From: gregg biermann (email suppressed)
Date: Thu Feb 02 2006 - 21:01:37 PST
Thanks Madison -- I can appreciate where you are coming from. A few
things though... It is easy to give avant garde cinema a privileged
ethical and aesthetic position in comparison to today's cross marketed,
mass market commercial film franchises laden with formulaic pre-packaged
elements. Those are extreme ends of the spectrum. Compare the "funding,
organization and division of labor, etc" of so called independent
productions to those of a mass culture event movie. You could argue that
the most mass culture product is fairer because its mode of production
allows for unionized labor at a fair wage and decent work conditions--
whereas the more sophisticated, more high culture product may be
produced with a small budget and also with a much more exploitative
attitude towards its crew. Avant-garde cinema (with its radical form and
more often post-radical form) perhaps still finds intact much of its
historical integrity. But I'm under no illusion that it is (or ever was)
a utopia. Avant-garde cinema is a cultural product that has its own
economy, its own establishment, its own institutions, and thus its own
cultural capital. It is subject to the same hierarchical stratification
as any other cultural product and so can take an "authoritarian tactic"
as well.
Also I have to admit a bit of my own "c'est la vie quietism" -- if only
because attempts to make the world better often have the reverse effect.
The person who kills you will think they are doing a service to God.
Best,
Gregg
Madison Brookshire wrote:
> Dear Gregg,
>
> Thank you for your thoughtful response. CROSSROADS is a difficult film
> in this context, I agree. I too wonder to what extent this film in
> particular is informing me. For me, the question is several fold: am I
> learning anything? is this a valuable aesthetic experience? or is this
> a twisted tabloid: tragic imagery being turned into decoration (like,
> say 2-D Warhol or CNN)? Put simply: am I being rewarded by my
> experience of this footage assembled in this manner or am I being
> desensitized to something that I need to remain alert to and critical of?
>
> I have no easy answers in regards to CROSSROADS. I can, however, name
> a few things that I admire about this film. I admire the duration. If
> nothing else, this is 35 minutes reserved solely for the contemplation
> of this momentous... I wanted to say "event," but part of what the
> film educates the viewer to is a _history_, a pattern, a duration, so
> to speak. There is no voiceover to distract one from one's own musings
> on the subject. In fact, there is strikingly little in the of way
> directing one's response. So I also admire the bravery of using the
> footage without alteration. It is a document. Things get a little more
> complicated for me when the Terry Riley kicks in. But, then again, I
> have a complicated relationship to Terry Riley, anyway. Does the score
> trivialize the imagery? I would've preferred to have seen it all
> silent, but we silent film enthusiasts are few and far between.
>
> Also, there is a disorienting quality to the presentation of the
> imagery with so little context. For me, at least, it was unclear at
> first which images were filmed in slow motion. So you have a distorted
> view of distended time. And there IS something horrific in the
> beautiful terribleness of it. But for me the terror is not that I find
> it beautiful, but that the world is so often both at the same time.
> That things are irreducibly complicated and that it is impossible to
> maintain any position any idea without qualification, lest one is
> willing to be an ideologue or dogmatist.
>
> But as I said, CROSSROADS doesn't sit easily with me. For one, I
> detect a kind of acceptance in the film, a sort of c'est la vie
> quietism that I can't abide. No, it's not life, it's fucked up. And we
> need to stop it. But I appreciate the opportunity to come to that
> conclusion myself, during the film, both times that I've seen it. This
> is an experience that is available during CROSSROADS. I was presented
> with information (visual and emotional as distinct from verbal and
> intellectual) and came to my own opinions about it. For me, this is a
> very important political (and I don't use the word lightly) gesture.
> We are so battered by information directing our attention this way and
> that--look here so I can sucker punch you there--buy me, not him--on
> and on, that to see something willingly distancing itself from the
> 'join my team' tactics is refreshing. More than that, it's an oasis in
> a desert of ill-will.
>
> All that aside, AIRSHAFT is a film of an entirely different stripe. It
> is anti-war in that its subject matter is without war. Nothing is made
> in a vacuum, and this 1967 film made by highly political Ken
> especially not. Deep in the Vietnam War, amid all the other social
> unrest pervading the country during the late sixties, Ken has a few
> movies about the beauty of home, of family, of people caring for one
> another. Seen in context of films like NISSAN ARIANA WINDOW, AIRSHAFT
> represents an alternative to war, not just a railing against it. And
> after all, what good is criticism without alternatives? Furthermore,
> at the risk of repeating myself, I think it is instructive. It shows
> us how to look, how to appreciate that which is around us. It is
> neither escapist nor illusionistic. It doesn't exaggerate or
> aggrandize for entertainment or vanity. It simply says, let's pay
> attention to this. Let's see this. Let's feel what's available here,
> in this stuff. These images. This light. This screening. For Ken,
> "feeling is a heightened form of intelligence." Help people be in the
> world, and they won't need to go destroy another one. That's a little
> simplistic, but you get my drift, I hope.
>
> In essence, AIRSHAFT (I single this one out because it was shown in an
> explicitly anti-war context, but we could cite many other examples) is
> not just a criticism, it is a rejection. And instead of verbalizing
> its rejection, it embodies it. We can criticize, it certainly has its
> place and usefulness, but we can also live our opposition. The latter
> is perhaps the more difficult of the two.
>
> Finally, a word on the distinction between radical form and so-called
> radical content. The form of your film, including the way in which it
> is produced (funding, organization and division of labor, etc.), will
> affect the content, to put it lightly. A film that purports to be
> anti-establishment, yet which upholds every authoritarian tactic of
> the established cinema in fact enforces the establishment. Put simply,
> political films must be made politically. There is no cookie-cutter,
> manifesto-esque answer I can offer as to what this means, what it
> entails. Only that our protest, if we do desire to protest, must be
> total. We must embody the change we wish to engender. This is
> precisely why the non-violent resistance of the civil-rights movement
> remains so powerful, so promising. They actually did what they said!
> The content of their ideas were manifest in their activities. Let us
> be so bold.
>
> Madison
>
>
>
>
> On 2/2/06, gregg biermann <email suppressed
> <mailto:email suppressed>> wrote:
>
> Madison,
> I remember being at a screening a few years ago of Bruce Conner's
> "Crossroads" and I happened to be sitting near Ricky Leacock. He
> seemed
> a bit agitated by the movie but I was impressed that he stayed
> through
> the entire thing. His quarrel with the movie was precisely with
> what it
> doesn't say or do about the content. He said that he thought the film
> was a failure-- for example because he wanted to know what
> happened to
> the people on the boats and the film never got around to letting him
> know. And after 35 minutes of watching these mushroom clouds you don't
> really know anything more about the facts of the atomic test (or
> Hiroshima for that matter) than you did before. Aside from the
> issue of
> objective facts it doesn't really lead us down a political road
> either.
> How many times can you think the thought: "it is so beautiful and so
> terrible that I think so"? You can think politics during this
> movie but
> eventually through radical form you get to a point where the movie
> seems
> to be stripped its potential for political interpretation or
> historical
> content. We might almost look at this atomic explosion from a
> not-human
> perspective. In that sense it might be almost ambivalent about human
> beings destroying themselves.
> GB
>
>
> __________________________________________________________________ For
> info on FrameWorks, contact Pip Chodorov at <email suppressed>.
>
__________________________________________________________________
For info on FrameWorks, contact Pip Chodorov at <email suppressed>.