a mode of slapdash production that previously garnered only a select number of viewers now reaches millions of eyes instantaneously. And our appetite for this stuff is insatiable. Recently at a bar in North Minneapolis, we took a break from the Tarantino/Rodriguez masterpiece Grindhouse on the enormous twin flatscreens to watch the Man Teases Dog talking animal video on the bartender’s laptop. Four times. And I’m not complaining.
At first glance, it seems that even the dimmest media consumers can tell the difference between a YouTube sensation and a serious piece of film art. But can they, should they, and more importantly, do they? The Academy recently passed over more solemn or controversial short works to present its top narrative honor to a slacker joke about love potion darts.
When production values once reserved for the elite aesthete are now available to the petit bourgeoisie, it seems that “looking good” has become a liability. Even with access to far superior means of production, many new festival submissions emulate the aesthetic of YouTube ephemera, neatly dodging the aura of color correction and its attendant connotation of middle-class complacency. Meanwhile, the films become more predictably comic or their narrative arc’s emulate the Q-shape of an O’Henry story: they busily tie slipknots or snap suddenly like mousetraps. The short film presents a conceit which it greedily burns at maximum brightness, leaving only a little pile of ash at the end of its duration.
OTHER VOICES
I recently attended the Experimental Short Film Program at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Film Festival. The program’s hasty curation was evident, but the films still provided a dynamic range that suggested a great deal of insight into the short form’s many possibilities. Divided into two deliberately synthetic categories (“Formal/Structuralist” and “Narrative/Pop Cultural”), the program ranged from the one-woman gag film (Diane Torr’s “Two Banana Dance”) to the rigorously achieved aesthetic experiment (U of MN professor Hisham Bizri’s “A Film”). One of the more interesting structural experiments, Jenny Hogarth and Kim Coleman’s “If You Can’t See My Mirrors, I Can’t See You,” commented directly on the ubiquity of video and the availability of imagery the broadband age.
The film documents a video chat in which the main topic of verbal conversation is the adjustment of webcams and mirrors to create ever more dutch or distorted images of the chatters. But a second non-verbal communication is also going on. The women exchange links, images, and film clips with no more presage than, “This is the one I was telling you about.”
Far from narcissistic, the film seems to comment on the ugliness of the frame, the inadequacy of the medium and the sudden poetic moments caused by a digital artifact, slow signal or Gaussian blur. While one viewer noted that the filmmakers’ quotation of Coppola’s film “The Conversation” was facile, (film scholars have been quoting this film for decades), I wondered if such simple points of entry might be necessary for bringing structural analysis to a broader audience, the way that filmmakers seemed to do with great success in the 60s and 70s. Coppola’s film, in which Gene Hackman acts as detective on an elusive piece of conversation captured in surveillance, debuted in 1974. Coming from the success of The Godfather, Coppola used his notoriety to introduce some of the concerns of the French New Wave to a broader American audience. Hogarth and Coleman in turn use Coppola’s now-familiar film as a kind of footnote to their observations about the mediation of everyday life and everyday fears about surveillance.
In contrast to this multiplication of digital artifact, most of the recent documentary/nonfiction shorts featured at the Academy Awards[1] treated the medium as an invisible lens through which to view a situation. The resulting films each presented their tragic, newsworthy subjects with a dryness and inattention to form and medium that was sub-Nightline. Have 15 years of reality television taught us nothing about the invisible veils between our cameras and their subjects? Call it night of the living verite.
If current short narrative is allowing cliched story to lead it by the nose, if documentary is laboring under a well-meaning patina of verite, then perhaps animation can bring us something of with beauty or grace, something that provides that synergy of form and content that characterizes great visual art.
Although most of the films succumbed to the self-deprecating trap of showing ugly homunculi on familiar infantilizing quests, there was at least one that escaped into beauty. The short travel diary, “Madagascar, Carnet de Voyage” by Bastien Dubois is a work of painterly beauty and transcendence. From the rotoscoped to the handpainted, the animated short uses the trope of a travel diary whose pages turn before our eyes, telling a story of a traveler’s journey to witness the ritual of “turning the bones.”
I wondered how Peter Kubelka would react to this movie. His fascinating 1966 short Unsere Afrikareise (Our African Vacation) is a revolting polemic on safari that uses disjunctions between sound and image to strike a tone of violent condemnation. It cast a violent pall over the decades of travel diary that have followed it. In contrast, Dubois’s film, which touches on a ghoulish ritual, has a sleepy serenity to it and an indifference to the ethnography that previous generations of filmmakers once rebelled against. Is it ethnography? Watercolored travelogue? Dubois and his illustrators seem not to mind. It places images alongside one another, and this invites the synaptic cavalcade.
THE ESSAYIST
Here Dubois turns his own bones: exhuming the tradition of film essay that Kubelka’s travelogue established in 1966.[2] Some of the most exciting works of Agnes Varda and Jean-Luc Godard have been their film essays, and that most elusive of filmmakers, the mythical Chris Marker has made a career of apocryphal essays.
On this note, one last curator to mention here, in a kind of round up of the status quo, is the oft-maligned — sometimes by us at Quodlibetica as well — Walker Art Center. Film/Video Curator Sheryl Mousley has consistently brought top-quality fare to the audience of the Walker. Add to the list of great film essayists Mousley’s latest find, the droll and erudite Redmond Entwistle. Entwistle’s shamblingly shamanistic short Monuments summons the ghosts of three site-specific modernist installation artists (one of whom is still living) and brings them to bear on the current moment. In Monuments, Robert Smithson, Gordon Mata-Clark and Dan Graham[3] wander peripatetically through New Jersey, rehearsing lines from their interviews and writings. The footnotes come in flash cuts to opened pages on the Xerox machine. The result is more than the sum of its parts, a hypnotic synthesis of moods and ideas.
Although the Entwistle work (which was available for free in the small auditorium) has since left the art center, it reminds us that there are still venues, however select and however familiar, for groundbreaking short film. But if whether it’s the mode of viewership or the film itself, this realization of short film’s potential seems consigned to the elite environments in which it has always existed. While new generations of filmmakers have curbed some of the more jagged excesses of previous generations of short filmmakers, a charge of complacency seems likely to stick. The younger generation has not, to my eye, created a portal for vital shorts.
I would love to be proven wrong, and to that end I iinvite readers to share their experience with short film that was truly bracing and exciting. What was it, and how did it reach your eyes?
[1] Anti-terrorist tract Killing in the Name tries to undo the indoctrination of Jihadists using a shockingly literal interpretation of scripture. The Warriors of Qiugang is an Ikiru-like story of a town united against industrial pollution, but it states at its inception that their struggle is not exceptional, then proves that point. Sun Come Up tells the story of Cataret islanders who become refugees of natural disaster when rising ocean levels begin to submerge their island.
[2] I don’t mean to suggest that Kubelka invented the film essay, but his claim to the form certainly predates that of Orson Welles, whose 1973 F for Fake is often cited as a seminal work. Marker also made a travelogue as film essay, 1983’s Sans Soleil, which is revered and reviled in equal measure.
[3] Smithson is most known for Spiral Jetty. Mata-Clark is known for 1974’s Splitting, in which he bisected houses with a power saw. Dan Graham’s sculptures use mirrors and translucent surfaces. One of them can be seen in the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden.
Images
1) Still from Agnes Varda
2)-3) Stills from Jenny Hogarth and Kim Coleman’s “If You Can’t See My Mirrors, I Can’t See You.”
4) Still from Peter Kubelka, Unsere Afrikareise (Our African Vacation).
5) Still from Bastien Dubois, “Madagascar, Carnet de Voyage.”
6) Still from Redmond Entwistle, “Monuments.”
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