VIDEO ON PAPER VOL. 1 by Jasmine Sarp

VOP Video on Paper vol. 1

Max Guy and Neil Sanzgiri Baltimore 2012

Contents

Volume 1, Introduction 1

Issue #1 NOTES

Spiral Cinema Thus Far - Neil Sanzgiri 34 Notes on Film - Eric Hatch Scenes From the Lost Roll - Rachel Lowing FEATURES 11

Jumbotron as Constant - Nate Cubeta Stills and Abstract - Isaac Diebboll Max Guy and Jimmy Joe Roche in Conversation ESSAYS

NEW MEMORY

Voids of Dogville (and other essays) - Miranda Pfeiffer Nascent Cinema - Mitchell Goodrich Ecstatic Truths - Hannah Mandel

Issue #2 NOTES

An open letter to Anne Lai from Max Guy FEATURES

Entropy and the Mimetic Digital Image - Rachel Lowing ESSAYS

Contemporary Dreamscapes - Mitchell Goodrich NEW MEMORY

Memory and Corruption - Neil Sanzgiri

Issue #3 NOTES 56

Notes from Mitchell Goodrich FEATURES 58

Stills - Lauren Brick Cultivate Your Data - Siobhan Hagan ESSAYS 66

Conditions For A New Social Subject - Amber Moyles NEW MEMORY

And In Case I Donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t See Ya - Martine Syms The Truth is Out There - Hannah Mandel

VOLUME 1, INTRODUCTION

As the title might imply, Video on Paper is an articulation of the [ongoing] practices of its contributors in print form – Volume One being an anthology of Issues # 1, 2, and 3 – first published in Baltimore, Maryland between the months of January and September of 2012. Volume One represents a year (or more) of work and contemplation on video, film and the cinematic experience, as those terms evolve. We started the journal to learn from the people we admire, and to establish ourselves within a larger community of creative minds through the engagement. We want to offer these friends and mentors repose – to be there with them on their break from work and ask them what they’re up to – learning from them as they figure things out. We’d like to thank the following people for your help and inspiration: Nate Cubeta, Isaac Dieboll, Mitchell Goodrich, Siobhan Hagan, Eric Hatch, Rachel Lowing, Hannah Mandel, Amber Moyles, Miranda Pfeiffer, Jimmy Joe Roche, Martine Syms, Damon Zucconi, Peter Oleksik, Dwight Swanson, Megan Downey, Jon Vickers, Jim Healy, Adam Sekuler and Ignatey Vishnivetsky and Justin Kelly. And a very special thanks to the designers Emily Burtner and Jasmine Sarp. Sincerely, The editors

ISSUE 1 2

“The whole story of the universe is implicit in any part of it. The meditative eye can look through any single object and see, as through a window, the entire cosmos. Make the smell of roast duck in an old kitchen diaphanous and you will have a glimpse of everything, from the spiral nebulae to Mozart’s music and the stigmata of St. Francis of Assisi. The artistic problem is to produce diaphanousness in spots, selecting the spots so as to reveal only the most humanly significant of distant vistas behind the near familiar object.” Aldous Huxley

NOTES - neil sanzgiri

Notes and a Rough Journaling of the Spiral Cinema Series Thus Far To begin by talking about how Spiral Cinema part two evolved I would like to talk about all of the things that never happened. For the second installment, Max and I only started loosely scheming ways of extending our methods of investigation primarily because we were somewhat bored. We needed more projects, more ways of justifying our daydreaming and placing it in an appropriate context. In fact, to briefly mention another thing that never happened, this whole thing started on an entirely comedic note. Max and I began talking this past summer about hosting a film series where we pair documentaries about art with their closest Hollywood equivalent (i.e The Guest of Cindy Sherman / Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World and In The Realms of The Unreal / Sling Blade). We decided to scrap that and move on. I always tried to keep Spiral Cinema away from a strict film series even more than it already is by incorporating elements of performance, music, and readings. I wanted to lessen the idea of a “theme” and concentrate much more on the effect of pairing films with counter performances that leave the viewer with a very specific emotion or overall sensation that they can attribute to a number of events that follow. I suggested ideas such as a fiction or poetry reading, a musical performance, or theatrical show. I don’t know why I wanted to be so adventurous. I was interested in unpredictable emotions cast or rather imposed on the audience by a combination of music, film and performance. And of course there is always an element of chance within curatorial endeavors - to put four things side by side and see what happens. The connections that are forged can be so rewarding, as was the case with the first spiral cinema series. I guess I just wanted that forgery to exist in another realm. It happens all the time in daily conversations when people bring up to mind a memory or personal anecdote that somehow relates to whatever topic is being discussed, but why can’t those same overlapping connections exist elsewhere such as in films and performances? Why can’t this happen over the course of a month? Why can’t an entire feeling be stretched out through different weeks and different performances? 4

Notes - Neil Sanzgiri

The idea in my mind warranted much more thought and elaboration – something we weren’t quite ready for. It would have been on a scale relatively too ambitious. Max suggested that we pair our second series down a little further. Keep it simple – four films, four weeks. Yet, Max wanted a specific theme: originally he proposed an entire film series based on “the fall” of the protagonist in films - a great idea yet a little to specific for my taste. We started listing off films and showing each other those trailers. We each compiled a list of ten films and then narrowed them down to four. “What next?” I started thinking. I was deeply unsatisfied by just presenting the films and hosting a subsequent discussion. That’s not what Spiral Cinema was to me. The Q&A approach always seemed a little half-assed when there was just so much to talk about. I knew that our first series of writing was going to be of great importance, as it one was one of the first opportunities I had to take myself seriously. What started as just one essay or handout to supplement the content of the series grew into an essay per screening. And we didn’t even necessarily mention any part of the film in each essay – the film was used to inspire a conversation about something entirely different. F For Fake made me question what a documentary was, and what happens when events and details become twisted according to the “authors” will. Double Take provoked a conversation about re-appropriation and what happens to an image after it is “reblogged.” Max and I each took a different approach to looking at the films not necessarily for their context but the surrounding questions that can be asked about the medium itself. Max and I have always been drawn to the expansion of time, space and consciousness through different mediums. We both understood that art was capable of these things as evidenced through our mutual love of artists like On Kawara, John Cage, and the entire Fluxus movement. It’s easy to just say that, and even though we realized it was kind of funny to just talk about these things so informally, we understood that the level of

complexity of what was actually going on in our brains when watching a film (see: upcoming lecture with neuroscientist Uri Hasson on February 12th @ Open Space) or metaphorically experiencing an expansion of time and consciousness through an object was not nearly as accessible as we originally thought. This is kind of why I stopped making studio art. With the announcement that Spiral Cinema received the Station North Arts “Think Big” grant in October, I knew that we were in this for the long haul. Moving forward, I really could not have anticipated how difficult it would be to follow up with all of the “promises” you make to yourself. Inspired by how powerful collective viewing experiences actually were to me (see: Gunky’s Basement, and the Revival Series at The Charles), I began on a quest to find spaces that also showed the potential for interesting collective viewing experiences. The Charles was always at the top of the list, and reading about the recently renovated Autograph Playhouse Theater on 25th St., I jumped at the opportunity to host something there. The grant application started as a “touring” film series that would start at The Charles move to the Windup Space, then onto Autograph Playhouse in Charles Village and finally reach Open Space Gallery in Remington. I loved the idea of someone riding their bike through different neighborhoods each week to find out where the series would take them next. Of course, this ended up not working because of budgetary and time restrictions, but there is still much to be investigated with “alternative” theaters. Instead we found comfort in limiting ourselves to the Windup Space and Open Space. The films seemed to belong there in respective ways. I got more and more excited about screening Jim Jarmusch’s Mystery Train at the Windup Space and Monte Hellman’s Two-Lane Blacktop at Open Space Gallery because of their unique attributes. One is a bar with a rich history of rock n’ roll, one is an auto-body shop turned art gallery.

initially envisioned it as a sort of live precursor to the film, but we compromised and settled on releasing an album, mix, or piece a week before each film in order to give listeners an opportunity to view each film in a new light. “Comprehending” a film to me was not just a matter of talking, analyzing, or criticizing but rather experiencing the film in new way. Sound just seemed like the perfect medium in which to explore newer dimensions of cinema. Along that same path, we knew we wanted to put together a new publication. “Video on Paper” as it is called. One night perhaps even before we started writing the grant, I had this crystalline moment in which I realized there needed to be some sort of unifying name or brand to the large number of bourgeoning artists, filmmakers and writers who view film as an important medium to be addressed poetically, analytically and politically. I started assessing all of the institutions in Baltimore we could align ourselves with – The Maryland Film Festival, The Contemporary Museum, Creative Alliance, etc. This incentive to bridge a gap, or perhaps encourage an audience who may have had no previous experience in looking at a film other than as an entertaining experience (which of course it still is) was still exciting to me. I finally felt like providing something to the public, though of course neither Max nor I are by any means qualified to lecture on film we nonetheless feel compelled in some form or another to continue this project. And that’s what this is more than anything: A project in which we are united and compelled to continue in our pursuit of consciousness pulled by the very gravity of the filmic image.

Yet, something happened that I never really saw coming. I mean I should have seen it coming because this is how I work. When one is planning something four months in advance but working on it every week, naturally things get left out of sight and planning continues nonetheless. While discussing the preliminary artists we would commission to make illustrations for the posters, one night I brought up the possibility of also commissioning musicians to “soundtrack” each film. I Video on PaPer - Issue 1

NOTES - eric allen hatch

34 Notes on Film Culture, History, and Appreciation

The most worthwhile films offer two experiences: the experience you have watching them and the experience you have replaying them endlessly in your mind. For this reason you may wish to suspend final judgment on a film for a period ranging from one week to forever.

Do not judge a film based on whether it tells you a story; it may instead aim to tell you an idea, mood, or feeling. The American art-house theater has become a tofurky. The problem is not Pedro Almod贸var per se, but we unquestionably deserve better.

Films shot on location are a form of time travel. Period pieces, costume dramas, and stage adaptations are the lowest modes of cinema, with innumerable remarkable exceptions. Films are not novels, plays, paintings, or songs. 6

Notes - Eric Allen Hatch

Which is one way of saying: another Fassbinder is possible. /// The heights to which a liberated camera had ascended by the end of the silent era; the damp documents and static frames of Cocoanuts.

The Hays Code as evidence that notions of morality on film have not evolved along a linear trajectory of “progress” or “openness.” The brief mainstreaming of pornography in early 1970s theaters and the swift self-censoring response of Hollywood as further proof of the same. \\\ One focused year working at a video store could be worth 4 hazy years at a film school. It may also happen that you will meet valuable people at both places. All films are meant to be viewed on the presentation format for which they were created, except early80s horror films, which are meant to be watched on grainy, big-box VHS cassettes in the middle of the night. Perfect films exist, such as Sunset Boulevard, Le Samouraï, and Car Wash.

Much as Godard has now delivered his most abrasive at 80. The number of today’s young filmmakers drawing inspiration from Barbara Loden’s Wanda and Floyd Mutrux’s Dusty and Sweets McGee. \\\ Who is the man sitting behind Robert De Niro mimicking his every gesture in King of Comedy; now that I’ve mentioned him, is he all that you can see? Say what you will about Steven Spielberg, he believes in movie magic. And made Duel. The visionary new films coming from Greece, Thailand, Argentina, and South Korea. The additional thrill provided by films that were never intended for our eyes.

/// The Enoch Pratt Free Library --- > the Frederick Wiseman shelf.

Bollywood; Nollywood; yakuza/Fukasaku.

The uncorked insanity of Timothy Carey and Elisha Cook, Jr.

The Baltimore music community in year 2000; the Baltimore film community in year 2012.

The peculiar observation that Nicolas Roeg’s films as cinematographer and Hal Ashby’s as editor feel more like their subsequent films as directors than they feel like the previous films of the directors under whom they shot and edited.

Which is one way of saying: something like another John Waters is possible.

Bresson’s breakthroughs in thinking about sound; his masterful realization of his own ideas.

Frownland.

Herzog on Herzog.

Claire Denis. The encouraging reflection that he made his angriest films beyond the age of 70. Video on PaPer - Issue 1

NOTES - rachel lowing

Scenes From the Lost Roll

Notes - Rachel Lowing

Video on PaPer - Issue 1

Notes - Rachel Lowing

FEATURE - Nate Cubeta

Jumbotron as Constant The monolithic Jumbotron screen is a constant stream of stimulation: prompts, advertisements, promotional contests, legal announcements, marriage proposals, archival footage, and replays. Views of the athletes, crowd, field and stadium itself are made constantly available, at multiple angles, speeds, and resolutions. . An unyielding presence in games filled with scheduled and unscheduled stops. The Jumbotron made its debut in 1985 at the World’s Fair in Japan. Then Sony creative director Yasuo Kuroki credited with its development. Despite being a trademark of Sony, Jumbotron is a generalized trademark that now refers to all large screens found in arenas and stadiums. These screens generally come in two varieties: the large single screens which are found at outdoor football, baseball and soccer stadiums and the octagonal or quadrilateral screens found in indoor basketball and hockey arenas. Its evolution from advanced scoreboard to basic display unit (think early Nintendo) to a multiple real time video screen has changed the role of the spectator as well as the athlete. It also caused an arms race of sorts for franchises to posses the largest screen possible. The current victor is Jerry Jone’s Dallas Cowboys, whose stadium features a four-sided screen that is large than the White House. A common occurrence to see while watching a sporting event is an athlete or coach gazing skyward after an important play or moment. For the coach, it is an opportunity to see the validity of a questionable call, severity of a failure or beauty of the flawless execution of their vision. For the player, looking at the Jumbotron usually follows either an impressive personal performance or a mortifying lapse. In either case, one can imagine the realization that that same piece of video has the possibility to trail them for the duration of their life (see Ron Artest and George Teague) At a more acute angle than the skyward point and accompanying look used by athlete to reference God, the gaze towards the Jumbotron occupies a position between the lowly participants and the divine. The Jumbotron also serves as a venue for both public love and rejection. Entire stadiums have witnessed both joyful embraces of an ecstatic couple just engaged as well the mortifying rejections of the hapless man suddenly so alone in a crowded arena. YouTube is filled with these ultra public rejections, one of the most famous features LeBron James laughing from the court as the would-be bride flees. A device whose purpose is to constantly stimulate and entertain, the Jumbotron displays a strong resonance when off. The void of the black planes looms over the empty seats It appears sinister, although naturally-as if caught unaware. One of the most powerful examples of this instance occurs in an image from the preparations for the funeral of “Smokin” Joe Frazier at the Wells Fargo Center in Philadelphia. On the bare concrete of the arena floor, surrounded by empty maroon seats and concrete stairs, a white flower draped casket rests. Crowd control stanchions emerge from either side, forming an acute angle. Directly above the casket, hangs a stack of black screens. The bottom and top of the stack are composed of rectangular rings, for displaying text-based advertisements. In the middle- four dull black rectangles crowned by a similar shape composed of smaller rectangles; except between them are square screens forming a complete octagon. The gravity of the machine’s weight mirrors the gravity of the death of such a public figure. Both Jumbotron and fighter no longer equipped to go silent in front of the once roaring crowd. Video on PaPer - Issue 1

Feature - Nate Cubeta

Video on PaPer - Issue 1

FEATURE - isaac diebboll

Stills & Abstract

Everything exists and everything is possible if we give weight and credibility to the invisible things we see in our mind and let them be as substantial and physical as the things we can touch with our hands. While looking at the following places, pick each word up like a brick and watch as you organically build a structure of your own imagery. An Invisible Landscape, already here, clear in front of us, living as the impression of a space that we have just been walking through. We see a person’s face and hold their portrait still in our mind. We see their features change, breathe, live and disappear into our vision. We have entered a room we recall our memories from. Our memories are immediate and constant. They are statues - columns of a house that we are building, a house full of drawers, which hold pictures we look at. We see life inside of these pictures. 14

Feature - Isaac Diebboll

We hold this life and build a tower with it, draw a design with it, fold a piece of clay that becomes a piece of music and then words we speak into a conversation – a relationship with a person – a life that we used our hands to help create. This space we are working with reflects us, the spaces of our minds, which are a landscape and portrait of our human being, showing everything, unlimited by laws of nature. Our minds are intelligent lifeforms capable of everything if we exercise them. ‘Listen to your eyes’’ – Wim Wenders

Video on PaPer - Issue 1

FEATURE - max Guy

Max Guy and Jimmy Joe Roche in Conversation

Jimmy Joe Roche is a video artist living and working in Baltimore, Maryland. My first experience with his video, Ghost Zane, was one that has stuck with me for the past four years, as it was also my first experience seeing a touring video, being screened in such a nontraditional (an alternative) venue—a firehouse in the middle of Bushwick, New York City. Since 2010 Jimmy has been co-curating Gunky’s Basement, a revival film series at the Charles Theater with musician Dan Deacon as part of the Maryland Film Festival. Gunky’s basement presents a wide array of cult classics from Who Framed Roger Rabbit to Dune in 35mm print, an opportunity for the film to be viewed once again its intended venue, by a potentially new audience. I met with Jimmy on Dec. 12th 2011 to talk about Gunky’s, and his experience taking his videos on tour, and defining classics from generation to generation. This portion of our conversation was recorded on tape; unfortunately about a minute was cut off from the beginning was, including my first question. I asked how he began taking his videos on tour. 16

Feature - max guy & Jimmy Joe Roche

Jimmy Joe Roche: When I got out of film school in 2004 I was pretty broke and also kind of disillusioned with film festivals. Though I hadn’t even really experienced them enough, I had one or two negative experiences with them and I had applied to a couple of shows and so I felt like… back then I didn’t really use the internet ever for anything like I think I didn’t have an email… well I had an email address but I really wasn’t ever on the internet which blows my mind like its crazy to think about when I think back to 2004 like how was I never on the internet like what was I doing?! But anyway for me it was like I would send films to film festivals in the mail and sometimes they would get screened but I would never hear back from the festival. I’d have to find out somewhere or maybe I would Google it eventually and find literally a website with like a list of times with my name attached to it, and it just felt so distant from having a meaningful experience with like exhibiting my work. And I was pretty naive in terms of contemporary art or anything like that because I went to film school so for me I was like, “well fuck! What if I take videos on tour?” Because the only people I knew who were doing anything with their art

were musicians that were my friends, just mainly like Dan. So I thought “well what kind of video…” and I had never seen Paper Rad’s work or anything like that, I think around that time they were doing touring with video and I know they had done stuff like that shit in the mid 2000’s. Max Guy: Yeah primarily I guess I had heard about their work through the Internet and their comics and that kind of distribution JJR: I don’t now how long or when they went on tour with videos but I know they’ve done it, obviously. I’ve seen them do it when I moved to Wham City, when I

for the most part there were always people who were really receptive to the work in that context. Sometimes I honestly think that even in the most hectic environment (like the one in that show in New York—that was pretty crazy, the projector was falling off the wall), even in the most insane-ish environments I feel like I’ve always had a good experience with people being surprised. Like not expecting that, and I think that’s one of the most important things or an interesting thing about like, what you were talking about—by changing the context in which you see film— is that it opens up an opportunity. Especially if its not in a gallery or museum because you go into a gallery or a museum which you already are making a contract with that institution

“But we showed Mozek, for example under a bridge in Canada next to a bonfire out of the back of a truck, like through a PA and while we were doing it the police and Mounties showed up, it was a completely surreal environment...” moved to Baltimore they came through and showed videos. But in 2005 I didn’t know about anything like that, but there was a guy… I’m going to fuck up his name but he was a Native American filmmaker who was also a kung fu expert in the 60’s, I think his name was Billy Black or something like that but he was this kung fu expert who would make these movies - direct and star in his own movies and then he would take his own films on tour in the late 60’s… late 60’s maybe 70’s? But he would drive his films all over the place and basically through his own charisma would get them screened and created an environment for his films to be screened by his presence and by his energy.

that you’re going to experience something that you anticipated going a certain way. But we showed Mozek, for example under a bridge in Canada next to a bonfire out of the back of a truck, like through a PA and while we were doing it the police and Mounties showed up, it was a completely surreal environment that totally took the film out of the context of all of the things you think you need to have; like not having the projector sitting on a generator in the dirt with cables all around.

MG: Did you get a lot of feedback that way also? Were people willing to come up to you and tell you how they felt? Were you looking for that kind of thing?

MG: Its a much different experience from hosting Gunky’s Basement, where what I was thinking a lot about with that was the fact that you’re presenting movies which so many people probably didn’t see when they were released in theaters but were blockbusters. For example dune you described seeing it with your friends at their home as opposed to seeing it in theaters. It’s a different kind of collective experience you know? It’s smaller in scale, and even though there are more people [in theaters] its still a very individualized, personal experience where you don’t consider the theater as much. But what I was also thinking about was how you and Dan will preface the films and so there is still something on our minds when we watch it. One thing that stood out to me in all of the screenings was during Alien when you mentioned H.R. Giger, it had me thinking of the film more as a painting.

JJR: Yeah, I mean I actually was really surprised that

JJR: Yeah I mean I totally get that, I mean I think that

Of course you know David [Lynch]; I remember being inspired by stories of people driving across the country to film festivals or like David Lynch driving Eraserhead around to places and so those things inspired me and that’s what I was thinking about when I was like “fuck it I want to go on tour with a video!” I don’t know anyone whose done that but I want to be there standing while people like... when the projector is bouncing around and intermingling with their bodies and…

Video on PaPer - Issue 1

there are literally massive paintings in those films you know what I mean? Like I’ve worked on a few Hollywood films over the last 10 years and some of the craziest things I’ve ever seen are the massive painted backdrops of some films and I think that Alien has probably huge paintings and sometimes some of those huge starship scenes do feel like huge paintings. MG: Would you prefer the sort of situation in which you’re screening films in a theater like Gunky’s Basement or having the actual picturesque situation like when you were for example screening under a bridge or in these other venues? JJR: Well I guess I have interest in all of the different incarnations of cinema in those different ways. Its nice showing 35mm with Gunky’s, for me its fun and a little bit of a challenge to make that an event that people get excited about and make it something special in peoples minds. I feel like Dan and I are good at getting people hyped up for things and I think its a subtle art, it’s like being a promoter or booker or whatever. And that’s part of what is interesting to me, one of my favorite things about Gunky’s is that we choose these films where we’re kind of taking a bet, like to have a weird psychological resonance with a bunch of people, and, like you’re saying- might of been under peoples’ radar, everyone knows about it but maybe they didn’t see it or saw it in a weird context and trying to angle that bet that we’ve made, that hunch that we’ve had into a kind of way of getting people hyped about this screening. That’s why its funny—and this isn’t answering your Post Typography

Feature - max guy & Jimmy Joe Roche

chris day

question but I think it’s interesting—Dan’s going to be on tour next year and so we won’t be able to do Gunky’s again probably until next winter, so it’ll to be a while. A lot of people have been like “aw man it sucks I wish you would keep doing it” and I’m like “well Dan’s going to be on tour” and they’re like “well couldn’t you do it without him” like my friend Adam is like “well no offense it’s cool that you guys do it but people are there to see the movies not you guys.” and I think in a way that’s true but it’s not; there’s a kind of subtle… it’s not just the event itself its all the kind of extra energy you put into it and the subtle way that you contextualize it and what else you link to it or the other things you think about or talk about while you’re promoting the event that kind of give it a flavor or contexts that sometimes help people influence the way that people think about or remember the film. MG: The way that you and Dan advertise is very specific, I’m thinking about the posters I see and how those things reinvent people’s notions of the films. The people you choose to do the posters, I’ve seen Post Typography, JJR: Yeah they’ve done two MG: And Chris day, these are people who have… sort of backgrounds in doing music event posters? How that changes things, its almost catering to a specific audience that is used to that? Used to seeing music posters and seeing events and being attracted… or just knowing who makes attractive advertising as well. Jordan bernier

JJR: It’s not only that but we try to get the person who makes the poster, we tell them the movies we’re going to show and ask them what film they want to do. So we try to get people to make posters for films they really love, so not only will they hopeful make a more interesting poster but also in addition to that they’re going to be psyched about the screening. All these people like Chris and Nolan and all of these people who make posters for us are people who aren’t only talented artists but they’re culture generators in Baltimore they’re people that people respect, they respect their opinions, what they think, what they do and in that way when they’re making a poster for a band or for the films they’re showing its like in a way its an indirect acknowledgement that they’re excited about it. And I think for the truism, like if you talk to Nolan or Chris they would be like “yeah I love that movie.” so in that way its another way of creating this larger field of dialogue about the work and bringing in other people who are generating culture in Baltimore into the event of the film or the “happening” basically. MG: I remember when I first heard about the series it was described as you and Dan curating the movies and I had never really thought about hosting a series and curating the films that were being screened, but I guess where culture is being generated and there are multiple parties involved in terms of the different things being produced for the event, that is a very curatorial process, it’s interesting to me that curatorial practice is becoming more of a medium in itself and this is one of the forms of it in this way? I saw this screening, it was called Videodoor at the Penthouse, and they had something at the Soft House as well recently. It’s acknowledging a whole other crowd of artists that I wasn’t really aware of before. It’s nice. JJR: I’ve definitely been thinking a lot about local and underground culture, well underground in the sense that if you’re not taking some time to find it you might not ever see it. It’s not like, right up in your face, you know like mass media, I mean underground is a hard word to use now because what the fuck does it mean anymore? But I think it’s pertinent, I’ve been thinking about the purpose function of people who make moving images in a small context, or in a local context, on a smaller or more independent— fiercely independent, like something you see at the Soft House and you maybe you can’t find a copy of it you don’t even know who made it because you walked in on the middle of it. I’m still thinking about it but I think it’s interesting. MG: I wonder if it has any parallels to the way that

people view things these days. I view a lot of things on the computer or, I watch things on my iPad. I’ve almost started treating a video more as I would reading a book, just because of the small format and the amount of control I have over it, it makes me think of different things now. JJR: Meaning you look at parts of it or you jump around, how do you mean? MG: Like, sometimes I don’t like suspenseful moment in movies, and I’ve been trying to get better about that, like I don’t skip parts in movies really, but I’ll pause and I’ll think about taking a film still, or if I’m tired I’ll just pause it and go to bed rather than watching it all the way through. But when you have something at a certain venue… JJR: Well, watching videos on the Internet is changing rapidly and its changed a lot in the last 3 years I think, like YouTube has changed drastically. YouTube used to be a place where I think everyone had an equal shot in getting his or her crazy shit (or whatever it is) seen. Now it’s much, much more complicated and I didn’t feel like spending money and financial algorithms and all this promotion and advertising and stuff. It kind of keeps the weird stuff, like; to some degree I think it’s sort of been figured out how to make YouTube like TV. In the sense that its harder for like… I had some early videos that got watched like a million times or 100.000 times or something and that doesn’t happen anymore. I don’t think its all because people aren’t interested in my work I think, part of it, because I’ve been dealing with YouTube for a long time, that it’s changed how video gets seen, the way people find things. Maybe there’s less of a “newness” with the ability for people to find independent work on the internet, or maybe people are a little burned out on it. It does seem like some people are starting to put things out on VHS again, and sort of an interest in 16mm again and trying to screen films, especially in Baltimore… or at least to some degree in Baltimore. And maybe some of that has a relationship to the changing way that people perceive finding independent media on the Internet. MG: Using old media sort of limits your own creative control in a way. There are a lot of cheers and collective laughing during the screenings, have you and Dan ever predicted when that might happen? JJR: Oh, no not really, sometimes it’s surprising but I’m never annoyed by it. I’ll talk to people after the Video on PaPer - Issue 1

screenings and there are always a few people who will say, “oh I loved that movie but I can’t believe people were laughing.” To me it’s interesting it doesn’t really bother me, it’s fascinating actually to see how people respond to something. Like I can remember the way that someone might respond to something in 1995 versus 1985 versus 2012 or whatever, it’s so strange. That’s one of the things that I love about showing these movies, there’s this bizarre cultural distance. I remember recently (in the last four years or something) realizing that 1981 or ’85 or something, when was alive but I was

Hollywood’s changed, cameras have changed, film’s changed, everything looks different, all the people act different, actors act totally different, everyone got a lot more sexy. just born—that was like 25 years ago! These horror movies that I like to watch and sci-fi movies that I’m really into from like 1985, that’s not 10 years ago anymore, that’s 25 years ago now, that’s a long time ago! But when you go to film school you learn about all of these films from the 60’s and the film looks different and you can kind of distance yourself from it, it feels like history. I think that it’s not until recently for me, that I realized movies that were made in the 80’s are history, in the same way that movies—when I was watching them— you know what I’m saying? MG: When you were born. JJR: Yeah and when you look at some of the movies in Gunky’s there is that kind of distance, that kind of historical distance, even from the 90’s and the 80’s, which is bizarre, because I feel like that’s a world that a lot of people aren’t discussing in contemporary art. MG: Even thinking about your self as history is kind of a strange thing. For the next series we’re going to screen this movie Aria, which came out in ‘89, and I was born in ’89. Sometimes I wonder—even though I wasn’t cognizant of the time, do I have this kind of connection to the movie regardless, just because I was born then? My upbringing started then, it’s almost like being brought up with the culture in that sense, the residue 20

Feature - max guy & Jimmy Joe Roche

of it. I think about my brother, who is 7 years younger than me, and what came out that year? So he was born in ’96? JJR: Lawnmower Man? Terminator 2? Arachnophobia? Tremors? I feel like that was the mid 90’s. MG: I wonder if those movies would resonate a whole lot with him right now. JJR: Its interesting, I feel like some of the younger people I know here in their early 20’s, the movies that are cult films for them are so different from the movies that are cult films for me. MG: Like what would you consider a cult movie? JJR: Well for instance, my brother, I think an important film for him… maybe his Eraserhead (he’s about 8 years younger than me) was Donnie Darko, and my Eraserhead was…Well I guess it was probably Eraserhead or I guess maybe something like, The Dark Backwards, just something radically different in terms of the aesthetic of cinema. Or like Scream, kids who grew up with the Scream series versus what I was watching when I was a teenager into horror movies. Hollywood’s changed, cameras have changed, film’s changed, everything looks different, all the people act different, actors act totally different, everyone got a lot more sexy. There’s this tremendous change, and one thing that I’ve noticed that I think is surprising is that a lot of people who are like 10 years younger than me who grew up with films that look and feel a different way are kind of tuned out to films that look and feel a different way which is like, stuff I watched on VHS in the 80s’. Students or people that I’ve met who are younger haven’t seen any of these movies because it’s not part of their vocabulary in a way. And I don’t mean that they’re ignorant or they haven’t dug deep enough but maybe there’s a visual wall there now. MG: How did you choose the movies (in Gunky’s Basement)? JJR: The main criterion is it has to be a film that both Dan and I have seen, and the other, most difficult criterion is that Dan and I have to agree on it. There are a few films that we were both 100 percent on, and then it takes a lot of trading and bickering. By the end of it we usually have a list that we both feel good about. Its usually that one of us wants to influence the series in one way and one of us wants to influence the series

in another way, like I want to show something that’s too radically off the beaten path and he wants to show something that I think is too mainstream—I don’t know mainstream seems like the wrong term to use—or vice versa. The line that we’re trying to create with the trajectory or the aesthetics of the film has never been defined, its not that we know what it is we just kind of know it when we see it. A lot of the films I think have that kind of quality where they’re movies that everyone knows of and you may have seen once on VHS but you didn’t catch in the theater and sort of forgot about, but are kind of always part of culture; films that didn’t quite die or disappear completely. MG: So do you think that when you agree on a film that’s when you’ve picked a film that is culturally [timeless]? JJR: Yeah, absolutely, I think that both of us have a kind of barometer for that. We’re not hashing it out in those exact terms but I think we’re both trying to sense these movies that are in the cultural subconscious. MG: You’re also coming at it from two different sensibilities but the fact that you can both agree that you’re two sensibilities fit within one film. JJR: Dan and I are very different in terms of the type of media that we enjoy; I mean there are things that we absolutely share 100 percent, aesthetically. There are parts of our sensibilities that are completely in sync. But then there are other things, like I would say taste in cinema is in some ways on the other end of the spectrum—like we’re kind of into different things. So when we find a movie that we agree on there’s got to be some kind of thing there that gives the film potential to get people psyched about it; the carnival of the event of [the film] being screened on 35mm.

that way. In a certain situation, event or environment, stand behind what you know to be the best choice, but also be capable of being endlessly flexible. It’s kind of paradoxical. Curating Gunky’s is a hell of a lot easier than making art. It’s fun, it’s pretty easy, we go get lunch, and we bicker and write some emails fuck around and we curate a film series and its really fun—with Eric Hatch, we wouldn’t be able to do it without him, he’s the one who when we come up with our list he tracks down the films. Making art is a lot harder and obviously a lot more intense, but can be just as rewarding if not more so when it works. MG: Right, and when you guys collaborate do you feel like you have a certain chemistry? Because that aspect comes off especially when you introduce the films. It’s almost as if you’re performing then, and maybe that’s more directly connected to your collaborative work in a sense. JJR: Dan and I have known each other for a really long time, and we knew each other when we were becoming who we are in some ways, and kind of figuring out who we are as artists. When you know someone in that context, that’s a really deep kind of knowledge, especially if you know someone and you see the kind of artist that they are, and you’ve been there for that whole process. I think that we’ve kind of been there for each other for that whole process. More info on Jimmy Joe Roche at www.jimmyjoeroche. com

MG: What’s different from the experience of choosing videos together from working together on video? JJR: We made Ultimate Reality, which we’ve shown on tour, and we’ve shot a film in the Netherlands recently. Well there’s a lot similarities, you have to make a lot of compromises in collaboration (obviously). You have to know when to 100 percent stick to what you want and you have to know when to bend. Knowing that, I would say that curatorially or aesthetically or when you’re working with someone, it’s an important balance in Video on PaPer - Issue 1

essays - miranda pfeiffer

Voids of Dogville (and other essays)

Still from Dogville, Ch 9, In Which the Film Ends, Lionsgate, 2003

â&#x20AC;&#x153;Mu,â&#x20AC;? Tori Enji, 1721-1792

Essays - Miranda PFeiffer

Moonassi, I can see you!, 29.5 x 42cm, Marker and pen on paper, 2010

VOIDS OF DOGVILLE “He’s a withdrawn and primitive man ...but in his heart he’s loyal ...and good.”

-Dogville, 2003

The blackness at Dogville’s limit is wall of a studio set and an illusion of endless distance. Movies are often filmed on recreations of real places rather than on location, but Dogville’s stage is barren, almost empty; a handful of lines painted on a black-box theater floor define the houses and landscape. As in theater, with so little environmental context in Dogville, the viewer is forced to contend with the bare essentials of character, plot, and narrative. Von Trier carves a story out of emptiness. Rather than full personalities, characters are Von-Trierian, bizarrely crafted archetypes presented in a familiar narrative structure. Watching Dogville forces the viewer to imagine what his characters might be outside of the glaring dogmatism of the film’s facade. Reflectively, it asks its viewer what he or she might be outside the character he or she assumes in everyday life. Von Trier writes his characters as dubiously simple caricatures on screen, inviting us to ask ourselves how we are stuck. How we live that facade. From what is void in Dogville, a viewer imagines his or her specific reality, while simultaneously encountering nothingness, a state of potential matter. All artforms are somewhat ‘unrealistic’ in that they can never fully reflect individual experience. Dogville is both a ‘nonrealistic’ work of art, and an exacting portrait of human experience.

*** In 2009, James Cameron’s Avatar became the first film to earn more than 2 billion at the boxoffice. Since, the film has domestically and internationally grossed 2,783,918,982. Because of the special lens created for the film, critics described Avatar’s box office debut as a turning point in a new era of virtual reality. In theaters, many movie-goers were urged to see Avatar in Real-D, a form of screening that requires special goggles for viewing. Avatar’s setting is Pandora, a foreign planet with indigenous life-forms and a native language of the Na’vi species. Pandora’s auteurs were an extensive team of film makers, CGI animators, lighting directors and cinematographers. The background animals that inhabit the film’s forest are dream-like mutations of animals on Earth. This level of detail, be it in the form of an indigenous language created by the film-makers, or a seemingly plausible alien-insect, is the true foreground to a background of a typical “hero’s journey.” James Cameron and the Avatar team thrust their energy into making a reality beyond what is imaginable on earth. With so many sensorial details embedded in the film, the amount of information in Avatar attempts to approach and potentially surpass what human senses experience in daily life. The details are so thorough, the film then invites the viewer to not only view but inhabit the world. The films earns its title well. Avatar echoed a continuing trend in ‘reality’ in entertainment. Today, the American public purchases TV sets, TV channels and even sunglasses with High Definition capabilities. With films like Avatar, modern cinema describes a movement of self aware, hyper-realities in all forms of human expression. Looking at recent popular culture, it seems we as a society are obsessed with that which promises to be real: In the decade after 2000, reality T.V ratings surpassed the situation comedy era of the 90’s, memoirs became best-selling books, and demand for thoroughly rendered textures in video games (as opposed to a more graphic, Mario Brother’s era in game design) encouraged a leap in CGI technology. Facebook (along with other Avatar-based web realities) is the most ubiquitous hyper reality. Video on PaPer - Issue 1

At the date of this essay’s writing, there are more than 800 million world-wide Facebook users. By curating reality with a series of images, the site gives its users the chance to project their own personal reality in any form they choose (so long as it fits into an image, posting, or tag). Status updates and mobile posting allow for these curations to happen almost synonymously with realtime events. Though while glancing at any ‘wall,’ the profile seems to be a stand-in for an actual person, the rendering, no matter how thorough, how simultaneous to actual events, is still the collective construction of an author. Simply and without value judgement, looking at a person’s Facebook profile does not equal the experience of meeting a person in real life. The essence of daily sensorial living is impossible to render. Yet, in comparison to hyper-realities, how do we know what is real in our daily experience? Though technology impacts the forms of art and media today, imitation has always been central to creation of art. Art is the lie that tells the truth. It cannot be said that these hyper-real creations are hierarchically more or less profound than more abstract, less technological ones. The technological, hyper-real impulse is merely the hallmark of our era. Even despite the level of production, Avatar evokes reality by way of simulating but never being real. It is the inability of Avatar to fully replicate life that makes it a lie that tells the truth. Dogville, by being so directly opposite of hyper-real renderings, is pointing to the exact same inability of art as Avatar.

***

Dogville never attempts to transcend what is technologically possible. A special effect in Avatar may depict a three-dimensional character flying on a mythic beast, but in Dogville, extra-reality moments occur in mundane experiences like snow falling on the town. The flakes drift through the black-box theater, strangely falling outside the architectural interiors described by the dotted lines on the floor. This illusion mimics the look of fallen-snow between houses, but does not depict it realistically. Because of this, the viewer is made more aware of the non-reality of the film. Inversely, the theatrical snow is a detail they may have never noticed in his or her own reality. Where a movie like Avatar seeks to reference reality by offering a world that is hyper-sensorial, Dogville portrays a minimalistic film-reality. The set and narrative only make sense in the context of the motion created in a film. Dogville makes no attempt to mirror a living scene, yet by by acknowledging the cinema, by becoming more cinematic and less realistic, the movie exists within the reality of the viewer. In Dogville, houses have no walls, and yet small gestures of pantomime and falling flakes of snow suggest a world as complete as Pandora. If one discusses painting with a view to its faculty to render distance, one must admit that it does not equal real landscape, but if one considers the wonders of brush work, it becomes evident that real landscapes do not equal painting. (Tung Ch’i-ch’ang, Ming dynasty), pg 138, The Chinese on the Art of Painting

Depiction of a subject does not equal the subject. In Dogville, Von Treir does not expect the film to equal a real landscape of any particular town. Yet, by making a film with cinematic and theatrical tropes, he lays the bare structure upon which an audience-member could imagine any town.

***

Dogville’s characters speak in unrealistic theatrical voices akin with early American television. The characters reveal their inner emotions so blatantly that they are not believable. Early in the film, the narrator introduces Liz, the girl next door (played by Chloë Sevigny). She coyly batts her eyes, yet complains that she’s tired of having all of the men in town lust after her. Obviously, she’s

Essays - Miranda PFeiffer

thrilled by the attention. Her overstated expression is a simplified depiction of a typical human encounter. Sevigny’s eye-roll is over the top. Caricatures work, even when they are unrealistic, because a viewer can fill in the gaps with his or her own experiences. These outrageous scenarios sublimate our more nuanced actions in daily life. Film requires the viewer to complete the stereotype with memories of their own encounters, weaving reality into the fiction. An archetypal character is a rendering of a human being, rather than the human being itself. The archetypal character will never express the manifold complexities and details of a living creature. When an archetypal character expresses sadness and longing--just as Tom does for Grace in the middle of the film--the viewer must call upon their own experiences of sadness to find humanity in the character. Incomplete characters are more descriptive of real people than uncanny overdescribed portraits. Because of this, archetypes are prevalent cross-culturally. Though simplified, archetypes express great complexity in humans because they force us to contemplate our own being.

*** By the end of the Dogville, almost all previously established rules are broken. Especially what this essay, up until now has theorized. First, the characters become more and more cruel. Their actions, before so amusingly trite evolve into caricatures of their own caricatures. The characters behave in murderous and selfish ways. This is startling not only because of the expectation that the narrative established early in the film, but also because such a sudden shift is so outside of the bounds of American cinema. Because of their archetypes, the characters remain tied to real life outside of the film, even when evil overtakes Dogville. This shift implies that humanity in its non-cinema real-life form could possibly show the same blood thirst and lust. As if the exposition and middle of the film were to be devoured and forgotten, the end of Dogville harshly diverts to question the source of dramas society create daily to satisfy its desire for entertainment. The final shot of the movie completes the transition from severe non-real scenario, to ‘realness.’ As gangsters follow the sound of a barking dog in the shadows of the set, the once void-like bark of the dog has given way to a moving image of a real dog. It’s as if the carporeal dog had been lurking in the shadows of the black-box all along. Transitioning into the credits, the dog reminds us that even a laughable scenario is a recreation of darkest human instinct. Without a pause, the ending credits flash photos of 20th-century impoverished America. In sharp contrast to the orchestral score of the previous scenes, David Bowie’s song, “Young Americans” blares. For the most part, the slideshow appears chronologically. The photographs start with black and white images from depression-era 1920’s, then become full color photographs that nearly resemble modern day. Though the majority of the film gives the viewer the utmost non-specificity to muse at a distance, the ending credits begin to tread on actual memories. This segment is the most aggressive moment of the film because it forces the viewer into a selfinvolved recognition of American history. Other than a comical photo of Richard Nixon, these images show working-class citizens. The empathetic eyes of the figures are relatable, but their actions show hate and malicious intent. They wield guns, and slouch into beer-cans, but it is unclear whether these are bad people or whether the structure of America has been bad to them. The objects in the backgrounds of the photographs become so recognizable that one feels they might see their own parents in the images. The ‘realness’ of the credits linger with one final message: these are not actors. By the end of Dogville, the viewer has experienced the film as both a minimalistic rendering and a void of emptiness and potential. The film can never fully imitate reality, yet as the film concludes, it uses the shortcomings of film and art to hold a frightening mirror up to the audience. It cannot be real, but it reminds us what is.

Video on PaPer - Issue 1

BREATHING “MU”

“Here we reach the realm of complete tranquility, where explanation can serve no purpose. This is the ultimate point of self benefit or practice for one’s own realization; commentary can proceed only with greatest reluctance.” pg 335, The Oxherding Pictures, Wind in the Pines, 1995

In Chinese calligraphy, when a letter-form has “good” energy, it is said to have good t’chi. This happens when the black of the ink and the white of the page are in a harmonious tension. In every symbol there is an endless void of black in the sumi-ink and an endless void of white in the the rice paper. Both are eternally in conflict, and therefore neither one dominates the other. Both are essential to the letter-form’s strength and show the calligrapher’s understanding of t’chi. The play between light and dark doesn’t represent an absolute duality, but a constant shifting of power, like a drawing of two faces staring at one another. In one regard this illusion illustrates two faces, but if attention is given to the negative space, the white becomes the form of a vase. This is also true for calligraphy. To include both lightness and darkness in a character metaphorically represents the nature of the world. The Chinese character “mu” describes nothingness. Nothingness can also stand in to mean not a thing, as in a state of potential energy, from which all matter can arrive. Its significance within Zen tradition originates from the following Kōan (mysterious Zen riddle): One day a monk asked a Chinese Zen master, “Does a dog have the buddha nature?” Although Buddhist doctrine teaches that all beings have buddha nature, the master answered “mu” meaning “has not” or “nothingness.”

Japanese Zen monks wrote “mu” beside and inside paintings of ensō, simple black circles drawn with sumi-ink on white rice paper. In the Zen tradition, painting ensō required the same skills as landscape painting or calligraphy, devout practices with ties to meditation. Unlike letterforms and images, the ensō a depiction of “no thing.” Within the ensō a viewer sees interminable whiteness. Outside of the ensō the viewer finds the same. The center of the circle is both the tangible white paper and the spiritual vastness of the self as well as the cosmos. Western academies of art encourage the artist to to fill the canvas entirely, so that a painting does not appear unfinished. In traditional Japanese and Chinese ink painting, leaving the page untouched is encouraged. The function of the ear ends with hearing, that of the mind with symbols or ideas, but the spirit is an emptiness ready to receive all things. Tao abides in the emptiness”( Chang Yen-Yuan, Han Dynasty) --A conception which also is abundantly illustrated in Chinese painting where the forms often seem to issue from some illimitable fluid or space represented by the bare silk. pg 26, The Chinese on the Art of Painting.

The viewer of eastern ink-paintings imagines the forms in the “bare silk.” In this style of painting, if too much is rendered on the page, then there is not enough room for the viewer to see. Each viewer may see something different in the empty space of the ensō, exemplifying a key teaching in Buddhism of the individual experience. A popular figurative motif in Zen painting is a monk pointing at the moon. In these paintings, there is no ensō, only an erect arm and a vast expanse above it. The absent moons in these images illustrate that a person directing a student

Essays - Miranda PFeiffer

on a path will not lead the student to enlightenment. The student must find the moon on their own. In ensō, the presence of ink on the page defines a perimeter, but which perimeter is it? Is it the endless void inside oneself, or the endless void external to oneself? The ensō illustrates both. It is an expression of the present moment. To access the present, the ensō requires the painter to posses a calm mind and a focused body. To paint, the artist breaths from his or her stomach. Air passes from outside to inside and inside to outside. Next, the artist brings that energy from the breath into his or her arm to mark the circle. Once it sits on the paper, the form itself breathes. The shape of the ensō shows a breath taken in and let out. Interior and exterior spaces mirror each other. Is the the ensō like the “uroboros,” the image of a serpent eating its tail? Both images describe infinity in some form. Yet, the snake represents a present object eternally destroying and creating. The ensō is simultaneously object and lack of object. Like “mu,” it is as perplexing as any Zen Kōan. The eternal nature of ensō exists in the void, an absolute nothingness from which everything can and will arise. When we practice Zazen our mind always follows our breathing. When we inhale, the air comes into the inner world. When we exhale the air goes out to the outer world. The inner world is limitless, and the outer world is also limitless. In this limitless world, our throat is like a swinging door. “Breathing” Zen Mind Beginners Mind, Shunryu Suzuki

In this quote, Suzuki relates interior with the exterior, naming them separately but describing them both as equally endless. This is the same as the interior of the ensō, and its relationship to the exterior. This is the same as the exterior’s relationship to the interior. Another dichotomy is ‘blackness’ and ‘whiteness’, the void caused by impenetrable ink on the page, as well as the the infinite whiteness of the untouched rice paper. In ensō, reality and image collapse, both existing in the void of the infinite. To breathe is to be alive, and therefore a part of the mysterious world of the living. By counting each moment, breath is also time. Buddhism is symbolized by the wheel, meaning constant change, and endless moments. The active mark of the ensō resembles this active, constantly fluxing moment in which we perceive time. Where the mind can become cloudy as it projects into the future and remembers the past, breathing and the ensō are reminders of the present. Rocks are another popular Zen motif. A painting of a black rock on white paper is heavy because the ink is visually dense, but it is also heavy because we perceive information beyond what is presented. The paper and ink are tangible, ‘real’ materials, yet they describe a rock which is intangible in the image. The image then, stands in for the actual rock. It reminds the viewer of rocks, and the qualities of rocks. By being nothing more than ink and paper, yet pointing to the nature of a rock, the image is simultaneously material and non-material. The paper and ink are real, and so the intangible is real too. The intangible is not real and so neither is the paper. Many artists in the past two millennia have painted versions of the traditional Zen fable of the Oxherder. In these works, ten images always accompany a series of ten verses, outlining an oxherder’s quest to find his missing ox. The work is allegorical, representative of one’s quest for understanding of their being. Though most of the panels illustrate a young boy with his ox (or traces of the ox), the eighth panel is always a startling blank circle. This segment depicts the same harmonious relationship between inside and outside as an ensō. The other images in the Oxherding pictures may include a small circle in the sky, representative of the sun or moon. Video on PaPer - Issue 1

The eighth panel is like a cinematic close up. The other images depict the moon as an object of scenery, like a prop to enhance the scene, but the moon as an ensō in all its infinite form both encompasses and obliterates all the narrative before it. The image shows no characters or a passage of time, therefore it is a symbol of what is beyond perception. This moon is a truth, but it does not resemble a scientific truth. The ensō is a guide to the ideal mind. It communicates harmony between inside and outside as well as light and dark. The ensō is all things, what is outwardly exposed and what is inwardly veiled. Both are interminable voids, and neither is absolute. The paintings are intended to be hung and contemplated. Like calligraphy and landscape painting, ensō usually appear in temples and tearooms. They are present in rooms of daily use. Their inscriptions can joke that the ensō is but a light-hearted depiction of mochi, a Japanese ricecandy, or describe the ensō to be as stoic and all-encompassing as an image of the moon. They need not be representative of any specific reality, for in their no-thing-ness they already depict all of the cosmos. Within the ensō are vast expanses of blank, un-inked paper for the viewer to imagine a state of nothingness. In this nothingness there is no thing, and yet, from here all may arise. From contemplation of the ensō, we understand our connection to all that we believe is not within us. The black border of the ensō may not disappear, but in one breath it can be permeable. If inside is the outside, then the individual experience is a connection to all things. All that is within is all that is beyond. Of course, just as a student must see the moon for themselves instead of looking at pictures, not just to read it, but to experience nothingness as potential, the teaching of the ensō can be realized. As is written beside Zen painter, Hakuin’s famous ensō, “Forget the self, become the universe.

Autumn Moon, Gasan Jito, 1727-1797. The calligraphy is a reference to a poem by Chinese poet, Han-Shan. The full poem reads: My heart is like the autumn moon, pure as a blue-green pool No, this comparison sucks; How can I explain?

Essays - Miranda PFeiffer

Phases of the moon, Virginia Tech Astronomy Dept, 2009

STARING AT THE MOON “I go out of the darkness Onto a road of darkness Lit only by the far off Moon on the edge of the mountains” -Izumi Shikibu, 974 - 1034

Looking at the moon is a shared experience. Unlike geographic features, which are specific to a region, the moon is in the sky, and therefore can be seen by anyone.

***

Last week, I was in Rite Aid buying medicine and peanuts. The check-out line moved slowly because the cashier was on the phone. “I can’t fucking believe it. How many fucking Saturday night shifts am I gonna have to work this month? Every single fucking one.” I didn’t want to seem rude, so I turned my attention toward the loudspeaker in the ceiling. The music that Rite Aid was playing was Del Shannon’s song from 1961, Runaway. While the woman continued talking to the phone I absently swiped my debt card. The song had taken hold of me. I was struck by the absurdity of the line “I’m walking in the rain/ Tears are falling and I feel the pain...” His tears cannot even be seen to others because he is walking in the rain. He is alone. He is speaking to his former lover by calling her “his” (as in “my” little runaway), but, by definition, a runaway will only increase his or her distance. Because he calls her a runaway, he can’t hope for her return. I felt sorry for him. I walked out of the store, accidentally leaving my purchase at the register. As humans we do not own or unite with one another. Our bodies themselves isolate our inner thoughts from the thoughts of others. In exterior spaces where we project those inner feelings with clothes, affect, words, and songs, it’s impossible to definitively know whether any experience has ever been shared. Though the singer called the lover “his” runaway, no one knows what the former lover believed. And I did not know the woman behind the counter, though I thought she wouldn’t have been lamenting her schedule so audibly if she believed it was at all possible for a random person in the checkout line to have understood her feelings. I felt as though I understood the meaning of Del Shannon’s song, but what does it matter now that it’s an oldie playing on a Rite Aid loudspeaker? Of the three of us--the overworked Rite Aid cashier, the still-in-love but frozen-in-time singer in an old hit-single, and me--not one was able to console the other. When I returned to the counter for my things, a new song was playing on the loudspeaker. The woman handed me the bag and I left again.

***

One way to communicate emotion is through affect. In cinema, a close up reveals more about a character’s inner thoughts than a shot of what that character is literally looking at. Our human programming gives us the ability to recognize every detail in a face. We describe eyes as “windows into the soul.” Non-human objects are less memorable. When we see a character crying, we assume the character is sad. When we see a character smile, we assume the character is happy. However, we never really know what another living creature’s interior thoughts feel like. To describe another’s pain is only to imagine that same pain inflicted upon yourself. To stare into the eyes of another is an exercise in imagining oneself in another form. We cannot know anything outside of what our senses can tell us. We cannot even know if a smell we smell smells the same to another. If subjectivity is our reality, then reality ceases to be assured. If all information is subjective, then is there any reason to ever feel certain about Video on PaPer - Issue 1

anything? Is there truth in the universe? Simultaneously, if as individuals, we are never able to really know if our affects communicate, then everything--even what is external to our physical being--is internalized through perception, and is therefore realized in the interior of the self. All we can know is the self, yet if we are always accessing others via our own experiences, then interior and exterior connections happen continuously. The only trouble is that it is impossible to know whether these encounters can be shared by both parties. We know the moon to be a solid mass above our planet. Though its distance is far less than that of the Sun, Mars or the rest of the Milky Way, it is a body exterior to the Earth. Though bound by the Earth’s gravity, the moon is not a part of us. When surrounded by the endless black of the night sky, we see the hovering moon as separate from our own planetary existence.

***

When I reflect on this memory, I feel as though we shared a moment. Sitting on my father’s shoulders at an hour that I should have been asleep, we peered into the folds of the universe. The sky in North Carolina is as dark as watered down ink washed many times on white paper. The blackness of the sky was an all consuming void of infinite distance. It was then that I understood that depth for the first time, and did not think of the sky as an opaque sheet around the Earth. Neither he nor I could possibly know, nor do we know now what is out there, way beyond our location in space. All we could do then was dream up specifics: Alien colonies or black holes? My brother, lounging inside and watching the X-files on television, probably believed that the truth was out there. Somewhere. Where? For the two of us in the backyard, underneath that field of stars, the half-moon was a witness, the only body not bound to specifics like “dad” or “human.” It looked like an eyeball peering down at us. If the shadow of the Earth lay across that half moon, then I was somewhere inside that shadow. Was I upside-down? He handed me binoculars and I admired the moon’s many craters. It’s hard to believe sometimes that the moon is real. It’s hard to believe that outer space is cold, or that it goes on forever. I believe that when we were looking at the moon that evening, we both shared in this wonder.

***

Scientific evidence supports that the moon is an exterior body to the earth. In 1969, if we really landed on the moon, then not only a camera, but an American man stood on that solid ground and marveled as the Earth rotated below him. The iconic image of Earth seen from the moon looks like a half moon seen from Earth. This photo is like seeing your own body in a dream. Somewhere in that photo are cities, towns, forests and mountains. It is the entire Earth as it had never been seen before. At that moment, in the depths of that planet, you or your relatives were somewhere below when the aperture cinched. This photo documented the moon’s eternal exterior view of the Earth. Back on the planet, we see the moon in the sky where it maps our space-time by orienting us within our own rotation. Because it is comparatively close, it visually transitions our sight into to the rest of the cosmos. The moon bears a white glow because of light cast from the bright sun. This has been proven. Yet through observation alone, the moon is also a flattened shape. In one of the last scenes of Dogville, the image of the moon appears as a cut out circle in the black-box wall rather than a spherical mass. The revelation of this moon coincides with the lead character’s climactic epiphany. In artist, Moonassi’s drawing, I Can See You!, the moon is an un-rendered white circle within a marker-inked sky. Even if we know that the exact opposite is true--that the moon is a spacial entity, and its surroundings are nothingness--the inverted image still reads as a moon. Represen30

Essays - Miranda PFeiffer

tation can successfully render the moon as such even when science tells us that the moon solid because even science is a subjective. If one believes the moon is hole in the sky leading to an endless white eternity, then look and it will seem so. Go anywhere in the world, and the moon will be there above you. If I called my Dad one night and told him to look at the sky, despite distance between us, we’d be looking at the same thing. The moon shines for everyone, and everyone has their own personal relationship to the moon. Humans invented the image of a “man in the moon” because it already seemed so. Looking at the moon, you might imagine it as a piece of yourself, staring back at you. Its gaze is not quite that of another human’s, which invites you in with affect, but reveals no true communication. The loneliness of mankind is part of our earth-bound bodies themselves, but the moon is both unreachable and reliably present. It is an ideal like the ensō. However, the ideal it presents is not salvation or factual reality. It is an eternal nature, constantly shifting yet returning. The moon is what is beyond and what is close, a white hole, a solid mass. The moon defines our smallness as little humans in a vast cosmos, and--in its exteriority--likens us to our enormous planet, Earth. The light of the moon shines indiscriminately. Its glow can represent a truth, as it does in the eighth panel of the story of the Oxherder, or an enlightened moment as it does in Dogville. Yet the truth of the moon is not the truth of science. It is a truth of nature, intensely modified by our specific perspective of it. Though we attempt at communication, our very bodies themselves keep us apart, keep us isolated. Humanity turns to possession and anger, while in the same breath it struggles towards love and justice. Even day to day encounters like my experience in the Rite Aid exacerbate the isolation caused by being human. Del Shannon’s words sung what he longed to express. Unsung, but implicit within was that which can never truly be shared. Though the Rite Aid cashier knew her own sadness, it was not the same as the one in the song. Reality is mediated through our five senses, therefore the entire universe is within our perception. One’s experience of the moon is also observed within the bounds of perception, yet symbolically it represents the possibility of becoming unified. We do not know the nature of the moon, yet bathed in its glow, humanity is somewhat more connected. The moon is a constant eye of the universe, watching over us, and us watching back.

OUT Is communication ever possible, or are we each a burning star many light-years apart? Even then, what is this black night between us?

Bogue, Ronald. Deleuze on cinema . New York. u.a.: Routledge, 2003. Dogville (dvd). Directed by Lars Von Trier. Perf. Nicole Kidman. Chicago: Lions Gate. 2003 Fiennes, Sophie, Slavoj Zizek, Brian Eno, and Tony Myers.The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema . Widescreen format. ed. London: P Guide, 2006. Hirota, Dennis. “The Oxherding Pictures.” In Wind in the pines: Classic Writings of the Way of Tea as a Buddhist Path. Fremont, Calif: Asian Humanities Press, 1995. pg 335. Red Desert (The Criterion Collection). Blu-Ray. Directed by Michelangelo Antonioni. Perf. Monica Vitti. Hollywood: Image Entertainment, 1964 Seo, Audrey Yoshiko, and John Daido Loori. Ensō: Zen circles of enlightenment. Boston: Weatherhill, 2007. Sirén, Osvald. The Chinese on the art of painting: translations and comments.. New York: Schocken Books, 1963. Snedden, Joan. Man and his symbols by Carl G. Jung and others . Melbourne: Dept. of Discussion Services, Council of Adult Education, 1986. Stokstad, Marilyn, Marion Spears Grayson, and Stephen Addiss. Art history . New York: H.N. Abrams, 1995. Suzuki, Shunryu, and Trudy Dixon. Zen mind, beginner’s mind.. [1st ed. New York: Walker/Weatherhill, 1970.

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essays - mitchell goodrich

Nascent Cinema & Its Early Incarnations at World’s Fairs Sometime in the early moments of the 20th century, Louis Lumiére—who, along with his brother Auguste, is noted as one of the originators of cinema—apocryphally remarked “the cinema is an invention with no future.”1 Obviously, the verity of his comment bears no resemblance to his technological foresight, but perhaps that is because his remark was more of a jaded response to the disinterest of his audience, than a cultural forecast. To suggest it was an audience whose disinterest loomed, is particularly relevant to the reputation of the Lumiére Brothers, as their prime contribution to the origins of cinema was their December 1895 screening at the Café Grand in Paris of several documentary shorts, filmed on, and projected with, their Cinématographe machine. While this public exhibition, of works such as La Sortie de l’Usine Lumière à Lyon (Workers Leaving the Lumiére Factory, 1895), is considered by many to mark the beginning of film history, the Lumiéres’ certainly did not invent cinema, and although the most popular of their technological predecessors, Thomas Edison, did not either, his Kinetoscope of 1892 was the first, functioning, patent-protected motion-picture device.2 The contrasting element, between the Lumiéres’ Cinématographe and Edison’s Kinetoscope, is key in defining the line between film history and pre-history; that is, Edison’s apparatus—as the innovative, yet pre-historic device—confines viewing to a peephole, begetting not much more, in terms of culture and perception, than its own Kinetoscope parlors. The Lumiéres’ Cinématographe however, by projecting films for a social audience, rather than purveying a peep-hole mechanism as commercial object, combined projection with people to formulate the primogenitor to cinema’s continued presentation format.3 Thus, the historiographical distinction found in retrospect, postulates cinema’s nascent years as those wherein the technological innovation of motion-pictures as science, is replaced by public accessibility and exhibition of filmic works as spectacle. Because World’s Fairs were, at the turn of the century, the premier venues for exhibiting advancements in technology to an international audience, whose attendance was also stimulated by new modes of entertainment, the following will examine the role international expositions had in promoting film during its formative years. Specifically, my discussion will ponder the 32

Essays - Mitchell goodrich

appearance of Edison’s Kinetoscope, as the premier motion-picture device at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, and detail the prominent inclusion, yet discouraging attendance, of cinema and cinema-esque exhibits, including the Lumiére Brothers’ Cinématographe Géant, at the 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris. First however, there is a certain amount of summarizing of Edison’s device that is helpful for understanding the latter portions of filmic development, technologically, and why the discovery would be worth exhibiting. Further, a technological introduction is relevant since Edison was supposedly only able to complete his device after meeting Étienne Jules-Marey during the 1889 exposition in Paris. There is a somewhat infectious mythologizing of much of early film history, that makes itself present in the various records of Edison’s meeting with Marey, and which goes as well for the assumed first filmmaker, Louis Amié Augustin Le Prince. In 1888, when Edison was just beginning to conceptualize a motion-picture device, the French photographer Le Prince created what is thought to have been the first film, called the Roundhay Garden Scene. Unfortunately, Le Prince did not get to prosper from the invention, since he mysteriously vanished in 1890, after boarding a train to visit his brother. In 2003, an 1890 photograph was found in the archives of a Parisian police station, depicting a man closely resembling Le Prince, who had been drowned. The story of Le Prince is oddly fatal, but the various stories surrounding Edison are simply matters of hearsay, generally perceived as fact for the advantageousness of their implications.4 According to Neil Baldwin’s biography of Edison, the American inventor met with Marey in mid-September, while visiting the 1889 Exposition Universelle in Paris, when the latter, a photographer studying the chrono1 Anne Friedberg, “Trottoir roulant: The Cinema and New Mobilities of Spectatorship,” in Allegories of Communication: Intermedial Concerns from Cinema to the Digital, ed. John Fullerton et al. (Eastleigh: Indiana University Press, 2004), 274. 2 “History of Edison Motion Pictures,” Library of Congress, accessed November 1, 2011, http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/edhtml/edmvhist.html. 3 Alan Williams, “The Lumiére Organization,” in Film Before Griffith, ed. John L. Fell (Los Angeles, California: University of California Press, 1983), 157. 4 “Louis Aimé Augustin Le Prince,” Stephen Herbert, accessed December 13, 2011, http://www.victorian- cinema.net/leprince.htm.

photographic approach, shared his “photographic gun” with the American inventor.5 This weapon-resembling camera captured a subject’s continuous motion on a single strip of film, at 12 frames-per-second, and would often produce a sort of double image. Seeing this device was an aid to Edison, as his Kinetoscope was currently failing to produce a fulfilling motion-picture, using a process where multiple images of continuation were developed onto sensitized celluloid sheets, wrapped around a cylindrical drum. As seen in the film Monkeyshines, No.1 (ca. 1889-90), the central problem was that the tiled images did not exceed 1/32 of an inch in width, and thus, could only be viewed through a microscopelike lens, and when visible, enabled little discernibility of movement on the part of the viewer. By adopting Marey’s innovation of the continuous film-strip, Edison’s company was able to produce the final Kinetoscope cabinet, and although it was originally patented in 1891 with the inclusion of the cylinder mechanism, it was completed by 1892 without the cylinder and using 35mm celluloid film. In 1997, David Robinson concisely described the final apparatus: It consisted of an upright wooden cabinet, 18 in. x 27 in. x 4 ft. high, with a peephole with magnifying lenses in the top... Inside the box the film, in a continuous band of approximately 50 feet, was arranged around a series of spools. A large, electrically driven sprocket wheel at the top of the box engaged corresponding sprocket holes punched in the edges of the film, which was thus drawn under the lens at a continuous rate. Beneath the film was an electric lamp, and between the lamp and the film a revolving shutter with a narrow slit. As each frame passed under the lens, the shutter permitted a flash of light so brief that the frame appeared to be frozen. This rapid series of apparently still frames appeared, thanks to the persistence of vision phenomenon, as a moving image.6

Therefore, what came of Edison’s invention is perhaps dependent on his having travelled to Paris to attend the 1889 exposition. This dependency certainly aids an argument that the international expositions had an effect on the early growth of cinema, however while Edison did not actually exhibit films in Paris that year, just supposedly shared a helpful meeting with a photographer, he did exhibit in Chicago four years later. What exactly he exhibited however, is nearest speculation. What constitutes a second story about Edison is merely the debate as to whether, or not, he even exhibited his Kinetoscope at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, in Chicago. Having finished his invention in the

year prior, Edison gave the first demonstration of his Kinetoscope at the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences on May 9th, 1893.7 Further, Edison scheduled to exhibit not just one, but up to fifteen Kinetoscopes alongside his phonographs in the Electricity Building that year. While World’s Fair historians like Stanley Appelbaum claim to have read witness accounts of one machine having been present in Edison’s exhibit, others denounce such claims as a misreading of the proposed as the actual program of his display. The opposing stance seems to have been passed down by film scholars throughout the past century; one of the more important Edison film scholars, Charles Musser cites the author of the first book on film history, Terry Ramsaye who in turn claims to have interviewed the head of Edison’s Kinetoscope Company, Norman Raff, who supposedly said the machine was not exhibited in Chicago.8 Whatever the case may be, in relation to film history, the Chicago fair was generally a failed opportunity for cinema to launch, exemplified by the insultingly low attendance of Eadweard Muybridge’s lecture-demonstrations in his Zoopraxigraphical Hall on the Midway Plaisance. In contrast to Edison’s scientific display in the Electricity Building, wherein viewers might hope to learn from or about new technologies, Muybridge’s placement on the Midway put his didactic motion studies in direct contention with visitors’ desire for entertainment. Although it is known that Muybridge exhibited larger than life, animated photographs, of animals—such as horses galloping and birds in flight—it is unknown whether he presented any of his human studies of the nude female form. In her study of female spectatorship at the Chicago fair, Lauren Rabinovitz estimates that Muybridge did not exhibit his nude human studies, as doing- so would have been a crude exploitation of his technology and because his attendance was incomparable to the neighboring Moorish Palace and Streets of Cairo. While Muybridge’s exhibit suffered perhaps most significantly due to its relative position amongst the adulterated Plaisance, Edison’s filmic involvement with the fair has been mythicized and nearly invalidated by the simple obscurity of records.9

5 Neil Baldwin, Edison: Inventing the Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 208-9. 6 “History of Edison Motion Pictures.” 7 Ibid. 8 Lauren Rabinovitz, “The Fair View: Female Spectators and the 1893 Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition,” in The Image in Dispute: Art and Cinema in the Age of Photography, ed. Dudley Andrew (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997), 112. 9 Ibid., 87-9.

Video on PaPer - Issue 1

At the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1900, cinema makes a far more definable appearance, marked foremost by the Cinématographe Géant of Louis and Auguste Lumiére, but also by the smaller theaters and the multitude of cinema-like panoramas throughout the fair. Of film history’s nascent years, the Lumiéres’ Giant Cinématographe was certainly the most popular of motion-picture exhibits at the international fairs, having screened short films and presented color photographic transparencies—the brothers’ new interest in anticipation of the fall of cinema—to an estimated 1,400,000 visitors. The exhibit was presented in the 6,300 square-foot central court of the revitalized Gallery of Machines, originally constructed for the ’89 Exposition. The Lumiéres’ projected onto a screen measuring 21 meters-wide and 18 meters-tall, which was lowered from the ceiling before each performance, twice per day, and moistened by jets of water so that the surface was smooth and translucent.10 The translucency of the screen allowed the projected image to be viewed from either side—necessary because the screen hung in a circular hall, wherein attendees could sit in any direction from center. Additionally, the Lumiéres’ had tried to construct an open-air-theatre version of the same screen, where it was to hang directly in front of the Eiffel Tower and be visible from the Champs-de-Mars and the Trocadéro, however the giant screen’s inability to allow wind to permeate rendered the project impossible. Unfortunately, although the exhibit seems to have been a popular spectacle, official organization of the fair must not have promoted the performance wholeheartedly, as there are no surviving records of the program of over 150 films and, furthermore, because the exhibit was completely free to attend, yet entirely funded by the Lumiére Brothers alone.11 A significant motion-picture exhibit whose records do survive was the Phono-Cinéma- Théâtre, which showed precursors to the synchronized-sound film, recorded, synched, and projected by Clément-Maurice, who was important for having been the projectionist for the Lumiéres’ Grand Café screening. The brand of soundfilm presented here, was 70mm film, projected on a screen hung directly in front of a wax record player. The Phono-Cinéma was placed alongside six smaller film theaters on the rue de Paris, and is known to have shown Sarah Bernhardt in the duel scene from Hamlet, Benoit Coquelin in Cyrano de Bergerac, and a vocal performance by the tenor Henri Cossira.12 Additionally, the theater screened Big Boots; one of only three films by the vaudeville comedian Little Tich. In this 58-second short, which has been glorified by the infa34

Essays - Mitchell goodrich

mous performer/director Jacques Tati as “a foundation for everything that has been realized in comedy on the screen,” Tich performs a slap-stick pantomime, in front of a painted backdrop of a city alley-way, while wearing a pair of shoes whose soles are about as long as his legs are tall. He continually struggles to stay balanced and to keep his top-hat on his head, before walking off-screen with a bow.13 The unfortunate side of this exhibit was that, although the theatre was widely heralded by the press, attendance continually diminished from the opening day onwards; visitors citing unhappiness with the poor image quality and asynchronous sound. The organizer Paul Decauville attempted to spike profit by raising admission prices, but only further injured the theater’s numbers.14 The exhibits that were more popularly attended at the 1900 exposition were the cinematic panoramas, yet the most famous and impressive of these displays, the Cinéorama, was also the shortest-lived, having been closed after only four performances. Arguably closer to a themed ride than a cinematic attraction, the Cinéorama was engineered by the French inventor Raoul Grimoin-Sanson and modeled as a giant, false hot-air balloon that could fit up to 150 people in its gondola platform, at a time. The balloon was surrounded by a 360° screen, on which ten synchronized, 70mm, projectors displayed a virtual, aerial tour over the Seine. The descent displayed the same images as the originating ascent, played backwards, as to give the sensation of a return. On the opening day of the ride, Gimoin-Sanson recorded his excitement: The sensation was extraordinary and many of the spectators experienced the same vertigo that they would have on a real ascension. The animated view of Paris—with the flow of the traffic and the passersby that stopped to look up at the sky—constituted a sensational novelty... The presentation ended with the descent into the Tuileries, accomplished by projecting in reverse.15

Although Grimoin-Sanson may have found his attraction exciting, his improper engineering of the projector 10 Friedberg, “Trottoir roulant: The Cinema and New Mobilities of Spectatorship,” 272-3. 11 Emmanuelle Toulet, “Cinema at the Universal Exposition, Paris, 1900,” Persistence of Vision: The Journal of the Film Faculty of the City University of New York, no. 9 (1991): 15-6. 12 Friedberg, “Trottoir roulant: The Cinema and New Mobilities of Spectatorship,” 271. 13 “Little Tich (Harry Relph),” Anthony Barry, accessed December 13, 2011, http://www.victorian- cinema.net/tich.htm. 14 Toulet, “Cinema at the Universal Exposition, Paris, 1900,” 26. 15 Friedberg, “Trottoir roulant: The Cinema and New Mobilities of Spectatorship,” 271.

cabin beneath the gondola made the ride extremely hazardous, leading to its ultimate closing. The lower cabin, which needed three projectionists at a time to run the films, was lined with metal, as to shield a mechanical fire from spreading out onto the ride, if something were to go wrong with the unwieldy projectors. However, that metal lining intensified the heat of the projectors, allowing the floor of the gondola and the lower cabin to reach dangerous temperatures. Finally, when one of the projectionists fainted due to heat- exhaustion during the fourth performance, falling and losing two fingers to the blade of a projector’s ventilator, the police commissioner ordered the attraction to be shut-down.16 Other than the Lumiére Cinématographe Géant, the Phono-Cinéma-Théâtre, and Grimoin-Sanson’s faulty Cinéorama, the cinematic attractions were either entertainment clubs trying to lure in extra cash by holding film screenings during their off-hours, or panoramic spectacles that weren’t actually filmic, but cinematic in their virtualization of mobility. The most prominent of the latter category was the Maréorama. Created by Hugo d’Alesi, an advertisement painter for shipping and railroad companies, the Maréorama simulated a Mediterranean Sea voyage, from Nice to Venice, to Constantinople, by allowing ‘passengers’ to board a false ship, which gave the effect of motion by use of hydraulic piston engines installed below, and a 215,000 feet, hand-painted canvas.17 Of the other category, which Emmanuelle Toulet calls “fill-in cinemas,” the most notable theatre was the Grand Guignol; a theatre built in a basement on the rue Chaptal that specialized in short, comedic and melodramatic, performances. The Guignol

made an—at this time—unconventional business deal with the American Biograph and Mutoscope Company, which was co-owned by Edison’s former chief of the Kinetoscope project, William Dickson. Through their agreement, the Guignol rented films from Dickson’s company during the exposition, to show in their basement as fill-in entertainment during open time-slots.18 Although the 1900 Exposition Universelle propelled the new cinematic medium to the forefront of its entertainment possibilities, it did not holistically succeed at marketing the prospects of the filmic based screening to visitors, who were more interested with grand spectacles of size and mobility. Perhaps the result is the looming disinterest of the audience over Louis Lumiére’s head, driving him to pessimism regarding the future of the medium of cinema. Certainly however, the even moderate successes of the Paris fair are preferable to the Chicago exposition’s failure to disseminate due interest in the technological feats of the motion-picture. In retrospect, it becomes obvious that Chicago was the venue for a pre-cinema, not yet ready for spectatorship; perhaps over-didactic, rather than subtle-documentarian; ostensibly unmemorable, so that whether it was present is still uncertain. By contrast, Paris shed light on possible scenarios for further exhibition methods that have remained up to the present: the virtual-voyage ride, the basement theatre, the megaplex (a giant cinema).

16 Toulet, “Cinema at the Universal Exposition, Paris, 1900,” 22-3. 17 Friedberg, “Trottoir roulant: The Cinema and New Mobilities of Spectatorship,” 270. 18 Toulet, “Cinema at the Universal Exposition, Paris, 1900,” 28-30.

Anthony, Barry. Little Tich (Harry Relph). n.d. http://www.victorian-cinema.net/tich.htm (accessed December 13, 2011). Baldwin, Neil. Edison: Inventing the Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. Fell, John L., ed. Film Before Griffith. Los Angeles, California: University of California Press, 1983. Friedberg, Anne. “Trottoir roulant: The Cinema and New Mobilities of Spectatorship.” In Allegories of Communication: Intermedial Concerns from Cinema to the Digital, edited by John Fullerton and Jan Olsson, 263-76. Eastleigh: Indiana University Press, 2004. Gunning, Tom. “The World as Object Lesson: Cinema Audiences, Visual Culture and the St. Louis World’s Fair, 1904.” Film History 6, no. 4 (Winter, 1994): 422-444. Herbert, Stephen. Louis Aimé Augustin Le Prince. n.d. http://www.victorian-cinema.net/leprince.htm (accessed December 13, 2011). Library of Congress. History of Edison Motion Pictures. n.d. http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/edhtml/edmvhist.html (accessed November 1, 2011). Ligensa, Annemone, and Klaus Kreimeier, . Film 1900: Technology, Perception, Culture. New Barnet, Herts: John Libbey Publishing, Ltd, 2009. The Movies Begin, Volume Two: The European Pioneers. DVD. Directed by Louis and Auguste Lumière, Walter Haggar and George Albert Smith. Kino International, 2002. Morettin, Eduardo. “Universal Exhibitions and the Cinema: History and Culture.” Revista Brasileira de História 31, no. 61 (2011): 231-49. The Movies Begin, Volume One: The Great Train Robbery and Other Primary Works. DVD. Directed by Eadweard Muybridge, Edwin S. Porter and Thomas A. Edison. Kino International, 2002. Rabinovitz, Lauren. “The Fair View: Female Spectators and the 1893 Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition.” In The Image in Dispute: Art and Cinema in the Age of Photography, edited by Dudley Andrew, 87-116. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997. Strauven, Wanda, ed. The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006. Toulet, Emmanuelle. “Cinema at the Universal Exposition, Paris, 1900.” Persistence of Vision: The Journal of the Film Faculty of the City University of New York, no. 9 (1991): 10-36. Video on PaPer - Issue 1

new memory - hannah mandel

Ecstatic Truths: Understanding where the Self Meets the Screen In 1896, in his publication Matter and Memory, French philosopher and metaphysicist Henri Bergson created a diagram. This diagram showed a three-dimensional conical shape descending into a torqued rectangle. Three striations in the cone were labeled, A, A’, A”, and B, B’, B”. The point in which the tip of the cone met the rectangle was labeled “S.” This diagram was a visual representation of Bergson’s philosophy of matter and it’s representation. Starting with the assumption that as humans, we sense and remember things in the form of images, Bergson proceeded to comment on the duality that exists between the “representation” and “matter” of an object. He dispelled the hierarchy between the two- that is; he did not place the actuality, presentness or objecthood of a situation above the image of such. Bergson was especially concerned with what constituted representation. Was an image, as the aspect we hold onto as our eternal reminder of any encounter merely a representation of actuality? Bergson hypothesized that an image was less than a “thing” but more than a representation. Yet, he concurred, if the answer had to be polarized, an image was a representation, and more importantly, our perception of the representation continually removed value of what was being percieved. In the diagram, “S” is the point where our physical being interacts with our present situation. The rectangle is the present. The infinite cone is our memories, and as they become further removed from the present, their value dwindles and they are further from the self. Bergson published Matter and Memory at the advent of the history of the moving image. In 1878, Muybridge first showed his experiments with motion pictures. In 1896, the year Bergson published his diagram, the first on-screen kiss was shown, in a 46 second silent film aptly titled The Kiss. In 1902, the first “movie house” opened in Los Angeles. In 1903, The Great Train Robbery was released, widely considered to be the first example of narrative cinema. In 1906, Australian Charles Tait released the world’s first feature-length film, The Story of the Kelly Gang, running at 60 minutes. In 1927, The Jazz Singer was released, effectively ending the 36

New Memory - Hannah MAndel

silent film era and giving rise to “talkies”- movies with synchronized sound. In the 1930s films started being shot in color. And in 1956, French philosopher Gilles Deleuze returned to Bergson’s diagram, elaborating on it’s intrinsic ties to film. In our realities, so clearly divided between matter and representation, where did the moving image lie? It was quickly becoming an engrained part of culture in which people placed high value and merit. Filmed narrative, theorized Deleuze, functioned as a concrete example of Bergson’s theories. Films were representative of reality, yet humans still placed a value on them, a value whose equivalent lay somewhere between that of actuality and that of a distant memory. While watching a horror movie, for example, an audience experienced fright, but never to the extent that they confused it with reality. Through the willing suspension of disbelief film was able to create controlled emotions, diluted and contrived enough to be escapist and cathartic. The use of tropes in film narrative functions as somewhat of an extremely simplistic cipher. Tropes are conventional narrative structures and plot building devices that have become predictable through their prevalence in various works. Though the connotation of something being foreseeable may seem negative, tropes also function as comforting in their predictability. I, for instance have watched eleven seasons of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit. The show follows such an overtly predictable trajectory that after about four episodes, almost any viewer is able to dissect the formula in its entirety. Despite the foreseeability of the program, I have remained not at all deterred from watching. Instead, it has proven to be a comforting, cathartic normalcy that I depend on and take solace in. This is how tropes function. They are meticulously plotted, formulated and repeated. In every incarnation they are slightly subverted, in an effort to quell viewer’s boredom. Essentially, however, they remain the same. The ease we find within tropes, the continuously intoxicating fulfilling of expectations as a never-ending route towards an escapist dream state is of paramount interest.

A significant aspect of postmodern cinema is the realization and subsequent undermining of cinematic tropes. This brings about an essential, intangible question. The use of the narrative arc and the tropes resulting from its application onto a story arguably constitute the very nature of fiction. If this application was avoided, wouldn’t the stories no longer function as fictional narratives? And if the opposite of fiction is nonfiction, and nonfiction is synonymous with truth, then wouldn’t any story not following a narrative arc be required to have a basis in fact? It all becomes very muddled. Filmmaker Werner Herzog has spent his career addressing these issues as they apply to cinema. In 1999, in a lecture at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Herzog drew up what he would call the “Minnesota Declaration” or, “Truth and Fiction in Documentary Cinema.” The declaration reads as a manifesto, twelve “lessons” that vacillate between the filmmaker’s opinions, (“Fact creates norms, and truth illumination”), and musings on Cinema Verité (…socalled Cinema Verité is devoid of verité. It reaches a merely superficial truth, the truth of accountants.”). Most concretely, lesson 5 reads. “There are deeper strata of truth in cinema and there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization.” Herzog is suggesting a separate genre, one that does not confine to the polarity created by labeling stories as fiction or nonfiction. An “ecstatic truth” can be seen as the level of understanding most closely connected to our own memories, as they progress further up on Bergson’s cone, they become less tangible and more intertwined with our intentional and unintentional fictions, grown to fill gaps and create narrative. In 1817, poet Samuel David Coleridge verbalized what would arguably be the most important idea in the history of narrative analysis. “Willing suspension of disbelief” has been used to explain how we interact with and understand literature, cinema and any other art form that requires the participant to become invested in a presently implausible circumstance. Breaks, (intentional or not), in our investment in suspended disbelief create allusions to Herzog’s ecstatic truths. In Sofia Coppola’s 2006 historical fiction film Marie Antoinette, there is a montage scene in which an array of images showing women trying on Rococo-style clothing and shoes eat decadent pastries. At the beginning of the montage there is a brief, but clear shot of a

woman’s feet, dressed in a historically accurate fashion. Behind them can be seen a pair of blue Converse Chuck Taylor sneakers, a clear nod to modernity and contemporary women. Through this staged contravention in our understanding and fantasy surrounding a period film, Coppola is drawing concrete and jarring attention to the character and storyline’s ties to current society. The on set sneakers, however, function in differently than films that outright acknowledge their very filmic tendencies. Documentaries often do this, when you can hear the off-screen camera person direct or ask questions, or when other aspects showing the filmmaking process are discussed. In fiction, however, moviemakers generally go to great lengths to assure that the suspending disbelief is as easy and comfortable as possible for the viewer. Plot inconsistencies, visible crew or camera people and other technical mistakes are scrutinized and heavily avoided. There are even some films (namely horror, see Paranormal Activity or The Blair Witch Project) that are staged, scripted and rehearsed efforts to appear unscripted or believably amateur. I find this sort of self-referenciality incredibly interesting. After all, the greatest exercise of the suspension of disbelief is the willingness to look past the object of the movie screen- a series of pixels, reflections on the light spectrum, after all, are not human, do not hold emotion. By drawing attention to this point we can henceforth proceed examining film from a completely self-referential, and phenomenological context. My quest to understand my interest in the moving image, narrative structure and suspension of disbelief has been, as the subject matter warrants, a muddled, convoluted and analytic process. It has taken me deep into the nuances of my prefrontal cortex. I have built sets, been banned from Wikipedia, cut holes in walls, and spliced film. What started as a mild fascination with the theory surrounding film sets has become an exercise in my own self-awareness. It’s as if I’m viewing everything through the lens of a camera.

*** There’s a viral video on YouTube, called David After the Dentist. David is a small kid, and he’s in the backseat of his parent’s car after drug-induced oral surgery. “Dad,” he asks, wide-eyed at the camera. “Is this real life?” It’s funny. David is cute, he’s naïve, drugs have worn into Video on PaPer - Issue 1

his awareness of reality. He has no other way to phrase how he’s feeling. I’m empathetic to David. I first noticed this feeling when I was eleven. I was also in the car with my father. He turned to me, and asked a question, he had a red Subaru then and it smelled like mint Tic-Tacs. He was speaking to me, but it sounded like he was speaking in slow motion. I watched his lips move in real time, but I was unable to process what he was saying at, say, twenty-four frames a second, the rate we view and understand real motion and action. Around this time was when I first started having trouble sleeping. I would dream, but I was always aware I was dreaming. As I slept, I went through the motions of my day, I was sitting in the lunchroom, with the din of paper bags and rubber soles on linoleum, and someone would open their backpack, they would turn towards me and say, “You know you are dreaming, right? You should really wake up.” Reality was no different than dreaming. I would never know which was real, how would I be able to tell? Were my actions consequential? I became terrified of sleeping. My mother bought me a tape, a soothing male voice that instructed me to relax every part of my body until I was able to drift into slumber. There are large gaps of time I don’t remember. I continuously fill them in with fiction. I invent scenarios and elaborate on interactions. I know I knew this person but I can’t remember to what extent. I can’t remember their presence, or the feeling I felt when with them. I’m a huge liar, but I promise, it’s not malicious. It’s barely intentional. The official diagnosis is called DP/DR, or depersonalization/derealization disorder. I don’t think this is important to know that I have this, It’s a coping mechanism, thought to originate from my neural circuits firing irregularly.

New Memory - Hannah MAndel

My artmaking process became aware of, and made sense of my mental process before I could verbalize how I felt. It took me eleven years to fully understand how I felt, but how I felt was only evident to myself after closer examination of the way in which I make work, and the topics I kept coming back to. I want to freeze time and memorialize it, to analyze it through a filmmaker’s lens. I want to repeat a word enough times that the word becomes uncanny and feels strange and unreal. On the deepest, most emotional level, I want to do these things as a cathartic process, as one that will allow me to understand how I interact with the world. On the deepest, most intellectual level, I want to frame and analyze and dissect in order to apply film and literary theory to ‘real’ space and ‘real’ time, to highlight our reliance on escapism. I understand what it means to entertained, but I have an intense amount of trouble with the negative connotations of escapism. Escapism as essential to human life as our basic need for nourishment. The oral story became the written word, which became the play, which with technology became the cinema, which diluted into television, whose immediacy and connections with how we live our lives continues to grow. The fusion of our escapist tendencies with what we consider daily life is fantastically unavoidable. We strive and search for escapism in every corner of our world. We daydream, we write, we envision. Perhaps what Herzog means by ecstatic truth is that moment when our imaginings cease to become that and the separate planes of reality and fiction merge. It’s something that we actively avoid every day, but the cinema is a parallel universe that continuously strives to mimic our reality, but it’s just a dream, so we are free to merge and unleash all our fantasies onto it, while facing forward, eyes open, focused on the screen.

Video on PaPer - Issue 1

ISSUE 2 40

â&#x20AC;&#x153;In my earliest years I realized life consisted of two contradictory elements. One was words, which could change the world. The other was the world itself, which had nothing to do with words.â&#x20AC;? Yukio Mishima

notes - max guy

Cinema In Deed: An Open Letter Dear Anne, It’s about 10:00 on a Sunday and I’m coming out of the rain. I’ve re-written this letter about 10 times already. Being in the rain woke me up, it made me realize that I didn’t know what I wanted to tell you, not that I didn’t know how to tell you. I’m certain that I want to write to you. I’ve been going back and forth between Vita Activa and the Human Condition, and Labor, Work, Action, originally a lecture delivered on November 10, 1964, which was then transcribed and published in the Portable Hannah Arendt. Although the further reading provided extra context for the Vita Activa, I became less involved with my own ideas in a way. In trying to fit myself within what I was reading I forgot what I was doing myself. This is ironic because writings on the Vita Activa all seem to be inquiries into what it is that we do. Around the time that you sent me that first reading, I was also brainstorming ideas for the third film series in Spiral Cinema, an ongoing project that I direct with my friend Neil. Spiral Cinema is our platform for critical discourse in Baltimore, through film series, publications and lectures. We both were dissatisfied with the level of criticality in the city’s young art community; we found the celebratory nature of art shows here counterproductive. While Baltimore can be a very nurturing environment to make work in, I was oblivious to (maybe ignorant of ) any critical response to work in this city. Criticism seemed secondary to a celebration of labor intensity and/or quantity; likewise a good concept could be dumbed down by its execution. This was my assumption when we hosted our first film series in July and August of 2011. We selected four documentaries where the directors diverged from the original plot/narrative (the original press release is a available on spiralcinema.tumblr.com) Neil and I proposed that this type of divergence would have an effect on the viewer’s understanding the progression of time. In essence the series was an exploration of film as a didactic medium, choosing a fairly abstract topic to demonstrate how it may be one of the most resolved stand-ins for human communication. We wrote short essays to accompany the screenings. In writing the supplemental material for each screening I had little concern for what the films themselves had to say, but what they were actually doing, and the character of each film. I wanted to understand how I could better relate to the films. From that first series on, I’ve been concerned with the way that we can relate to film as an entity in itself. It’s a pretty big deal that we can view films now in all of the same contexts that we can socialize with other people; I don’t think that the idea is original, but I also don’t think that it’s past novelty. We now have to factor in the interface on which we view films. For the second Spiral Cinema series we chose B-Movies and Cult Classics and screened them in multi-use venues. The social context of each film became important as the audience could choose when and when not to interact with each film. If you felt the movie was boring or nerve wracking, you could go outside and smoke a cigarette, go to the bar and have a drink, talk to someone else. You’ve obviously read it, and I’m a little reluctant to make any specific references, but I think it’s appropriate. From Vita Activa and the Human Condition. In addition to the conditions under which life is given to man on earth, and partly out of them, men constantly create their own, self-made conditions, which, their human origin and their variability not-withstanding, possess the same conditioning power as natural things. Whatever touches or enters into a sustained relationship with human life immediately assumes the character of a condition of human existence. This is why men, no matter what they do, are always conditioned beings. 42

Notes - Max Guy

I think that the next step is to host a series that revisits the human condition, as we know it. I don’t know how to say this without sounding totally insane but I feel like the humanity’s reconstitution is something that becomes more ominous every time I open a newspaper. The 99% Movement is a prime example of people recognizing something man made beginning to emulate humanity, and past comfort. A corporation is defined, “a body formed and authorized by law to act as a single person although constituted by one or more persons and legally endowed with various rights and duties including the capacity of succession.” While cinema does not share the same function as a corporation (and it seems absurd right now to think of it as having rights) it in fact does simulate human communication. It nonetheless influences our memory and self-image. So what is there to do? I propose to curate a third series that looks into our understanding of identity on various levels of concrete or abstract thinking.

• We explore the egocentric nature of auteur theory, asserting the director’s creative vision above all collective effort within a film. I thought it might be interesting to screen a short series of films where each movie ends with the death of the protagonist.

• We screen Matthew Barney’s Cremaster Cycle in its entirety. Pretense aside, the concept of a film representing a bodily function (the cremaster muscle raises and lowers the testes in response to various stimuli) thus proposes the entirety of the series as an organ. On another note it is interesting to consider the availability of the movie to the public via P2P networks—the entire series was sold in a limited edition of 20 dvds for $100,000.

• We re-evaluate BYOB, a series of one-night exhibitions occurring worldwide, where anyone is invited to “Find a space, invite many artists” and “ask them to bring their projectors.” I cannot help but draw parallels to the format of the 99% movement and the Occupy protests.

• We explore the affect of films viewed entirely out of context. The End of Evangelion directed by Hideaki Anno for example, is a movie that consists of the last two episodes of Neon Genesis Evangelion, an anime series from the 1990’s. Viewed out of context of the series, one might not have a clear idea of what is going on, but removed from the original narrative, a powerful voice still expresses its existential crisis.

Apart from the small tangents I made referencing the 99% movement, I think that the political aspect within all of this is inherent in the desire to introduce a kind of criticality or discourse within a specific group of people. I don’t really know if I care whether people like the movies or not, but that they form an opinion and are inspired to truly relate to other people. Maybe even to get out of their comfort zones a little bit. I’m dedicating this issue of Video on Paper to you, as thanks for introducing me to the works of Hannah Arendt. It meant a lot to me. I can recognize how my ideas are amplified by the text that you sent and my further reading of Arendt’s work. Video on Paper is a publication where we invite our peers to articulate an aspect of their creative, video-related process in print. In the editing of this issue I think that we’ve taken careful consideration was taken to preserve the voice of each author, in order to keep it from being dwarfed by his or her own thesis. You will find honest and intelligent attempts on the parts of the authors to form relationships with others, and to preserve the tools and media that man created in order to do so. It’s 3:38 now. Slowly but surely, Max Guy Video on PaPer - Issue 2

features - rachel lowing

Entropy and the Mimetic Digital Image

In the interest of exploring the implications of new media preservation I wrote this brief inquiry concerning the lossy file format JPEG. The deterioration of the mimetic1 digital image and the fleeting nature of socially constructed memory are the topic that will be explored using the JPEG. These virtual memories store information in a manner modeled after an interpretation of the way the “ideal” human body sees, and remembers.

order to immortalize an individual’s sight. The camera obscura could only have been developed through the understanding of perspective and the investigation into the way the eye perceives light. Painters and draftsman seeking absolute accuracy in the description of the world around them considered the practice of channeling light through a pinhole to create a recordable image Magia Naturalis, or Natural Magic.

One will remember her, the light bouncing off her face in a bright field of movement, the coded information entering both retinas and continuing to the brain to be decoded and inverted to create an image. The tongue will share the memory of her face later, slipping in bits of language to allow the image to be shared in a flexible manner. The wrinkling of the initial interpretation creates a changing parcel of descriptions tied into a linguistic knot. She has dark eyes and light skin. She has brown eyes and freckled cheeks.

Because a strong similarity does sometimes make a great sensation with the sense, and brings in such an affection, that not only when the senses do act, are they in the organs, and do trouble them, but when they have done acting, they will stay long in them. Which may easily be perceived. For when men walk in the sun, if they come into the dark, that affection continues, that we can see nothing, or very scantily, because the affection made by the light is still in our eyes.

Perhaps it would be truer to capture this initial registration of light with a device that organizes the information, modeled after an eye. The dark space of the skull where the encoded image is transposed has been imitated, taken outside the body in 44

Feature - Rachel Lowing

-Giovanni Battista della Porta, Magia Naturalis, 1553

The effect of light on the surface of our surroundings has been used to record events and stories for millen1 Michael Taussig’s explantion of mimetic faculty: The nature that culture uses to create second nature, the faculty to copy, imitate, make models, explore difference, yield into and become Other. The wonder of mimesis lies in the copy drawing on the character and power of the original, to the point whereby the representation may even assume that character and that power.

nia; consider the sundial or the rendering in the depths of a cave using the light from a burning torch. In 1727 the alchemist Johann Heinrich Schluze, was attempting to trap the “Universal Spirit” through the distillation of calcium nitrate and silver carbonate, and in doing so created phosphorus (bringer of light). When phosphorus is exposed to light, it darkens and changes the compound into scotophorus (bringer of darkness), recording the pattern of the sun’s rays in an image. The problem of fixing and exacting the light’s stain remained, the physicality of the blurred images always faded away. A dead spider, taken through the solar microscope, has such fine detail that you could study its anatomy with or without a magnifying glass, as in nature; not a filament, not a duct as tenuous as it may be, cannot be followed and examined. You will see how far from the truth of the Daguerreotype your pencils and brushes are. Louis Daguerre, 1829

The “truth” of the early photographic image, the Daguerreotype or the camera obscura’s material representation becomes a semi-transparent object, in both cases the viewer looks at the image without fixating on the materiality of the plane it is presented on, the wall on which the light is patterned, or the glass plate on which the silver nitrate is exposed. The moment the light is registered by the optic nerve, making the glimpse possible -- this is what can be considered the “nowness,” the memory of the “highest resolution.” In a different moment the woman portrayed is not with us in the room, and the viewer is not gazing at her, she is in an imaginary space. It is this semi-transparency of form that digital media extrapolates from, striving for the mimetic in other forms of representation to share and shape a multitude of coded information. Transparency is the new mimicry. While mimicry forces a perfect copy of an original where the process of copying (hand, body, thought) disappears, transparency calls for a specific medium, preferably flexible to allow transmission of memory with the least amount of disappearance or deterioration of clarity and detail. For the designers of the JPEG, cyberspace is a transparent environment in which we can see through each other’s bodies to the pure minds that live within. The JPEG, much like the Daguerreotype or other photorealistic media that strive to give the viewer the sense of having been in the environment from which they are derived. Just as studying perspective through painting was integral to inventing the camera, computer

programmers use projective geometry and algorithms to find a level of perspective that is life-like. In The Language of New Media, Lev Manovich identifies two facets of new media: the cultural layer, which is roughly analogous to “content,” and the computer layer, or infrastructure, interface, or other machine based forms that structure the computer environment. Here, Manovich’s multifaceted theory will be applied to the JPEG’s performance as mimetic and magical object. Virtual images exhibited and exchanged on the interface of the screen have much in common with the physicality of the social memory for many reasons; the interface on which these algorithms are being displayed is inextricably linked to verbal description and human memory. The difference lies in the viewer’s inability to reach across a velvet gallery rope or an easel and smear the brush strokes with an outstretched palm. Just as Alice Rayner articulates in E-scapes, the arena in which JPEGs exist is “..not of the world but of circulation, modeled more on brain power than physical objects.” Fred Ritchin uses a biological metaphor to explain the gap between analog photography and digital photography when he uses the categories of phenotype to describe the physical visibility of analog and genotype to explain the importance of the non-visible code of digital photography. The code of the JPEG performs a role in cyber space as depicting reality as purely informational. In the case of the JPEG, the term mimesis becomes the efficiency in which the information coded in bytes is categorized and stored, the least amount of loss each time the file is decoded for viewing and then recoded for storage can be measured in the medium’s ability to be transparent. In the context of the Internet and file sharing platforms, JPEGs are used most because of the flexibility among a wide variety of systems and image capturing devices. The need for a multifaceted way of relating to fragmented systems used by a multitude of viewers is a main aspect of contemporary life. In Life on The Screen, Sherry Turkle cites anthropologist Emily Martin’s theory of the importance of adaptability: “..New metaphors of health as flexibility apply not only to human mental and physical spheres, but also to the bodies of corporations, governments, and businesses. These institutions function in rapidly changing circumstances; they too are coming to view their fitness in terms of their flexibility.”

Sharing a memory with the largest group of people possible -- bringing them into the moment when you saw it, requires a platform which is multifaceted enough Video on PaPer - Issue 2

to fit the diverse array of programs and applications existing in cyber space. The Joint Photographic Expert Group’s2 coding is a desirable algorithm because like a simple, effective metaphor it uses minimal, carefully categorized information, which is compressed to conserve storage space. The sensitivity of the human eye has set the paradigm for different compression ratios of digital images. The sequence of the JPEG’s code which deals with color density is called quantization; here because of the eye’s lack of ability to register small shifts in saturation as opposed to brightness factors, the storage space designated for saturation is less than that dedicated to brightness in color profiles. Here is where the hierarchy of digital memory is exposed, for when sharing files on the Internet the size of the JPEG is imperative. Each time the photo is downloaded, or dragged to a new space (a desktop for example) it loses information byte by byte. The disintegration of the image begins at the hard edges of the darker pixels creating harsh areas of contrast. All of the copies of one original image are all original because of the JPEG’s inability to exactly replicate itself through compression and decompression. Although the JPEG inhabits a realm that is non-physical, it is just as susceptible to erosion as light induced chemical reaction of a silver plate image. Photography is usually seen as resolving ambiguities, yet with the digital photograph, it’s storage and viewing methods, we see that it becomes a filter for fluctuating information and a multitude of impressions from the collective memory that a JPEG encounters. Note the magical, the soulful power that derives from replication, the image affecting what it is an image is of, wherein the representation shares in or takes power from the represented-testimony to the power of the mimetic faculty through whose awakening we might not so much understand that shadow of science know as magic, but see anew the spell of the natural where reproduction of life merges with the recapture of the soul. Michael Taussig

To capture the glance and distribute the information evenly through a matrix of bytes that could be encoded and decoded, translated again and again. Is the memory embedded in the image itself, or is it floating around the image? The image is the object, carved in the likeness of one, which invokes the spirit of the glance, never to be repeated in the same way. The code of the jpg (structure) is comparable to a carving, the power of the memory created can be thought of in relation to the spiritual power of the Cuna forms. “Magic is a living mass, formless and inorganic, and its vital parts have neither a fixed position nor a fixed function. They merge confusedly together. The very important distinction between representation and rite sometimes disappears altogether until we are left with the mere utterance of a representation which thereby becomes the rite. The spirits which the sorcerer possesses or which possess the sorcerer may become confused with his soul or his magical powers. Spirits and sorcerers sometimes have the same name. The energy or force behind the rite—that of the spirit and the magician—is usually one and the same thing. The normal condition of magic is one involving an almost total confusion of powers and roles. As a result, one of its constituent features may disappear without the nature of the whole changing” Marcel Mauss, A General Theory of Magic.

2 The JPEG committee has created many standards since it was created in 1986. ISO had actually started to work on this 3 years earlier, in April 1983, in an attempt to find methods to add photo quality graphics to the text terminals of the time, but the ‘Joint’ that the ‘J’ in JPEG stands for refers to the merger of several groupings in an attempt to share and develop their experience.

Beard, Thomas. “Deterioration, They Said.” © 2010 JRP | Ringier Bergson, Henri. “Memory and Matter” © 1991 Zone Books, NY, NY Bolter, David and Gromala, Diane. Windows and Mirrors © 2003 MIT press, Cambridge, MA. Diane Gromala. “Pain and Subjectivity in VR.” In Clicking In: Hot Links to a Digital Culture, edited by Lynn Hershman Leeson. Seattle: Bay Press, 1996. Manovich, Lev. “Language of New Media” ©2001 MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. Mauss, Marcel “A General Theory of Magic” ©1950 Presses Universitaires de France. Rayner, Alice. E-scapes: Performance in the Time ofCyberspace. © Univer- sity of Michigan, 2002. Ritchin, Fred. After Photography. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2009. 24-56,162-176. Taussig, Michael. Mimesis and Alterity. Routledge, Chapman and Hall Inc, 1993 Turkle, Sherry. Life on The Screen. Simon & Schuster 1997 Touchstone, New York, NY. Virilio, Paul, and Jonathan Crary. The Aesthetics of Disappearance. Semio- text, 2009. Print. Zizek, Slavoj Reading Digital Culture “From Virtual Reality to the Virtual- ization of Reality.” Ed. David Trend. © 2001 Blackwell Publishing Victoria, Australia. 46

Feature - Rachel Lowing

features - mitchell goodrich

Contemporary Dreamscapes in the Language of American Cinema’s Pillars of the Avant-Garde “The walls of this room are solid except right there. That leads to something. There’s a door there leading to something. I’ve got to get it open because through there I can go through to someplace instead of leaving here by the same way that I came in.” –Maya Deren, 1965

One of my favorite Hollywood dissenting voodoo priestesses, Maya Deren, who collaborated with her husband Alexander Hammid to create Meshes of the Afternoon in 1943—a work generally treated as America’s first salient foray into experimental film—remembered the above sentiment as one she used to repeat for herself upon re-watching a particularly exciting moment in that film, when the protagonist must walk across the history of time, in a mere four steps, before she can kill herself.1 Deren herself plays the “dreaming awake” lead; one who wanders as a somnambulist in a lonely, self-meditative confusion, amongst former and future incarnations of herself, chasing after a tall cloaked figure with a mirror for a face, before being awoken by Hammid, only to find out in the end that she’s lapsed back into sleep.2 The film is prized not simply for having the audacity to dispose of the conventional (conservative) need for a sensible narrative plot—a task that Dalí and Buñuel had famously already completed—but more importantly for having constructed a story that, by negating the “standard function of dividing imagination from actuality,” prizes the dislocated dream state as a nearer to present truth, than the reality teased at in the illusion of Deren being awoken by Hammid.3 Thus, what is uncovered is a question, not about what exactly is going on in the narrative, or how we are to make sense of it, but a question about the metaphysical nature of the cinematic experience: Are the inherent aspirations of any film to create an environment simulative of dreaming? That is, doesn’t the protagonist’s dream continue, even after you think she’s awake, because the film itself is a dream that only ends when you, the viewer, stop watching?4 There are two local artists, who exhibited videos at the second Boombala Video Cabaret in March, that have created works reminding me of this question, and who’ve utilized a form in those works comparable

not only to Maya Deren’s various filmic meditations on sleeping, but to a few other pillars of the American avant-garde cinema as well. The videos are Danielle Criqui’s Daydreams, a two-part portrait of a daytime somnambulist that is particularly similar to Deren’s tradition of the so-called trance film, and Justin Kelly’s ADVERT 1, a more lucid video-mix of found-footage, which is closer in technique to the film collages of Bruce Conner. Additionally, both films, perhaps unintentionally, resemble the youthful amateurism in media quality and comedic articulation of seemingly deeper issues that are so integral to the importance of Ken Jacobs.5 And still further, Kelly’s work discovers a less emphatic treatment of decay than what might be found through Bill Morrison. If nothing else, these two videos are valuable for their surprising allusions to avant-garde cinema (whether intentional or not) and for their fostering of digressions into contemplation, both for the viewer and the protagonist—but I think there’s more. Through such comparisons we can begin to see that these two works reveal important questions of their own, about their contemporary condition. I’d like to start then, by discussing the differences in how the dreamscape is rendered in each, before moving on to what might be embedded in that semblance.

Bill Morrison

Ken Jacobs

1 P. Adams Sitney, Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde, 1943-2000, Third Edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 19-20. 2 Ibid 3 Ibid, 4 Meshes of the Afternoon, DVD, Directed by Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid (1943; New York, NY: Mystic Fire Video, 2002). 5 Stan Brakhage, Film at Wit’s End: Eight Avant-Garde Filmmakers (Kingston, NY: McPherson & Company, 1989), 154-62.

Video on PaPer - Issue 2

Daydreams is the more conventional of the two videos, primarily in that it follows coherent, related, although separate narratives through its two chapters. Criqui begins with a musical introduction of the film’s protagonist, played by Renee Clark, motioning back and forth— more a wobbling than any sort of dance—in a room with white tiled walls, wearing light green and lots of make-up. The parameters of her movement are limited by two hands, one on each side of the composition, and both holding what appear to be incense sticks. As she floats forward, towards the eye of the camera, the view suddenly returns to black for the title sequence, introducing part one. There are three girls now, but Clark remains concentric; all of them dressed in white, in front of a blank wall. A puddle of colorful liquid, in the typical Baltimore style of highly saturated tube colors, begins at their feet and returns to their mouths, in slowmotion reverse. ABBA’s “Dancing Queen” becomes the new non-diegetic soundtrack and the three begin to dance, but Clark falls backward and down, eventually becoming a near full figure in the shot, while the others are continually cropped. She suddenly awakes in the dairy section of a grocery market, eating a sandwich, and wearing the customary blank stare and groggy façade of a figure in reverie. Clark walks away and the end of part one soon follows. The second chapter begins with Clark picking at her teeth in the rearview mirror of her car, while stopped at an intersection on her way to the cemetery. She enters through a castle-like archway and stops with visible intent, so that we know she is headed for a specific place, walking directly towards a set of three graves; two of them are marked “mother” and “father” respectively. She removes her coat behind the one that reads “mother,” revealing a loose coverall garment, patterned in a red, green, and golden brown floral design. Meanwhile a boy strapped with a guitar appears behind Danielle Criqui, Daydreams

essays - mitchell goodrich

the paternal tombstone, and begins playing the tune to a dubbed vocal performance by Clark. When they finish, the nonexistent crowd goes wild and Clark wakes up from what has been her second daydream, staring at the graves as if she never fully approached them. And once again, she walks away and the end quickly follows. The ending to each part is the same, not only in that they frame Clark’s return to consciousness as the penultimate moment of the story, but more interestingly in that she goes from being surrounded by friends (the ironically sentient deceased included), to being alone each time she exits the screen. It is from this point that, after recovering from the laughter Criqui allows us—with her all-white dancing trio, public exhibition of a private act of dental grooming, and juxtaposition of a cheering audience over the vision of an empty graveyard—we can immediately begin drawing comparison to the work of Deren, and the trance genre in particular. P. Adams Sitney, who authored the concept of this style, suggested the following as a sort of outline for the practice: The trance film as it emerged in America has fairly strict boundaries. It deals with visionary experience. Its protagonists are somnambulists, priests, initiates of rituals, and the possessed, whose stylized movements the camera, with its slow and fast motions, can re-create so aptly. The protagonist wanders through a potent environment toward a climactic scene of self-realization. The stages of his progress are often marked by what he sees along his path rather than what he does. The landscapes, both natural and architectural, through which he passes are usually chosen with naïve aesthetic considerations, and they often intensify the texture of the film to the point of emphasizing a specific line of symbolism. It is part of the nature of the trance that the protagonist remains isolated from what he confronts; no interaction of characters is possible in these films.6

The first two of these criteria are quite obviously answered in Daydreams, save for the fact that Clark does wake from her sleep—twice even—thus relieving the camera of much of its responsibility to re-create the movements of a somnambulist, and allowing for simple filmic tropes to differentiate between imagination and reality instead. However, this minor discrepancy does not distance the video from being a trance film, nor do the missing aspects of self-realization and progress; rather, these latter two missing elements reveal the narrative’s psycho-dramatic inspiration, a key foundational element for all works of this trend. But that is something I intend to uncover later. What matters now is to connect Daydreams to what Sitney deems Derenesque trance based on the final vestige of his criteria, and the most straight-forward of his demands—that the protagonist remains isolated and have no interaction with other characters. And Clark, the “dreaming awake” protagonist here, is indeed the sole active figure in the film. Yes, there is the boy playing the guitar and the other two girls in white, but all three of the characters are more objects of the setting—decorative aspects of the mise-en-scène—than supporting characters, or even personalities of any significance.7 For example: During the graveyard concert, the boy exists merely to rationalize the appearance of the guitar; an object whose importance is to signify that the instrumental accompaniment in Clark’s ballad is actually present. No, the song was not performed live for the camera, evidenced by the fact that the Stratocaster’s output jack is clearly unplugged, but the simulation of this both renders an ecstatic moment, advantageous of the medium (like the father’s spot-lit performance in Vincent Gallo’s Buffalo 66), and highlights the absurdity of the successive shot, an unvisited graveyard as cheering audience.8 Thus, it is the guitar that matters, and the boy is merely its human support, because he is the best of the available options. If the instrument were floating freely in the air, a viewer could perceive of a ghost; if Clark were playing the guitar, she would look alone, rather than concentric; and a mannequin could not move to simulate performance—let alone the tremendous effort it would take to make it not look campy/creepy. Similarly, the other customers in the grocery store are merely rationalizing objects, of no more significance than their inanimate partners, the items on the shelves. So, by accepting the video as fitting of that genre, what concept becomes apparent as being established by the trance dreamscape? That being expressed in Day-

dreams, ostensibly via its emphatic absence, is the idea of a loss of noticeable progression as unnerving for a viewer’s desire for a narrative inclusive of rising-action and climax, as well as for the protagonist as both an individual youth and perhaps as a canvas for projection of a spectator’s concern for their own ego. The absence of self-realization (the would-be climax), provides that the video has no penultimate answer to a lack of definitive direction; it is melancholic, no matter how many comedic gags it may offer. It is a documentation of reality, subtracted from which is any sign of intellectual practicality or academic progression, wherein all that is left is time to think—time to dream. That is, while progression in a Deren film is measured by the repetition of objects and locations, like a key transforming into a knife, a cloaked figure turning a corner, or the protagonist watching herself from earlier moments in the narrative, in Criqui’s video any aesthetic props that are introduced, last only as long as their respective shot, and thus imply no consecutive duration other than the measure of the media’s physical running time.9 The film opens with Clark in heavy make-up, a mask that does not ever reappear; the rainbow puddle, upon returning to the mouths of the dancing trio, never shows up again, and nor does anything with comparable saturation; the coveralls she wears, is a surprise costuming that has no prior allusion. In contrast to Criqui’s video, wherein the protagonist is the dreamer, Justin Kelly’s ADVERT 1 frames an absorptive space for the willing viewer to enter a dream state, while the alert skeptic remains to be entertained by the sudden change in both audio and video tracks that awakens their distant-minded cohort.10 This dichotomous spectatorship arises from the fact that Kelly’s video denies narrative, in favor of a piecemeal assimilation of lossy video clips, most of which have presumably been taken from YouTube, or some other streaming platform. (A non-narrative film always distances a portion of the crowd.)11 Thus, there is no protagonist in this video, and it’s very difficult to differentiate between what is borrowed material and what is new content, shot by the artist. Further, the subject of the work becomes illusive and the best guesses are those that are wide-ranging. What can be declared for 6 Sitney, Visionary Film, 18. 7 Ibid, 17. 8 Buffalo ‘66, DVD, Directed by Vincent Gallo (1998; Santa Monica, CA: Lionsgate Home Entertainment, 2003). 9 Meshes of the Afternoon. 10 I’m using the word “willing” to denote an attitude comparable to gullible, but without the negative connotations. 11 L Video on PaPer - Issue 2

certain however is that the video ends on a surprising metaphor that frames everything prior to that moment a dreamscape, similar in effect to Criqui’s tropical use of sudden cuts to separate the imagined from actuality. The dreamscape then is the subjective experience of the viewer watching disparate images pass- by, such as green lasers bouncing off mirrors in a dim-lit room and a slow-motion encounter with Michael Jordan at the apex of his fame. These images come and go quickly, sometimes in sync with the accompanying soundtrack, but those audio tracks too change often with little, if any, concern for an accretion of meaning. During these moments of the video, it bares resemblance to the Deleuzian concept of gaseous perception, in that all images are equal without a central subject—nothing is metaphorical or synecdochic—and the viewer has the freedom to take each passing image/sound merely for their objective value (a concept for which he found the American avant-garde to have provided the best examples).12 That is, until Kelly’s great metaphor: an utterly unanticipated change in view to a shot of water pouring from what appears to be a large dam, accompanied by its near white-noise diegetic sound, alluding to, rather than directly utilizing the cliché of emptying a glass on the face of a sleeper to wake them. If this process is successful, the viewer jumps at the sudden change in sound or image, even if they are unaware of Kelly’s technique, and they have been removed from a slumber, their absorption into the filmic image. The most immediate resemblance that ADVERT 1 draws is to the film collages of the late assemblagist Bruce Conner, and in particular the dream aesthetic of his 1976 sepia-toned Take the 5:10 to Dream Land and the comedic metaphors of his 1958 masterwork A MOVIE. Having already become a successful visual artist by creating work comparable to that of Edward & Nancy Reddin Kienholz, Conner’s filmic technique, which pervades the compositional structuring of Kelly’s video, was to take old portions of found or archived film stock, from Hollywood recordings or educational documentaries, and organize them into his own movies.13 Quite regularly his finished products would take on socio-political commentaries or in the case of A MOVIE, wherein he displays intertitles reading “A MOVIE,” “BY CONNER,” and “THE END” repeatedly throughout the film in a mixture of contextual orientations, a critique of the popular movie-making process itself. One comedic task in that film is a metaphorical framing similar to Kelly’s waterfall. That is, Conner depicts in one scene a submariner looking through the periscope of his ship, only to be pleasantly surprised by the image of a woman undressing, creating a sort 50

essays - mitchell goodrich

of peep show dynamic. Out of excitement, this voyeur orders for his crew to fire a missile. We are given one more look at the stripper, before witnessing Conner’s analogizing of the missile and the submariner’s ejaculation.14 Although dissimilar in intent, the comparison between this gag and that of Kelly’s glass of water is obvious. Further, Conner’s strategy, of collaging film pieces to create new compositions, is a conspicuous forefather to the remix approach in ADVERT 1. The last formal comparison to draw between the two artists’ is also the simplest: That in Dream Land Conner seduces the viewer into reverie by providing disparate images, with variations in timing and subject-matter, and accompanied by dreary audio recordings of sounds from nature, to produce the Deleuzian effect of gaseous perception, much like how Kelly allows the willing spectator to be absorbed quickly into the short video before framing their experience as a dreamscape.15 Another very interesting quality working in ADVERT 1 is the idea of digital decay and whether the depicted image should be received as a lesser version of the original semblance, a nostalgic meditation on that former self, or as a new representation of that semblance, whose aesthetic quality should be measured only against itself, as a self-referential product, in the manner of new criticism. Useful for such an analysis is a comparison to the work of Bill Morrison, who has continually studied and reorganized fragments of old footage into new compositions, in a manner similar to that of Conner’s, but whose primary importance is for dwelling solely on degenerating materials. One of Morrison’s films in this manner, his 2004 short Light is Calling, utilizes footage from just a single movie, titled The Bells, from 1926 and featuring Boris Karloff. That actor is barely visible in this reincarnation however, as the stock’s image has almost completely disintegrated, forcing the viewer to stare deeply and attentively at the screen if they want to see a recognizable image, noticing all the way through that the film repeatedly needs to be realigned, as the reel’s perforations no longer successfully serve their intended function. In this film, the quality of the original image has grown so poor that the viewer would be challenged to judgmentally compare this version to its former self. Instead, we are left with large blotches of black, skewed faces, and 12 “Gaseous Perception,” David Deamer, last modified June 8, 2010, http:// www.cineosis.com/page7.htm. 13 Ken Johnson, “Bruce Conner, San Francisco Artist with 1950s Beat Roots, Dies at 74,” The New York Times, July 9, 2008. 14 A Movie, VHS, Directed by Bruce Conner (1958; San Francisco, CA: Canyon Cinema, 1985). 15 Take the 5:10 to Dream Land, DVD, Directed by Bruce Conner (1976; San Francisco, CA: Canyon Cinema, 2002).

bubbles that appear nearest to two-dimensional boils. Certainly then, the image becomes a non-referential beauty in and of itself.16 In Kelly’s video, the most telling image is that of Jordan, concentric and leaping for a dunk, surrounded by flashing cameras. Those flashing lights no longer have details; rather they are simply dots of bright white and yellow, turning on and off. Jordan himself is merely an outstretched ambiguous figure, enveloped in red, and grasping some sort of orange-globe.17 Thus, ADVERT 1 does not seem to definitively choose a path for a critique of image quality through the aforementioned trifurcation, since in the example of Jordan he is ultimately recognizable, however it is certainly composed of enough decay to deny a sweeping criticism of product versus intent. And most importantly, the video brings the above into question in the first place. Justin Kelly’s ADVERT 1, which draws its viewers into an absorptive mix of lossy videos before waking them abruptly, with a surprising combination of image and sound, formally appears nearest the techniques of the

American avant-gardist Bruce Conner. In a similar fashion, Danielle Criqui’s study of a daytime somnambulist alludes to the trance genre in filmmaking, which was revolutionized by Maya Deren, the mother of experimental film in the US. In Criqui’s Daydreams, the unique content the video embodies is a melancholic subtraction of visible progression and climactic selfrealization from the criteria that Sitney used to qualify works within the genre, allowing for a comical yet worrisome challenging of the narrative minus sensible linear arches. To find a critical discussion in Kelly’s video we need to look no further than the rendering of the image on screen, as its exhibition of a digital form of decay challenges the viewer to make decisions about where they fall on ascribing beauty to disintegrating forms of previously intact aesthetic objects. Both works return us to the sentiment offered by Deren, who in sharing her own over-analytical reading, challenges us to be receptive of even the minutest and most subversive moments and tones in all filmic works, so as to escape the inflexibility of convention in seek of something other than what’s customary.

Bibliography Brakhage, Stan. Film at Wit’s End: Eight Avant-Garde Filmmakers. Kingston, New York: McPherson & Company, 1989. Un Chien Andalou. DVD. Directed by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí. 1929; Los Angeles, CA: Transflux Films, 2004. A Movie. VHS. Directed by Bruce Conner. 1958; San Francisco, CA: Canyon Cinema, 1985. Take the 5:10 to Dream Land. DVD. Directed by Bruce Conner. 1976; San Francisco, CA: Canyon Cinema, 2002. Valse Triste. DVD. Directed by Bruce Conner. 1978; San Francisco, CA: Microcinema International, 2009. Daydreams. Streaming Video. Directed by Danielle Criqui. 2012. Deamer, David. Gaseous Perception. June 8, 2010. http://www.cineosis.com/page7.htm (accessed April 11, 2012). At Land. DVD. Directed by Maya Deren. 1944; New York, NY: Mystic Fire Video, 2002. Meshes of the Afternoon. DVD. Directed by Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid. 1943; New York, NY: Mystic Fire Video, 2002. Buffalo ‘66. DVD. Directed by Vincent Gallo. 1998; Santa Monica, CA: Lionsgate Home Entertainment, 2003. Haslem, Wendy. “Maya Deren: The High Priestess of Experimental Cinema.” Senses of Cinema, no. 23 (December 2002). Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. “Hirshhorn Acquires Major Artworks by Dan Flavin, Bruce Conner, Michael Snow and Gabriel Orozco.” Hirshhorn Museum Press Release. January 3, 2011. http://www.hirshhorn.si.edu/info/press.asp?key=90&subkey=495 (accessed April 10, 2012). Blonde Cobra. DVD. Directed by Ken Jacobs. 1963; New York, NY: Electronic Arts Intermix, 2001. Little Stabs at Happiness. DVD. Directed by Ken Jacobs. 1959-63; San Francisco, CA: National Film Preservation Foundation, 2009. Star Spangled to Death. DVD. Directed by Ken Jacobs. 1956-2004; New York, NY: The Film-Makers’ Cooperative, 2007. Johnson, Ken. “Bruce Conner, San Francisco Artist With 1950s Beat Roots, Dies at 74.” The New York Times, July 9, 2008. Light is Calling. DVD. Directed by Bill Morrison. 2004; San Francisco, CA: Microcinema International, 2009. Sitney, P. Adams. Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde, 1943-2000. Third Edition. New York, New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. Stracke, Caspar. “The YouTubing of Bruce Conner (1933 - 2008).” Caspar Stracke’s blog | post.thing.net. July 9, 2008. http://post.thing.net/node/2114 (accessed April 10, 2012).

Video on PaPer - Issue 2

new memory - neil sanzgiri

Memory and Corruption: A Digital Buffer for the New Age A few years back during my stint as an amateur filmmaker, an alarming fog of anxiety approached my conscience as the lens of the camera slowly replaced my sense of self. It was not that I, the filmmaker, was transforming into the very apparatus I commanded, but rather this object commanded my memories by way of restriction. Memory, as powerful gift, demands constant responsibility to remain true to “the way things really happened.” It is as if there existed in the core of the mind a binding legal contract of utmost reliability towards the constant stream of information that molests our senses. This innate flaw within the very system of the mind absorbs and mutates each event as it unfolds and eventually evaporates. I first came into contact with this threatening feeling of sin, that is to say a betrayal of my mind’s legal contract, while shooting a low-budget documentary of the travels of two bands on their first tour. The DV camera I brought with me slowly started to malfunction. I stumbled upon an old Sony Hi-8 Camcorder at the place we were staying in New York and decided to opt for the Hi-8 for its grainy, film-like quality that so many young videographers strive for. Nonetheless, as I arrived back at my home in Baltimore, I was eager to upload the footage from what was pretty much my first meaningful road trip as a 19 year old. And then the inevitable – the events recorded on the Hi-8 cassette tape could only be extracted by that very same model of camera which happened to be located in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. I used every tape deck at my school, every Hi-8 camera I could borrow, and only came up with one answer – to go back to the house we were staying at and once more use that camera. This overwhelming fear that those precious memories were gone flooded my senses. I was submerged by the weight of the evaporating distance of “what really happened” versus what I captured on tape. A flash of images appeared in my head from the trip, yet what finally brought me to tears was the realization that those images I was seeing were filtered through the lens of the camera. And honestly, that is the problem – the events as that actually happened for the most part were a combination of me filming everything as it happened and

New Memory - Neil Sanzgiri

panicking about my inability to not film everything. If I wanted my memories back, I needed that tape. I finally got in touch with the guy whose house we were staying at in Greenpoint and explained my situation. He finally agreed, after a small argument where he proposed other options for retrieving the data. I think even at one point, as I was on the verge of tears talking to him on the phone, desperately explaining how those memories of our time in New York City were slowly evaporating.* Two weeks later I appeared in his warehouse once again reliving fragments of our time spent together both virtually through the camera, and the accompanying smell and sight of his living quarters. Yet after all of this trouble of living through the camera, I thought I would have learned my lesson. Later on in my second semester of that sophomore year, I was in a class with some friends called “Road Movies & Travelogues”. Our assignment was to actually go on a road trip and make work from it. I knew that I wanted to create a narrative, but the idea only took form as we were already traveling. My idea was to document everything that happened as if I were directing everyone in a narrative about themselves and what they were already doing. I re-staged many events seconds after they happened in order to fully and cinematically capture the production in different angles. It was a fairly successful video and lasted about twenty minutes. However, that was not enough. I wanted the narrative to read much more dramatically. So, naturally I scripted enough fictional events to add cohesion to the very ambiguous plot. This turned into a forty-minute video. On the day that our finals were due, and the day I was to turn in what would be one of the last videos I would ever make, my hard drive crashed. All of the editing I worked on was useless and that forty-minute video was gone. I received an extension for the summer and took the time to go back and transfer each and every scene from the DV tapes. It was amazing that all of those events were still there in their “raw” form and I got that same warm feeling that you get when you look at some footage you shot ten seconds ago. I roughly knew how everything was put together, so I just went for it and spent the rest of my summer piecing everything back

together. Two weeks before school started again, all of the files were corrupted a second time. Once again, I just dove right in and spent the next two weeks straight chasing after those images and events that were nearly six months old and slapped something together.

*** And that is what I really want to touch on right now, this idea of the “corrupted” file, these morally depraved pixels that no longer serve their function. Virtual suicide. When documentation fails, what happens to an event once captured? Does everything return to its natural format of the evasive momentary fragments that make up our memory. I find a moment of pleasure with the thought of events once captured on video re-uniting with their former real life counterparts in some vast cloud of all the moments that ever lived: a celestial sphere of the way things really happened. A friend recently recounted a scene of accidental occurrences that he captured wonderfully on video. The story goes something like this: Upon leaving a camping trip in upstate New York, one of the camper’s car fell into a ditch on the side of the road. This was the last time these two campers would see each other for another year, so the build up of this goodbye was postponed for this slight emergency. As the car is getting pulled out of the ditch by a towing truck, my friend pulls out his camera hastily as he attempts to film these events as he so often does. After the car is settled on the back of the tow truck, the departing camper sits in the front seat of his car and vanishes off into the distance, his eyes fixed directly into the center of the camera. A few seconds of silence ensued; the car and tow truck are miles down the road. All of a sudden, a revving of an engine starts up, then another. A pack of bikers ride proudly past the camera, following the towed

truck into the distance. A few more seconds of silence. Another camper who happened to witness this series of events darts out after the bikers completely naked running down the road and once again vanishing into the distance. All the campers called this scene, “The Shot,” for a reason. Upon retrieval of the video, the file was corrupted. No one ever saw the footage either. Yet instead of being lost forever, “the shot” lived on in a more impressive manor. My ability to recount what “the shot” entailed was directly linked to the amount of times I’ve heard that story told. Needless to say, just like the mind twists the reality of things, so does storytelling. Either way, each person I talked to about this story says the same thing – they envisioned “the shot” as a video, not as a series of events. Is it possible that a film once lost is brought back to life through the act of describing? The shot is comparatively short in length, enabling the description to be more thorough, however the revitalization of the images that once existed and statically framed live on in a new life, supported by the execution of the description of the video itself and not of the events. Cinematically, nothing ever goes to rest when there is a mind to relay a combination of moments.

* Even within this story I am re-counting experience from memories that have been twisted once more. Here, however, my goal is to try and recount these as comfortably as possible.

Video on PaPer - Issue 2

ISSUE 3 54

“In the subtlety of being alive, you feel the nuance(s) of a generation. If you read art history, that subtlety doesn’t show up as much.” Mimi Gross

notes - mitchell goodrich

Some Notes for Future Reference and Others I: Before Some Notes for Future Reference I’ve just opened, for the first time, Proust’s Swann’s Way; the initial volume in his great In Search of Lost Time. I’m trying to understand Mieke Bal’s interpretation of that work as wholly “about photography.”1 Her narratological study of the concept of focalization has helped me better understand Chantal Akerman’s La Captive—a film derived from Proust’s volume of the same name, from his aforementioned magnum opus. In the opening scene of that film, Akerman’s main character Simon stares at a 16mm projection on the wall of a small, dim-lit and decidedly nondescript room. The moving-image shows a girl named Ariane, played by Sylvie Testud, enjoying a day at the beach with her friends, among them her closest companion Andrée. Simon watches the two of them with eyes wide open, uttering “Je... je... je... vous... je... je vous... je vous... je vous aime bien.” Je being the French word for I, vous being the word for you, and je vous aime bien meaning I really like you. All this time we assimilate shots of the projected image as being the view from the eyes of Simon. Accordingly, when Ariane and Andée break the fourth-wall and stare back at Simon, we are afforded the shot-reverse-shot technique in editing, allowing us the chance to jump to the conclusion that the images of Simon looking have not only been from an outside, third person view at the position of the wall, but have also been the view of the two females characters looking. Their three pairs of eyes meet at the moment he’sfinally able to get out the words “Je vous aime bien.” The girls look at each other and nod modestly, before doing the same at him. Then, in the penultimate shot, the dynamic is broken: We are looking from Simon’s point of view, but he himself walks out from behind the projector and across that image, sitting down in front of the light, with his shadow rising from the lower- left corner to meet with Ariane’s face. We have not been seeing from his view, but from Akerman’s, behind the camera. And we continue to throughout the remainder of the film, as the camera is consistently set at her eyeline height.2 I return to Mieke Bal here, with her question that pervades all narrative storytelling, especially in the inherently visual medium of filmmaking: “Who sees?”3 56

Notes - Mitchell Goodrich

That is not the opening paragraph to the essay I’ve failed to complete for this third issue of VOP, but it does give you an idea of what I’m working on. Like in much painting, where the artist is present at least at the surface—at the level of visibility of an artwork’s facture—the work of the director is latent in the final assemblage of a film on screen, the editor squeezed in the interstices we refer to as cuts, and it is only through the eye of an unconscious mechanism, the camera, that we comprehend the synecdochic images that construct a movie’s “self-enclosed diegetic universe.”4 So, with the paper I’m working on now, I’m plunging into that terrifying realm of perception theory, but merely in an attempt to discuss themes of presence, divorce, and forbidden consciousness as they are found in not only Akerman’s La Captive, but also Julia Leigh’s controversial Sleeping Beauty, the novella on which that film is based by Yasunari Kawabata, and the lyrical films of Stan Brakhage, as described by P. Adams Sitney. But until then I’ll have to leave you with some notes. II: Notes & Quotes -Ariane ≈ a rien = nothing - In traditional translations of the literary narrative schematic into the cinematic language, we may think of a homodiegetic narrator as one whose dominating voice tells the story and, of course, one who appears in the story (e.g. Tom Hanks in Forrest Gump), but with the added aspect of a projected image with synchronized sound, we have different technical possibilities. • And for that reason Brakhage can be a homodiegetic narrator without speaking in his “lyrical films;” • Alain Robbe-Grillet can be simultaneously an extraand intra-diegetic narrator in Trans-Europ-Express; • Matt Porterfield can become a persistent outer presence in Putty Hill, perhaps framing his entire fictional scenario as a hyponarrative under a pseudodocumentary.

1 Kaja Silverman, “JE VOUS,” Art History Vol. 30, No. 3 (2007): 453. 2 Ibid. 3 Mieke Bal, “Narration and Focalization,” in A Mieke Bal Reader (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 7. 4 Tom Gunning, “The Cinema of Attraction: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde,” Wide Angle Vol. 8, Nos. 3&4 (1986): 68.

-According to Bal, to see a character watching something is much different than knowing they are watching and seeing what it is that they are seeing. You, as a reader, exist on an entirely different level of what she terms “focalization.” -“Much has been made of the gap separating the ‘I think’ from the ‘I am’ in Descartes’s Sixth Meditation. However, the first-person pronoun is not the only word that splits us in two: the ‘I’ has no effectivity unless it is addressed to, and acknowledged by, a ‘you’, and the relationship between these two pronouns is infinitely reversible. And not only can we never fully know the one to whom we say it, but the other that we are for him or her is also permanently unavailable to us.” – K. Silverman -

“...it was not until 1858, when Thomas Skaife created his Pistolgraph, that the camera was equated with a gun, and the first recorded use of the verb ‘to shoot’ as a synonym for the verb ‘to photograph’ occurred in 1890.” – K. Silverman - “Every change in film history implies a change in its address to the spectator, and each period constructs its spectator in a new way.” – T. Gunning -“...it is another nature which speaks to the camera rather than to the eye: “other” above all in the sense that a space informed by human consciousness gives way to a space informed by the unconscious.” – W. Benjamin “What is aura, actually? A strange weave of space and time: the unique appearance or semblance of distance, no matter how close it may be. While at rest on a summer’s noon, to trace a range of mountains on the horizon, or a branch that throws its shadow on the observer, until the moment or the hour become part of their appearance—this is what it means to breathe the aura of those mountains, that branch.” – W. Benjamin

III: On the Bechdel Test The Bechdel Test should be practiced with some discretion. Although it is genius in its uncomplicated applicability, we should remember the procedure has come from a satirical comic-strip and thus, in its very straightforwardness, may be prone to unwarranted exploitation and misuse. Its strategy elicits derision,

and while that may often be useful in denouncing movies that frame the male gender bias as an unchallenged convention, it connotes negativity with troubling immediacy. The comic strip itself is evidence to the test’s strengths, while it takes a little more investigation in order to point out its weaknesses. The comic shows two women walking by a theatre and when one asks if they should see a movie, the other replies that she only goes to see movies that “satisfy three basic requirements. One, it has to have at least two [named] women in it who, two, talk to each other about, three, something besides a man.” The really fantastic aspect of this strip is that as the two women pass through each panel, a different example of male targeted signage is displayed, from movie posters for “The Mercenary” and “The Barbarian” to the theatre’s marquee that, in the final frame, reads “Rambo Meets Godzilla”—and if these action flicks aren’t the only current attractions, then I’m willing to bet the other sum are rom-coms that only reify gender stereotypes. The test plays well here. Unfortunately, while the test catches and questions the bias displayed in such male dominant action films as The Thing, a film that fails the test with flying colors in its not having a single female character—only the uncredited female voice-over of the computer—the test also qualifies movies like Clueless, which is drowned in associations of materialism with femininity and malehomosexuality, albeit in a satirical context. The central problem for me though, is that the test leaves open the possibility to fail movies like Gregg Araki’s Mysterious Skin, whose subject bares the need for very isolated views of the main characters. That is to say, while Araki’s movie has more than two named female characters who talk to each other, it fails the test because they do not talk about anything other than the two male, main characters; but what the test does not have the facility to denote is that this harrowingly dramatic study only shows scenes with the main characters, or conversations centered around the main characters, in order to intensify the terror of its subject—the longterm psychological effects of childhood sexual abuse. Thus, I simply believe the test should be practiced with thorough consideration when utilized on a case by case basis. As a study of the general sum of films, especially those marketed to the mainstream, it is very often eyeopening.

Video on PaPer - Issue 3

features

LAUREN BRICK Lauren Brick is an artist living and working in Baltimore Maryland. Well known for her work in CGI and print media, Lauren has also collected an impressive library of movie stills over the years which she has incorporated into her practice. Placed between articles is a selection of her film stills curated in response to the term cryptomnesia; when a previously forgotten memory or experience resurfaces as a seemingly original idea or inspiration, unaware of the first instance. lbfilmstills.tumblr.com flickr.com/photos/lauren_brick/

Features - lauren brick

Video on PaPer - Issue 3

features - siobhan c. Hagan

Cultivate Your Data: A Practical Guide to BornDigital Video Preservation and Personal Archiving Preserving your digital videos for future access requires active care. It may be helpful to imagine your digital output as a motor vehicle that needs constant tune-ups and maintenance to run well and to last as long as possible. I am not that big of a fan of that analogy, because I hate driving and cars have a relatively short life expectancy, no matter how well you take care of them. I prefer the idea that your data can be seen as a living thing that you must take care of for the rest of your life: a responsibility that you actively chose to take on because it is important to you and adds value to your daily life to have access to your created bits. This is why I prefer the analogy of looking at digital preservation like cultivating a garden. Many make it a career, but many also make it a hobby. It should be as accessible as gardening and it really isn’t as scary as it may seem. Sure, you could devastate your best rosebush in mere seconds with an accidental slip of the weed whacker. You can’t control the weather or the climate but you work with what you’ve got and try and stay ahead of any major disasters to protect your garden as a whole. Not everything will always survive, but you will replant and adapt. Don’t just think about gardening and then talk yourself out of it every spring because you think that you need to have a green thumb to be a success, that is guaranteed failure. Ask for help from the professionals, most of the time they are so passionate about sharing information for free. And some good advice for gardening, digital preservation, and pretty much any aspect of life: don’t be afraid to look stupid. Wear it like a badge of honor: you are curious and determined, and your ego will not stand in the way of learning something! I justify to myself that if I am not hurting anyone’s feelings and if I am genuinely listening to the answer, no question is really stupid. Plus, asking questions is a genuine time-saver. I love the Internet, but there is almost too much information to sift through sometimes, and when you ask a professional, often they can give you a very specific answer in a very short amount of time, in an easier to understand explanation. What exactly is in your digital garden? There are so many ways to capture born-digital audio and video these days, so I am just going to talk about some of the most popular. However, most of the ideas in this article can be applied to any born-digital format—even your digital photos. 60

Features - Siobhan c. hagan

When a two bits love each other very much…let me tell you about the Ones and the Zeros. Where do “borndigital” files come from? It is not the digital files that come from taking a VHS and digitizing it-- Born-digital files were created in a digital form—they were never anything else. Now you can have born-digital AV content on tapes, for example everyone’s favorite consumer format MiniDV (DV is for “digital video”). However I am only going to discuss AV that is born-digitally as a file and never exists on a “physical medium”. This is the stuff we are getting off of our cell-phones and SLR’s. Digital media is amazing; the fact that we can capture, edit and distribute a digital video on our phone for cheap has such potential for society and culture (when I write “cheap” I am comparing to the cost of even S-8 film production in its heyday: but please don’t get me wrong, I love film too!). The main problem with this is that once content is shared via the Internet, it is often forgotten about—not because people don’t care, but because they are working on something new or just because they take technology for granted and assume that it will last. But for something so quick and easy to create, it is just as quick and easy to lose forever. Another huge problem with born-digital AV content is that there is too much of it! There is a freedom in capturing things without having to worry if you are going to run out of film or tape (although digital space may be an issue), but deleting things should be a major part of a creator’s job. Curate your AV material! A lot of times with digital technology we create so much that we will not need or reuse in the future. What are you going to use these moving images for? Do you really need three shots of the same thing from different angles? Or the 15 minutes of casual chat that leads up to the amazing interview or performance? And maybe you do. Just make it a part of your thought process; you’ve got to consistently spend time weeding! However you create your criteria of value is up to you— but it might help to get another person’s perspective or to see how other’s go through the task. Ideally this would happen, before, during, or immediately after editing your project, but no one is stopping you from deleting your own stuff down the line if you realize that you are never going to reuse it or want to pretend it didn’t happen.

While digital storage is getting cheaper, it is still pretty expensive, especially when you need to back things up to preserve them (more about this later). And eventually the cost of digital storage will level out.1 So weed your data! To get a little bit technical, it isn’t necessarily the file that you want to preserve, but the content and anything that helps you to identify or describe it. While it is complicated and multi-faceted, you don’t need to be an IT genius to understand what makes up your born-digital video data. You just need to know its main characteristics. Is it annual or perennial? Does it grow better with other certain types of plants? What particular insect likes to infest it? Once you have that information, you have control over your landscape. It is good practice to choose a quality capture format before starting a project. However, if you already have digital video that exists in several different formats, then you can convert them into the quality format of your choosing. The question is what makes a format of “quality”? For this article, quality refers to the format’s ability to stick around for a while: to be easily supported by many different players, non-linear editing systems, etc. The Library of Congress has published a whole list of factors to help you determine how sustainable a format is, and you want to listen to the Library of Congress.2 They are doing things others of us only dream of. However, this is pretty detailed stuff, and I wish to offer my breakdown of the basics of what you need to know to make a decision on what format you capture and store your digital video in. A codec is computer hard ware or software that converts data from a code into understandable information. It is a mixture of the words “compression/decompression” and/or “coding/encoding”. Some current popular digital video codecs are H.264 / MPEG-4 AVC, DV and HDV, MPEG-2 (also a wrapper format), ad WMV (Windows Media Video).3 However, a codec does not mean that the data is necessarily compressed. Compression uses mathematical algorithms to make a video size smaller. Most use lossy compression, where data is lost but typically not to the degree that it can be noticed in the particular viewing environment intended for the video.4 The other type of compression is lossless, where the original data can be reconstructed exactly and no information is lost when decompressed.5 We will be working with lossy compression and formats that use intra-frame as opposed to inter-frame; intra-frame coding compresses information in each frame, where interframe you can actually lose frames in compression.6 A codec should also not be confused with a wrapper or container format. This is the standard in which you

store the video data. It stores multiple types of data and describes how they all coexist together.7 The wrapper is on the outside, and the following is on the inside of the wrapper is the video, audio, metadata, codec. Current popular wrappers are Quicktime (MOV), AVI, ASF, AVCHD, MPEG, Flash,8 Windows Media Video (WMV), Real Media (RM), and MP4.9 Another thing to think about is (as if you needed another thing) what software you are going to be editing in (FCP, Avid, etc.) and what you will want to playback in when choosing your codec and wrapper (for example, Quicktime or Windows Media Player?). Currently the best open source media player and transcoder is VLC10; if it doesn’t play in Quicktime or another player, it most likely will in VLC. Are you Mac or Windows based? If Mac, you want to go with Apple products and services, if Windowsbased then you want to go with Microsoft. Keep track of popular codecs, wrappers, and media players through the Sustainability of Digital Formats: Format Descriptions for Moving Images website.11 Wikipedia is also a good starting place to find articles on certain technical topics. Let’s imagine that I capture most of my digital video that I want preserved on my iPhone 4S. I look into it and find that it records video in MOV H.264 with a 1920x1080 resolution and 30 frames per second with the AAC audio codec.12 I can also enable video geospatial tagging, which I will most certainly do. This information will be kept in the wrapper so the location of where I shot something can be preserved as well (I will quite possibly forget).13 This all works for me as I am an Apple user who edits in Final Cut Pro 7 and this file format and codec will be sustainable for longer than most.

1 Rosenthal, David. “Modeling the Economics of Long-Term Storage”. DSHR’s Blog. 27 September 2011. Blogger. Web. 20 June 2012. 2 “Sustainability Factors”. Sustainability of Digital Formats: Planning for Library of Congress Collections. 29 February 2012. Library of Congress. Web. 20 June 2012. 3 Case, Loyd. “All About Video Codecs and Containers”. PCWorld Video. 14 December 2010. PC World. Web. 20 June 2012. 4 “Lossy Compression”. 16 June 2012. Wikipedia. Web. 20 June 2012. 5 “Lossless Compression”. 18 May 2012. Wikipedia. Web. 20 June 2012. 6 “Inter frame”. 15 March 2012. Wikipedia. Web. 20 June 2012. 7 “Digital Container Format”. 16 June 2012. Web. 20 June 2012. 8 Case, Loyd. “All About Video Codecs and Containers”. PCWorld Video. 14 December 2010. PC World. Web. 20 June 2012. 9 “Video File Types”. Video File Formats. 2012. Fileinfo.com. Web. 20 June 2012. 10 Trapani, Gina. “Top 10 Free Video Rippers, Encoders, and Converters”. 31 October 2007. Lifehacker. Web. 20 June 2012. 11 “Format Descriptions for Moving Images”. Sustainability of Digital Formats: Planning for Library of Congress Collections. 30 May 2012. Library of Congress. Web. 20 June 2012. 12 “Aperture 3: About Video and Audio Formats in Aperture.” 12 June 2012. Apple. Web. 20 June 2012. 13 Stoimen. “Reading GPS Latitude and Longitude from Image and Video Files”. Stoimen’s Weblog. 4 February 2011. WordPress. Web. 20 June 2012.

Video on PaPer - Issue 3

So now you have your AV files. But wait, you aren’t finished! You need to create an Md5 checksum to verify the integrity of your file in the future. The checksum number will be totally different if any change has been made to the any part of the file. Checksums are key, you need to check them routinely and whenever a file is moved or changed. Some open source tools are Md5Checker14 (for Windows) and CheckSum+ (for Mac).15 The definition for “open source” is extremely long and involved,16 but to put it very simply, if something is open source, it is free to use and free to change and completely transparent, whose construction is well-documented: the opposite could be considered “proprietary”, although some things that are proprietary are transparent, but not typically. For projects created on a non-linear editing (NLE) system, you will need an EDL, or Edit Decision List. This is a list of reel and time code data of your final version of your project. I recommend outputting it to an XML file.17 You might not be able to understand it, but it is good to have in case you have to rebuild the project. Make sure to set up good file structure before editing a project, and ideally before even shooting something: do not delete or move any original files that you imported into your movie. Otherwise when you want to go back to the NLE to make changes, you will have to spend time finding those files to reconnect to the media. Also, don’t upgrade your software with doing a test. Recognize what version of the NLE that your videos are on— these will more than likely not be readable in the newer version, but you could try it out in order to see with someone else’s new version of the software. You’ve got the whole package, now you want to stick some signs in there so you don’t confuse your chocolate peppermint with your lemon mint. You can’t be too organized with your files. Teaching yourself and getting into this habit during and even before creation will make your life much easier in editing and archiving, and then potentially re-using video in the future. The main reason you need to practice folder hierarchy best practices is that it is quicker and more efficient to find things. Plan before you start so that you know how you like to organize and find things and maybe sketch it in template form for future reference— do you prefer to start with the year, and then have a folder for each respective month in that year— Or do you like to organize things by content? Such as a folder for “Exhibitions”, “Home Videos”, “Processes”, and “Projects”, and then within those folders have subfolders of each year.18 This really depends on you: just be consistent! Also, don’t use special

Features - Siobhan c. hagan

characters or highlighting folders asnot all systems can read these properly. Avoid redundancy--don’t put a video in “Exhibitions” and then put the exact same video in “Projects”— clearly define each. The biggest thing in file naming is that you need to assume that the videos will be moved from their original folder structure eventually.19 Therefore, make sure the filename has all absolutely necessary descriptive info to make it unique. For example, in folder “Exibitions”/”2012” you may have a video with the filename 001.mov. However, you might have a 001.mov in the “2010” and “2011” folders as well. While at the same time, you want to keep it simple, nothing more than 25 characters, and use underscores instead of periods or spaces and avoid special characters again. To make this easier, you could come up with your own shortcuts or acronyms for terms and document them and share them. For example, “SCH_HM_20101209_01” could mean that the creator was Siobhan C. Hagan, that this video is the first of Home Movies taken on December 9, 2010. Always include dates in filenames and be consistent with how your format them. For example you could use 12_09_2010, as long as that is the same with all your file names. Lastly, if you have multiple versions of the same project, make sure to include that in the file name. Don’t put “update” or “old,” just “v03”, “v04” will do. Or “Final”, but this might change and you don’t want to have two finals. Now is the time to be redundant! You need to have three copies of every file that you want to preserve for backing up; they need to be geographically dispersed (in case of fire, earthquake, twister, zombies, etc.), each file with its own checksum stored with it. This is why you really need to examine how much digital storage you can afford. You don’t want to buy an external hard drive any larger than 500GB, this way if one crashes, you don’t have to try and recover too much data. Another option is the Cloud. Companies like Amazon, Apple, and DropBox may say they can store your data forever, but don’t trust them as your only back up. Use the most popular ones because they will be expensive but there is a better chance that those companies will be around for longer. What would happen if the company that hosts your information cloud closes overnight? Or they could switch their service, for example MobileMe has been transitioned to iCloud.20 My personal digital videos are all mostly home movies of family and friends and dogs doing cute things. My mother and my brother both have personal stakes in these and have their own additional data for the same events. So I will collaborate with both of them, a 500 GB hard drive at Mom’s house in Maryland, a 500 GB hard drive at my house in Los Angeles, and a 500 GB hard drive at my

brother’s place in Harrisburg, PA. We will be each other’s back up and I really recommend taking the time to preserve things this way. Make sure someone can power the hard drives up on a routine basis and don’t leave them plugged in. You will need to check the checksums and check to make sure they play in the same players regularly. I advise putting reminders in your calendar maybe three times a year. Collaborate and team up with friends, family or like-minded colleagues/organizations. You could potentially make a game or an event out of it. Schedule backups at times of the year where you will have a day off-- winter holidays and 4th of July -- make it a get-together via Skype or Facetime or something. Only use DVDs to create copies to share easily, but even then those are disappearing fast with the Cloud and it getting easier and quicker to share large files. I personally use DropBox to share videos (only the free version). What if you find that your file will only play now in a select number of players? Or that after doing your homework you realize that your wrapper and/or codec is old news and is being left in the dust by more supported and widely used formats? Repot that plant! What do you do if a checksum fails at home? There is something wrong with your file. Immediately check the file at Mom’s or in the Cloud. If they are verified by their checksums, then replace the file with a copy of these and generate a new checksum for that one. At several points you are going to have to convert your video data from one format to another.21 This will be involved, but it shouldn’t happen too frequently and won’t be too difficult if you plan for it with friends and professionals. How much might this all cost? An hour of video from my iPhone 4S will take up approximately 2 GB of space. A quality 500 GB external hard drive will cost you from $100 to $200 (look at customer reviews and spend more money for more reliable hard drives).22 For 100 GB of storage at Dropbox, it will cost $19.99/month or $199.00/ year. While they don’t price it out, they do offer a “Team” rate where you can have 1 TB of data and lots of other sharing services.23 If I am working with my Mom and my brother to jointly preserve a total of 400 GB of digital video (200 hours of iPhone 4S video), it will cost roughly $400 upfront for two 500 GB hard drives and then $800 a year for Cloud back up (but hopefully this would be cheaper if we go in on it together). So this could potentially cost you over $1K in the first year, but then the hard drives will more than likely last longer than one year. Personally, I am going to have three external hard drives and no cloud storage to save money ($600 every few years to replace the hard drives if and when they fail).

Lastly, please note that the recommendations in this article are not considered the optimum “best practices” for digital preservation of video. However, optimum preservation is just plain unaffordable for personal digital archiving. My recommendations are the minimum amount that should be done to have your data potentially be accessible for your lifetime (it is up to the kids to cultivate it after that--or the pros in a library, archive or museum). As you can see, even this isn’t going to be cheap. The key to doing things cheaper in almost any environment is to collaborate with a large number of like-minded people with similar goals, or to sacrifice peace of mind. The more money and time you spend on this, the safer your data will become. Happy cultivating! SUMMARY • I will have three copies: Store on a hard drive at Mom’s 1. Wrapper 2. EDL* 3. Md5 Checksum Store on hard drive at home (different make and model than the one at mom’s, but still reputable) 1. Wrapper 2. EDL* 3. Md5 Checksum Store on hard drive at my brother’s 1. Wrapper 2. EDL* 3. Md5 Checksum *If it is a NLE project • I will have good folder hierarchy that is documented and consistent. • I will have good file naming. • I will constantly check on my files to see how they are doing. • I will migrate the files to more sustainable formats over time.

14 “Md5 Checker”. Md5 Overview. V. 3.3. Md5 Checker. Web. 20 June 2012. 15 “CheckSum+”. V. 1.5.3. 13 September 2009. Pescados Software. Web. 20 June 2012. 16 “The Open Source Definition (Annotated)”. Version 1.9. Open Source Initiative. Wb. 20 June 2012. 17 “Edit Decision List”. 8 June 2012. Wikipedia. Web. 20 June 2012. 18 Smith, Edward. “Folder Hierarchy Best Practices for Digital Asset Management”. 8 August 2011. DAM Learning Center. Web. 20 June 2012. 19 “Best Practices for File-Naming” Department of Cultural Resources, Office of Archives and History, Government Records Branch of North Carolina, revised 7 May 2008. Web. 20 June 2012. 20 “MobileMe Transition and iCloud”. 2012. Apple. Web. 20 June 2012. 21 “Data Conversion”. 23 December 2011. Wikipedia. Web. 20 June 2012. 22 “Hard Drives”. PC Mag.com. Web. 20 June 2012. 23 “Pricing”. DropBox. Web. 20 June 2012. Video on PaPer - Issue 3

Features - lauren brick

Video on PaPer - Issue 3

essays - amber moyles

Yvonne Rainer’s Film About A Woman Who…: Conditions For A New Social Subject Yvonne Rainer’s first experiment with film, titled Hand Movie, was produced in 1966. The composition begins with Rainer’s hand, alone on the screen. The fingers are extended and closed. The back of the hand faces the viewer and in the first seconds: Rainer’s middle finger bends three times, pauses, and then repeats the action, bending again, three times. Then, the hand pivots so that the palm faces the audience, this sequence repeats before the pattern is broken. Rainer’s hand pauses, stumbles as if confused, the movements becomes disordered for several moments before a new pattern emerges and, in turn, falls into disarray. The critical moment in the first sequence is the turning hand: when Rainer bends the middle fin¬ger, turns the palm, and bends it again, she allows the viewer to see the movement from more than one perspective. Rainer’s Hand Movie is the beginning of her participation in the second feminist film movement characterized by Laura Mulvey as film “concerned with the language of representation” and occupied by a “fascination with the cinematic process.” Earlier trends in feminist film, in contrast, were marked by a desire to produce realistic, rather than ‘positive’ images of women, and role reversal between the presumption of the spectator as male and the female object as the recipient of the gaze.1 Rainer continued working with the same disruption of pattern and structure exhibited in Hand Movie in her subsequent films, most notably in her second feature-length work Film About A Woman Who… (1972–74). The film lacks an intentional sequential order; anachronistic scenes subsist rather than contribute to a concrete narrative. Some visually disjointed settings include: a stage with a couch, photographs of a family vacation, the beach, a bed on a stage, a dinner party on a stage, a dance performance, and Marion Crane’s hotel bathroom from Alfred Hitchcock’s thriller Psycho (1960). As a result of these disjointed sets, the audience of A Woman Who… is disoriented, dissociated, and unable to assimilate with the shattered narrative or identify with a concrete character. Rainer defies the objective of mainstream cinema to create a delusively 66

Essays - Amber Moyles

stable, masculinist viewer. Rather, Rainer’s viewer is an insecure viewer; a vulnerable viewer; a response to what Teresa de Lauretis terms the creation of “conditions of visibility for a different social subject.”2 The patterned action in Hand Movie as well as Yvonne Rainer’s choreography throughout the sixties and early seventies, including Trio A (1965, filmed 1978) and Three Satie Spoons (1972, performed 2012 Dia: Beacon), all emphasize the object-like qualities of the performer, portraying the uncanny illusion of an insentient body imbued with a dignity of ‘presence.’3 In view of Michael Fried’s theory of objecthood as the ability of the work to “hold as shape,” Rainer acknowledges the temporal quality of performance as resistant to conventional ideas of modernist sculpture. Carrie Lambert-Beatty described how “an artist who acknowledges this difficulty [the fleeting temporality of dance] had two options. She could try to make performance less ephemeral … or exaggerate the problem of dance’s disappearance….”4 In Hand Movie the action holds as shape most clearly during moments of pattern, while in moments of randomness the problem of disappearance is exaggerated. Rainer describes her involvement with repetitious movements, such as the choreographed gestures in Hand Movie, as an attempt to exaggerate the materiality of the body, she intended each movement to be “seen as more than a fleeting form, much as one can observe a piece of sculpture for one minute or many minutes.”5 In an attempt to “literalize” the human body, Rainer often created comparisons and relationships between performers and props. In other works, Rainer deanimated an isolated part of the body, transforming it into an object for the dancer to “lift,”6 rather than a limb imbued with life. In the second chapter of Three 1 Teresa de Lauretis, “Aesthetic and Feminist Theory: Rethinking Women’s Cinema,” pp. 154–175, in New German Critique, No. 34 (Winter, 1985), p. 155. 2 Phelan, p. 112. 3 Ibid., p. 183. Yvonne Rainer is quoted: “Inanimate bodies are also imbued with a basic dignity of presence.” 4 Carrie Lambert-Beatty, Being Watched: Yvonne Rainer and the 1960s, (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press), 2008, p. 1 5 Lambert-Beatty, p. 57. 6 Lambert-Beatty, p. 167.

Satie Spoons a dancer opens her stiff arms, touches the ground, then brings her pointed fingers to her cheeks, again and again, so that the viewer reconsiders the arrangement in the same way that he or she might sustain an uninterrupted thought while observing a sculpture. Rainer described her intention in the following statement: “Our bodies, despite the difference that lies in the face of our volition, can be looked at in the same manner as objects. We occupy space, when one of us moves out of that space he leaves room for another to enter, or for an inanimate object to be placed there.”7 In Laura Mulvey’s essay, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” she appropriated the term, scopophilia—pleasure in looking—first introduced by Freud in his generative text “Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality.” Mulvey pointed out that scopophilia is associated with pleasure in “taking other people as objects or images” and “subjecting them to a controlling and curious gaze.”8 Rainer sought to establish dance as a more object-like construction and the dancer as an autonomous individual. She imagined that this would protect the dancer from the viewer’s unconscious projection and subjugation. However, as mere objects stripped of agency, Rainer and her dancers became exactly more vulnerable to the voyeur, unable to interject or redirect the scopophilic gaze of the viewer. LambertBeatty writes on the unsustainability of this practice in Rainer’s work, using as an example Trio Film (1968), a vignette in which two nudes pass a white balloon between them: “It is as if the whole exercise had been a test: How long can you keep pretending your nude body is neutral—that your physicality is the same as that of a white balloon, or that sexual difference can be stripped from human bodies as easily as clothes?”9 Early in A Woman Who… Rainer includes a sequence in which action mimics still-image photograph production in the same way that repetitive gestures in Hand Movie simulate an object that holds as shape. In the scene, actors John Erdman, Shirley and Sarah Soffer pose on the beach for a series of photographs. They sit still; the only indication of time passing is the wind in their hair, the occasional breath or misplaced finger. As if reacting to a signal, they rearrange. This time, John is only partly within the frame. Again they pause briefly. The scene cuts and they are contained, again, completely within the frame. They pause, and then they reposition, and now, the frame crops the image so that they are, all three, only visible from the neck down. During these moments of stillness, the viewer is able to study the scene in its entirety, identifying with

the persons pictured, deriving pleasure from the image before the actors disperse and the image dissolves.10 By remaining momentarily stationary, the actors’ suspended movements becomes more like a photograph than a film, more object-like, and therefore the actor is briefly more available to the spectator’s scopophilic gaze. Mulvey follows her discussion of Freud’s scopophilia with an introduction to a specific phase of infantile ego-development defined in Jacques Lacan’s theory, “the mirror stage.” Lacan described the mirror stage as the incipient subject’s identification with an idealized image, when its reflection as an objective human body is recognized in a mirror’s surface.11 The moviegoer is like an infant child, incapacitated and limp. Both are confined to aural and visual sensations of space. The moviegoer, like the infant, identifies with a dismembered body rather than a whole body, as in the case of tightly framed close-up shots.12 Finally, like the infant who finds joy in its mirror reflection, the moviegoer experiences pleasure in identifying with the idealized image on screen. As Christian Metz wrote, “the screen is a mirror …. The representations are produced by the institution cinema, the images presented on the screen, are accepted by the subject [the moviegoer] as its own.”13 Ironically, in A Woman Who…, Rainer remembers a mirror-stage-like experience with mainstream cinema during which a male character is found to be more relatable than the film’s female characters.14 The monologue describes a young Yvonne Rainer who feels guilty after laughing out loud while watching a scene in which two actresses fight over a non-present male character. Later, in the essay “Some Ruminations” Rainer recounts and reflects on the conflict incited her reaction: 7 Lambert-Beatty, p. 183. 8 Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” 1975, pp. 198–210 in Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader, by Philip Rosen ed. (New York: Columbia University Press), p. 200. 9 Carrie Lambert-Beatty, “Other Solutions” p .191 10 Yvonne Rainer, “Film about a Woman Who...,” Script 1972–74, pp. 39–67, in October, Vol. 2 (Summer, 1976), p. 42. 11 Jacques Lacan, “The mirror stage as formative of the function of the I as revealed in psychoanalytic experience,” 1949, pp. 1–7, in Écrits: A Selection, (New York: Norton), p. 2. 12 E. A. Grosz, “The Ego and the Imaginary,” pp. 24–41, in Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction. London: Routledge, 1990, p. 34. “The child experiences its body as fragmented. Some parts of its body are more perceptually available to it than others. The sensations coming from its hands are more developed, for example than those from its feet for many weeks, due to the later myelination of nerve fibres.” 13 Joan Copjec, “The Orthopsychic Subject: Film Theory and the Reception of Lacan,” pp. 53–71, in October Vol. 49 (Summer, 1989), p. 58. 14 Rainer, “Film about a Woman Who...,” Script, p. 61.

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The spectacle of two women fighting over a man provoked in me the pleasure that was clearly intended for the male spectator who would ‘naturally’ identify with the absent (from the scene) male character they were fighting over. The perversity of the situation was that I took pleasure in the humiliation of both women….I was identifying with the power of the actual ‘winner,’ the man, rather than with those with whom I shared the same psychosocial disfranchisement, the women.15

This allegory illustrates a problem addressed by many feminists interested in film: the male character, not the female character, is responsible for driving the plot forward. The male “articulates the look,” performs the ‘gaze’, and directs the attention of the viewer. The male “creates the action,” and advances the story, while the woman “performs within the narrative.”16 Mainstream cinema sets up a situation for spectatorship that is specific to the male viewer and dismissive of female audiences and viewers must identify with either the position of the masculine subject or the objectified female.17 In A Woman Who… Yvonne Rainer presents, as well as attempts to resolve problems that arise when the unsustainability of minimalism is realized. The characters of the film remain undeveloped and without name or personality they lack subjectivity. Their confessions of memories or expressions of emotion are incidental and delivered without emotional affect. The main actors are identified only by repeated appearance and named only in the opening credits as John Erdman, Renfreu Neff, Dempster Leech, and Shirley Soffer. Yvonne Rainer and John Erdman perform gender specific, third person narration throughout the film in voiceover. Erdman appears frequently, but never in dialogue. Rainer appears just once in the course of the film in dialogue with Shirley Soffer. Shirley appears often but only speaks in lip-synched words that are sometimes off-camera. On the other hand, Renfreu Neff and Dempster Leech participate in continuous broken dialogue. Other actors appearing in the film, such as James Barth, Epp Kotkas, Sarah Soffer, Tannis Hugill, and Valda Setterfield, perform cameos as silent background characters and dancers. The first scene of Film About A Woman Who… depicts four characters, two men and two women—actors Dempster, Shirley, John, and Renfreu—who sit on a living room sofa passively observing photographic slides projected onto a screen.18 The image is accompanied by Rainer’s voice, which reads: “He thinks about making love, then about being in love, then about performing…. 68

Essays - Amber Moyles

She tries to reconstruct the passage from the novel that had so impressed her.”19 Disembodied, monotone, and effeminate, Rainer’s voice describes personal, internal experiences in the third person that evoke empathy in the listener in a way that the silent figures on screen do not. Additionally, the vague pronouns ‘he’ and ‘she,’ identify the characters as either male or female, and while preventing the viewer from ascribing empathy to a single character, the gender specificity of the address divides the audience between those identifying with the male and those identifying with the female. The voiceover creates a disjunction between the otherwise invisible spaces constructed by the cinematic situation—the diegesis, the mise en scene, and the acoustical space of the theatre. Whereas “classical narrative film… works to deny the existence of the [mise en scene and acoustical space of the theatre] in order to buttress the credibility or legitimacy of the [diegesis],”20 Rainer places equal interest in all three constructed spaces by referring to ‘he’ and ‘she’—presumably the actors mise en scene—from an omniscient, off-screen position in the diegesis, which is transposed on, or confused with, the acoustical space of the theatre. In cinematic documentary, a male voice performs the narration because convention ascribes the male, alone, with knowledge and interpretive ability.21 In a later scene Renfreu’s voice reads: “And I would have put some jumps in that solo, and maybe a longer fade at the end of that shot on the stairs,” which is followed shortly by John Erdman’s voice: “Now when she thinks of the work all she can see are the flaws. That part is too long, that too short, that too quick, that too slow.”22 Rainer includes not one, but many voices within the audio of A Woman Who… these vocalizations, both male and female, are neither in discussion nor are they autonomies. Here, both Renfreu and John speak in the third person singular and adopt the position of an intrusive narrator, so that it seems both speakers contribute to a singular thought. The establishment of a vox populi 15 Yvonne Rainer, “Some Ruminations Around Cinematic Antidotes to the Oedipal Net(tles) While Playing With de Lauraedipus Mulvey, or He May Be Off-Screen But…,” 1986, pp. 214–23 in A Woman Who…: Essays, Interviews, Scripts, by Peggy Phelan ed. (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press), 1999, p. 217. 16 Peggy Phelan, “Feminist Theory, Poststructuralism, and Performance,” pp. 107–27, in TDR (1988–), Vol. 32, No. 1 (Spring, 1988), P. 116. 17 Mulvey, p. 203. 18 Rainer, “Film about a Woman Who...,” Script, p. 40 19 Ibid., 20 Mary Ann Doane, “The Voice in the Cinema: The Articulation of Body and Space,” 1980, pp. 335–58, in Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology, p. 339. 21 Doane, p. 341. 22 Rainer, “Film about a Woman Who...,” Script, p. 52.

narrator—similar to the chorus in works by Aeschylus and Sophocles23 —positions the omniscient speakers as idealized spectators, who are able to explain, comment, and interpret, yet—like the moviegoer—the speakers are merely observers of the unfolding spectacle. In providing an example of an idealized spectator, Rainer endows the audience with a sense of control, compromising her authorial role, which is now distributed and pluralized amongst narrators, speakers, actors, and audience. In addition to Freudian and Lacanian notions of scopophilia and identification in ego-development respectively, as well as film theory and feminist criticism, Roland Barthes’ “Introduction to a Structural Analyses of Narrative” is useful when viewing A Woman Who…. . The first paragraph of Barthes’ text reads: “The narratives of the world are numberless..... narrative is international, transhistorical, transcultural: it is simply there, like life itself.24 Narrative is of interest to Rainer because it represents a conventional object-like presence within film, in her words: “The tyranny of a form that creates the expectation of continuous answer to ‘what will happen next?’ fanatically pursuing an inexorable resolution in which all things find their just or correct placement in space or time….”25 Barthes continues his discussion by outlining the hierarchical levels for analysis in narrative: functions, actions, and narration. A function is “that by which narrative is ‘driven’”26 or a teleological element that contributes to the overall project of the story. Barthes identifies functions as a category with two sub-categories: proper functions, events with ‘consequence’ that are essential to the story and part of a sequence of events, and indices, those events that are inconsequential and if changed the story remains unaltered.27 Proper functions are further divided into: cardinal functions, decisive moments within the story, and catalysers, moments related to but not effecting decisive moments.28 Indices, too, are further classified as: indices proper, those with relevance, and informants, those without relevance.29 Rainer sought to ‘resist’ narrative structure in A Woman Who… by deviating from the narrative standards outlined by Barthes. This deviation takes place in Rainer’s work within disjunctive devices, instances of interrupted action most closely related to the Brechtian notion of distanciation in Epic Theatre as described by Walter Benjamin in his essay “The Author as Producer.” Brecht’s Epic Theatre sought to “uncover” a situation

before the audience rather than seduce the viewer with theatrical illusion. Benjamin writes on the process of interruption and distanciation: “In the midst of the action it brings it to a stop, and thus obliges the spectator to take a position toward the action, obliges the actor to adopt an attitude toward his role.” Benjamin continues to describe distanciation in the following allegory: Imagine a family scene: the woman is just about to grab a bronze statue and throw it at her daughter; the father about to open the window and call for help. At this very moment a stranger enters. The action is interrupted; what comes to the foreground in its place is the situation which meets the glance of the stranger: contorted faces, open window, smashed furniture. But there is a point of view from which even more common scenes of contemporary existence don’t look very different.30

The viewer of Epic Theatre realizes his or her role in theatrical illusion as complaisant. Distanciation interrupts the viewer’s scopophilia or voyeuristic pleasures. Thus the viewer, whose role is changed through distanciation, is posed with the realization of his or her acquiescence to social convention and faced with the challenge of changing or accepting his or her role in society. Two events from A Woman Who…, already discussed, resemble Barthes definition of function—the scene on the beach and Rainer’s monologue in which she remembers identifying with the male character. Both scenes are separated from the greater film by setting, time, and place. However, both scenes subsist within the film without pertaining to a common denouement. The events seem to be without cause or effect and resist integration with a shared storyline. Within the beach 23 For a discussion on the Greek Chorus please see Frederich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, Raymond Geuss and Ronald Speirs eds., (Cambridge University Press), 1999. Nietzsche references A.W. Schlegel Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature, Fifth Lecture, in which Schlegel “recommends us to think of the chorus as, in a certain sense, the quintessence and distillation of the crowd of spectators, as the ‘ideal spectator.’” Nietzsche, p. 37. “…Schlegel’s phrase gave us to understand that the perfect, ideal spectator lets himself be affected by the world on stage physically and empirically rather than aesthetically.” Nietzsche, p. 38. 24. Roland Barthes, “Structural Analysis of Narrative,” pp. 79–125, in Image Music Text, (London: Harper Collins), 1977, p. 79. 25 Yvonne Rainer, ed. Peggy Phelan, “Yvonne Rainer: From Dance to Film,” in A Woman Who…:Essays, Interviews, Scripts, Johns Hopkins University Press: Baltimore (1999), p 12. 26 Michael Tool, A Critical Linguistic Introduction, (Routledge: London), 2001, p. 23. 27 Ibid., p. 24. 28 Ibid. 29 Ibid. 30 Walter Benjamin, ‘The Author as Producer’ in New Left Review I/62, JulyAugust 1970.

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scene, the characters constant rearranging constitutes a proper function, but the manners by which they rearrange constitute indices—Sarah stumbles, Shirley props herself with her hand. Going further, the subtle movements might be classified as indices proper, while the fact that the actors leave footprints in the sand as they rearrange can be classified as informants. The second level of Barthes’ guideline for analysis is action, which describes the unfolding of events in reference to the actant as defined by the linguist A.J. Greimas to be whomever accomplishes action. As already indicated by Rainer’s description of her early moviegoing experience, the position of the actant in conventional cinema is a male prerogative. This problem is presented particularly well in A Woman Who…. in a sequence in which the male actor Dempster along with the female Shirley undress the female Renfreu Neff. 31 Although both Shirley and Dempster collaborate to disrobe Renfreu, it is Dempster’s hand—not Shirley’s—that grazes Renfreu’s chest, cups her breasts, and guides the gaze of the viewer. In the subsequent scene, Dempster slowly pulls down Renfreu’s skirt, revealing her groin, and then by redressing her, he conceals her body once again behind the fabric. Just as the male gaze directs the viewer’s attention to the female, Dempster is, here, literally responsible for the visibility of the woman. On-screen, Shirley and Yvonne Rainer watch the rising and falling ‘bloomers’ with unrestrained concentration. By successively covering and uncovering Renfreu, again and again, Dempster repeatedly confronts Shirley, Rainer, and the audience with the woman’s ‘lack’. To continue the correlation between moviegoer and infant: the fetish could later manifest in an article that was present just prior to the recognition that the woman is without phallus, in the scene described, that object would be Renfreu’s undergarments. Thus, Dempster restages the origination of the fetish in early childhood development, also described by Freud in “Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality.”32 The third level for structural analysis of narrative is narration, a concept combining linguist Vladimir Todorov’s notions of story, or that which is comprised of logic, actions, and characters, and discourse, or tenses, aspects, and modes of narrative.33 In addition to the dual presence of both a male and female in voiceover, which obstructs the singular point of view of an implied author, the film’s intertitle and subtitle texts act as nameless, non-diegetic commentators speaking in third person and second person narration. Both possess deviant syntactic sentence structure and there 70

Essays - Amber Moyles

is constant disagreement between oral and textual narration and visual event. Rainer fragments narrative and creates distanciation, most evidently by including experimental syntactic structure, or structural ambiguity and grammatically ill-formed sentences within the discourse of her film, the voiceover, and dialogue.34 Using Barthes description of narrative as a “long sentence, just as every constative sentence is in a way the rough outline of a short narrative”35 one can interpret the corruption of sentence structure in Rainer’s film as the corruption of narrative. This is exemplified by the absent significant term in the title sentence fragment: “A film about a woman who….” Within the film, similar manipulations appear in an early monologue. John Erdman’s voice reads: How much of the problem of their differences was real and how much was a smokescreen to conceal…? Her mind clouded when she tried to answer. She had set him an impossible task. ‘…to allow me to…when I need to,’ she had told him. He had reminded her that she was not so…of his…. She pleaded special circumstances. They argued. His voice was hard and curt. The die seemed cast. Yet in some way she trusted him. He would…They would meet again. If only he could say ‘But we really….’36

Discontinuing the sentences before their significant terms makes it impossible for the viewer to ‘pin down’ or interpret with absolute certainty the meaning of the phrase, and therefore prevents the viewer from sufficiently empathizing or identifying with the speaker. In “The Insistence of the Letter in the Unconscious,” Lacan explained that sentences such as these are not without meaning.37 These sentences force the viewer into an experience that runs “counter to linearity,” they possess “a meaning all the more oppressive in that it is content to make us wait for it.”38 Rainer, also, wrote on 31 Yvonne Rainer, “Film about a Woman Who...,” Script, 1972–74, pp. 39–67, in October, Vol. 2 (Summer, 1976), p. 58–9. 32 Sigmund Freud, “Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality,” 1925, pp. 239–92, in The Freud Reader, Peter Gay ed., (New York: Norton), 1989, pp. 249–50. 33 Barthes, p. 100. 34 Elzbieta Chrzanowska-Kluczewska, “An Unresolved Issue: Nonsense in Natural Language and Non-Classical Logical and Semantic Systems,” undated, pp. 43–62, in Philosophy of Language and Linguistics, Vol. 1, Piotr Stalmaszczyk ed. (Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University; ontos verlag), 2010, p. 46. 35 Barthes, p. 84. 36 Rainer, “Film about a Woman Who...,” Script, p. 43. Shelley Green, “Film About a Women Who…” in The Films of Yvonne Rainer: Radical Juxtapositions Series, (London: The Scarecrow Press), 1994, p. 32. In Erdman’s monologue, the vague use of the third person pronouns ‘he’ and ‘she’ as well as the third person plural ‘they’ and first person plural ‘we’ creates further detachment between the audience and the material. 37 Jacques Lacan, “The Insistence of the Letter in the Unconscious,” lecture 1957, pp. 112–47, in Yale French Studies, No. 36/37, “Structuralism” (1966), p. 121. 38 Ibid.

this point, determining that “no one is going to come out of this flick [Film About A Woman Who…] saying ‘I saw this movie about a guy who…[fill in the blank]”39 In other words, no viewer will be able to reduce the film to its essential plot, or establish a coherent, object-like narrative within the film with which to identify in place of a charismatic male actant. Near the end of the disrobement scene, as Dempster pulls down Renfreu’s undergarments, the camera pans left, zooming in on Yvonne Rainer’s face. At this point the viewer becomes aware of five ‘patches’ on Rainer’s forehead, cheeks, and chin. In what becomes the ‘coda’ of the scene, the shot closes in on Rainer’s face, her eyes watering as the patches become readable as newsprint. The camera turns, first, to the text on her right cheek: I’m still floating drunk full of you. Do you mind if I indulge myself for a few minutes and recall those things which make me laugh all over? I like your long, unruly hair and the way it was sticking up in the front, that childlike mischievous expression on your face when I pushed it down over your forehead.40

Then her chin: I’m totally intoxicated, overflowing with you and wanting you more than ever before.41

Finally the camera turns to an illegible text on her forehead, and left cheek. As the camera goes in and out of focus, the viewer can read the words ‘weakness’, ‘infinite’, and ‘Love you, love you’, among others. Unlike the intertitle and subtitle text, the text adhered to Rainer’s face occurs mise en scene as opposed to diegetically, on the surface or just outside of the film, invisible to the characters. This creates a significant transgression of compartmentalized cinematic space. Additionally, the blurred appearance of the text represents a slipping of the ‘signified beneath the signifier’—the viewer knows that there are words on the screen, but, unable to make out the letters, he cannot decipher their meaning. Rainer’s final violation of narrative structure in Film About A Woman Who… occurs during a recursive, summarizing monologue near the end of the film. The viewer listens as Rainer, off screen, answers a ringing telephone. While an image of two women dancing a duet in slow motion appears on screen and subtitles read: “They thought her shit was more important than she was. / Her shit got more attention than she did. / box-stops / Sit tight.” Rainer responds to the un-

heard speaker on the other end by reading a letter, the contents of which describe a mysterious film with an untenable plot: This is the poetically licensed story of a woman who finds it difficult to reconcile certain external facts with her image of her own perfection. It is also the same woman’s story if we say she can’t reconcile these facts with her image of her own deformity. She would like to engage in politics, but she can’t decide whether to join the big women or the hunchtwats. The big women have a lot to offer, but she has discovered essential weakness in their proposal to use wads of counterfeit money for ... doorstops? What is this ... boxtops? Oh ... boxstops. Neither is she attracted to the naive notion of the hunchtwats that every connection brings bed-chains. Not that it’s a matter of victims and oppressors. She simply can’t find alternatives to being inside with her fear or standing in the rain with her self-contempt. How long can you go on this way, mmm? You still think it’s all going to come out right, don’t you?42

Ironically, at least the third sentence of the monologue is a grammatically recursive sentence. Internal clauses within the sentence such as ‘shc has discovered essential weakness in their proposal’ create a recursive mise en abyme effect that disrupts the directness of the sentence—a sentence within a sentence; like the plot of the movie described within the movie; like reading a letter, over the phone, within a voiceover of a film. In the third sentence, Rainer replaces a noun with a nonsensical word ‘hunchtwats’ and the meaninglessness of the words ‘hunchtwats’ and ‘boxstops’ is equivalent to the elision of the significant term in the title sentence. In the last sentence, Rainer uses direct address. She asks: “You still think it’s going to come out all right, don’t you?” The moment of direct address is one of “intense self-revelation when the characters burst out of the fiction and the text momentarily comes to fully cinematic life.”43 In other words, in this moment of direct address, any viewer or voyeur of Rainer’s film who has managed to remain absorbed in the film can no longer conceal or ignore his desire to subjugate the object on screen. The viewer is “confronted” with it’s own 39 Rainer, “More Kicking and Screaming From the Narrative Front/Backwater,” in A Woman Who: Essays, Interviews, Scripts…, p.210. 40 Rainer, Script, p. 59. 41 Ibid. 42 Ibid., p. 61. 43 Amy Lawrence, “Staring the camera down: direct address and women’s voice,” Embodied Voices: Representing Female Vocality in Western Culture, Leslie C. Dunn, Nancy A. Jones eds., (Cambridge University Press), 1996, p. 167..

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“presence/complaisance”44 and also mocked for any lingering expectation that the film will come to a logical conclusion. Yet, the telephone call provides a sort of denouement, a culmination of the disjunctive devices previously used in the film. The male narrator is replaced by a female voice. The speech is contradicted by the subtitles and discordant with the film sequence on screen, which divides the viewer’s attentions. In his introduction to Finnegan’s Wake—a novel as difficult to read as Film About A Woman Who… is to watch—John Bishop advised the reader of Joyce’s novel to surrender “the need to be master of everything—or even most things….”45 This suggestion is applicable to Rainer’s viewer—he or she must, absolutely, surrender the need to be master, or rather, give up the notion that “in the movies you can send your mind away.”46 Rainer created an unstable object on screen, with which the viewer identifies and in doing so the viewer, like the film becomes unstable and insecure. This new viewer is a result of Rainer’s success in creating the ‘conditions of visibility for the creation of a different social subject’

Essays - Amber Moyles

that de Lauretis calls for. The new subject, however vulnerable, is liberated from the tyranny of the narrative—its functions, actants, and discourse—which form an object-like entity, “ripe for resistance.”* This new social subject presents a possibility for the creation of a new kind of language, or medium, unrestrained by convention, that is capable of communicating difference in all its complexities; a subject that is copresent as opposed to in opposition with its object. In sum, this essay was about the viewer’s position in relation to…. The viewer’s ability, inability, or desire to identify with…. The role of the … and the … in cinema…. … used to disrupt narrative…. Most importantly … in relation to Rainer’s practice: how her project for the creation of a new social subject can be contributed to …. and why it must continue. 44 Ibid., p. 168 45 John Bishop, “Introduction,” in Finnegan’s Wake by James Joyce, ( ), p. ix. 46 Rainer, Film About a Woman Who…, Script, p. 51. This line is silently lipsynched by Shirley Soffer.

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new memory - martine syms

And In Case I Don’t See Ya I don’t know where I first heard the idea that stories are how we understand the world, but I associate it with a phantom TED talk. I’m interested in storytelling, but I’m obsessed with how we share our stories. Format informs narrative. A twelve-inch record can fit fifteen minutes of music on each side. A hundred foot roll of 16mm film is exactly two minutes and forty-seven seconds in duration. Anthropologists assure us that humans have always told stories, but our [understanding] of storytelling changed with the advent of recording technology. Ironically, advances in the post-Fordist era did away with physicality and thrust us [back to the basics] of storytelling. A story can be told through variety or repetition. Variety can be plotted on a simple graph – as Kurt Vonnegut once explained – the y-axis goes from good fortune to ill fortune and the x-axis beginning to end. Dramatic situations occur along this graph. The resulting line begins high or low and ends low or high depending on the tale. Variety is a line. The line is an idealized object. Repetition can only be plotted on a complex graph that my limited knowledge of mathematics prevents me from detailing. For our purposes repetition is a circle. Repetition relies on circular reasoning. The story begins where it ends. Each of these narrative forms has an accordant ideology. If the story is how we perceive the world, the way we tell the story is how we conceive the world. Most American narratives arrive from an ideology of uplift. Uplift is the belief that tomorrow can be better than today. Horatio Alger is often credited with codifying the uplift structure, but its origins are actually found within Christianity. A quick survey of the films on view at my local multiplex suggests that we still have faith in the future. Repetition is compelling because it negates progress. Within a loop there is no expressed denial of betterment because there is no “better”—there just is. In Buddhism, the concept is called upekṣa or “equanimity.” It’s one of the four virtues in the brahmavihãra. Equanimity is “being free from attachment to everything and being indifferent to living beings.” This isn’t an original idea because there are no original ideas. And if you believe in historic recurrence there are no singular occurrences either. To 74

new memory - Martine Syms

paraphrase Mark Twain, life is a reenactment of everything that happened before. The loop is a fundamental idea in modern thought. This essay is my first attempt to sketch a theory behind the ideology of narrative recurrence. I’m particularly interested in film, television and other media because these are the primary discursive contexts in contemporary society. They form the foundational texts in our secular belief system. Commercial success is the higher power in ‘latest capitalism.’ I’ve always been drawn to loops, first as seen in time travel movies and later as a framework for abstraction. I started thinking about circular narratives (again) because my life changed (again). In March I moved from Chicago—where I’d lived for seven years—to Los Angeles, California to take a full-time job at a production company. I was born in Los Angeles and grew up in a nearby suburb. Since arriving (returning) I’ve become extremely conscious of my new patterns, especially when they parallel my old habits. When I was in middle school I’d get a thrill every time my parents drove past my crush’s house. As we’d get closer my heart beat faster and my stomach dropped. I’d experience the same euphoria that I did when I walked past him in the hallway. I’d point out the car window and say “My friend Daniel lives there.” In high school I’d go out of my way to pass his house. I didn’t like him anymore, I liked my crush. Sometimes I still find myself on Casitas Avenue staring at an aged bungalow, imagining that Daniel’s inside. At this point I’ve taken that route at least a thousand times. Maybe at first I believed the drive was the start of an elaborate scenario that ended with us falling madly in love, but by the end that didn’t matter. Through repeat action I created a ritual. The ritual was important. I enjoy repeating myself. I try to wake up at the same time every day and perform the same actions in the same sequence. I walk down the same street on the same side and I make note of the differences between each day. If I leave my apartment at 8:00AM I’ll encounter my neighbor in the stairwell, stretching before his morning jog. If I leave at 8:05AM I’ll see a woman standing or leaning outside the building next door. She’s waiting for a ride and I remember and forget this as I pass. For three weeks there was a piece of an orange plastic bag on the corner of Sixth

and Hobart. The doorman in the lobby of Union Bank waves to me as I exit the bus, even if he’s already talking to someone else. On the surface my activities might appear compulsive—insane, even—but I’m free from anxiety, uneasiness, apprehension, fear or worry. I’m ritualizing my day. I’m being conscious of every moment. I’m practicing equanimity. The story of uplift is created by sequence and conflict. Repetition works through accumulation. An early example is The Bangville Police (1913), one of the first appearances of the Keystone Kops, a group of bungling bozos who ran circles around suspects until they accidentally captured one. “The films were based on a theory of multiplicity, paradox and speed,” writes filmmaker Mark Sufrin. On screen the Kops repeated the same action one after the other: jumping through windows, hopping over fences, and pratfalling mid-stroll. These films were wildly successful, and thanks to loose copyright laws competing studios were able to create equally popular “Keystone Kopycats.”

the television networks and profits are pursued at the loss of other values. “If the deed is to get a hit at eight o’clock on Tuesday night at every other expense, what you do is copy what’s going on. ‘That’s successful over there. It’s got two young women in it, they jump around a lot, their breasts move—we’ll get four young women here,” muses Lear. I’m currently working on American Ritual, a non-fiction film about television and what it means to American culture. American Ritual posits the television situation comedy as a uniquely American product—like jazz or comic books—and uses the formal logic of the small screen to structure a polemic devoted to the medium. In addition to researching the history of sitcoms, I’ve also been looking at the ways that television has been represented in film, radio and magazines. During this process I rediscovered my affection for The Truman Show, a quirky 1998 dramedy starring Jim Carrey as Truman Burbank, the unwitting star of a popular reality show. “We could call it the best movie of 1998,” wrote Ben Svetkey in Newsweek fourteen years ago. And we could.

Science fiction movies prominently feature circular narratives. Film school favorite La Jetée (1962) by Chris Marker literally begins at the end. Over the course of twenty-eight minutes we discover that the protagonist witnessed his own death as a child. La Jetée wasn’t a blockbuster, but it directly inspired Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys (1995), which grossed $13,842,990 opening weekend.

Directed by Peter Weir, written by Andrew Niccol and scored by Phillip Glass (yes, that one), Paramount dubbed The Truman Show “the most expensive art film ever made.” The film is incredible in many ways, but mostly because of its prescience depicting the domination of reality television, the increased demand for a rapid news cycle and the fanatic devotion of television audiences.

In the Back to the Future franchise (1985-1990) the events of November 12, 1955 at the Enchantment Under the Sea Dance at the fictional Hill Valley High School in the fictional suburb of Hill Valley, California are repeated throughout the first two films in the series. The Enchantment Under the Sea Dance is the night main character Marty McFly’s (Michael J. Fox) parents fell in love. We return to this moment multiple times because it’s the genesis of McFly—without this moment he ceases to exist. There’s a great scene in the sequel that reenacts events from the first film, with a second, independent Marty McFly mapped onto it. It’s a ridiculous moment of step-and-repeat movie magic that can only be found in the mainstream.

The titular Truman Show is a sitcom set in Seahaven, USA that’s broadcast live internationally, twenty-four hours a day. Since birth Truman Burbank has been performing life on an impossibly large sound stage with paid actors pretending to be his friends and family. After witnessing a studio light fall from the sky on day 10,909, Truman notices that the world seems to revolve around him and begins seeking answers.

While the motion picture industry clings to originality, television has always been comfortable with recycled plots. Even within a single series the same storyline appears more than once, bouncing from character to character based on convenience. Legendary producer Norman Lear attributes television’s lack of creativity to its dependence on big business. Huge conglomerates own

The film was shot in Seaside, Florida, a revivalist masterplanned community built in 1981 modeled after preWorld War II small town America. Architectural critic Reyner Banham once observed, “Utopias, notoriously, are idealized pasts masquerading as ideal futures.” Production for the The Truman Show was planned for Universal Studios until director Peter Weir located Seaside. The New Urbanism pastiche of Seaside made it look more like a 1950s television show than a Hollywood backlot. Upon opening Seaside used the motto “The New Town—The Old Ways.” They’ve since updated their tagline to “A simple, beautiful life,” but either maxim would fit within the diegesis of The Truman Show. Video on PaPer - Issue 3

In his recent essay “Make It Real: Architecture as Reenactment,” architect Sam Jacobs writes, “In its freewheeling rewriting of the past, architecture uses history as a slingshot into the future. It endlessly re-stages itself, self-consciously folding its own past into its future, rewriting its own myth into its very fabric. At the same time it legitimizes its new propositions by embedding them within lineages of existing languages, materials and typologies.” Jacobs reasons that while novels, movies and plays “fictionalize the real,” architecture “realizes fiction.” Jacobs believes that architecture “achieves its reality through replication.” By that criteria I’d argue that mass media also has the ability to create reality through sheer ubiquity. If we understand manufacturing as a process or context that provides repetition, then mass media allows for narratives—and subsequently, ideologies—to be industrialized. Mass media enables an incredible circulation of images and narratives about the past. Modernity makes “prosthetic memory” possible and necessary. Aesthetically, The Truman Show is flat and bright like a mid-century sitcom decorated with liberal use of digital vignetting. The cinematography was influenced by early commercials and the costumes inspired by a similar nostalgia. The television-set-cum-town of Seahaven is perfect. It’s a throwback to Norman Rockwell’s idealism with politically correct revisions, such as the black family that lives across from The Burbank’s. Backstage The Truman Show strongly contrasts with the on-air visuals. Instead of the colorful, pop palette the control room is rendered in sleek blacks and the cinematography mimics surveillance cameras. Like any great television character, Truman Burbank has a catchphrase. Truman addresses his community with an over the top greeting “Good morning, and in case I don’t see ya’, good afternoon, good evening, and good night!” Jim Carrey improvised the dialogue during rehearsals. It adds a welcome level of absurdity to Truman’s man-boyishness. The line is repeated three times in the film, roughly aligned with each act. I want to look at each of those moments and consider how this particular repetition functions within the otherwise conventional narrative. In the first instance, around the three-minute mark, Truman salutes his neighbors before leaving for work. He’s framed in a tight medium shot, cut just above the waist. He’s grounded by the threshold of the Burbank house, flanked by white walls on either side, standing directly in front of a mint green door. Truman is costumed in a brown Glen plaid wool sport jacket, a yellow sweater, a 76

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green Oxford shirt with vertical white stripes, a contrasting striped tie and khakis. We’ve just met Truman. The film begins with opening credits and behind-thescenes style cast interviews, but the anonymous black family is introduced within the fictional world of Seahaven. Truman begins his day saying hello to his black neighbors. Their blackness—otherness—is in opposition to Truman’s banality. Their blackness is a correction of past omissions in both televised and real suburban life. Their blackness is in service to The Truman Show. We’re an hour into the film before Truman utters his catchphrase again. Truman is leaving for work. He’s contained in a medium shot, ending slightly above the waist. In the background is the entrance to the Burbank house. Directly behind Truman is a mint green door, flanked on both sides by white walls. Truman wears a brown plaid sport coat, a yellow sweater, a green Oxford shirt, a black tie with diagonal white stripes and light khaki trousers. There’s a beat between “Good Morning” and the rest of the sentence. Around the three-minute-mark Truman Burbank threw his head back jovially to emphasize this pause. Over an hour into the film he makes an exaggerated pointing gesture to accentuate the break. He’s wearing his wedding ring. His wedding ring is a hidden camera. In between the first occurrence and the second occurrence, Truman began to question his existence. He became conscious of the loop—the noose—that bounded him. There’s a lady on a red bike, a man with flowers and a Volkswagen beetle with a dented fender. At approximately one hundred and three minutes Truman goes into the next world, leaving the old one behind. He’s standing in a doorway at the top of stairway at the edge of a room that looks like heaven. He wears a charcoal turtleneck sweater, a leather belt and black slacks. Christof, “the creator of a television show that gives hope and joy and inspiration to millions,” instructs him to say something. Truman turns around slowly to face the camera. “Good morning,” pause, “and in case I don’t see ya’, good afternoon, good evening, and good night!” I want this final moment to mean something, but it doesn’t. The existential gnawing of The Truman Show collapses into an ambiguous happy ending. Cut to a montage of the on-screen audience cheering in front of their television sets in a didactic ploy to get the in-theater/athome audience to do the same. We don’t. We won’t. Or maybe we will if we watch enough times because repetition establishes itself. It starts with fiction, duplication, repetition, and ends with real.

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The Truth is Out There 1. The show begins with the filmed portrayal of a female running through the woods at night, falling into a pit and encountering a white, glowing figure. A fade out to a mimicking bright white is shown This is a signifying trope that indicates some time has passed. A daylight sequence begins. A face-down body we assume to be said female, because of the costuming of the actress, whom we assume inhabits our reality, is lying in an area we assume to be the afromentioned pit from the previous sequence, which we interpret to have happened the night before. It is dayight and we assume it is the specific daylight directly following the night. A man we assume to be a member of the police force, due to costuming and other tropes surrounding the depiction of crime-scene detectives on television shows, reveals that the woman, who we assume to be dead, due to tropes existing for similar reasons, has two strange marks on her back. The camera zooms in on two brown colored raised bumps on skin. While we understand that these bumps have been produced using makeup in our lived reality, we also invest in the reality of the storyline. We become personally invested in the well being of the dead woman, whose name is revealed to be Karen Swinson. The man who identifies the body is familiar with the identity of the woman. He says she went to school with his son. As he walks away, another member of the police force asks, “It’s happening again, isn’t it?” 2. A less ghostly fade to black occurs and we are led inside the FBI Headquarters in Washington DC. At this point, credits start appearing, superimposed over the pictoral storyline. We understand that the fade outs and credits are meant to be read as existing in a separate realm than the imagery. This ‘separate reality’ also contains accounts for the music heard behind the imagery, suggesting a inane hierarchy of sequential imagery vs. sequential sound. Dialogue can be viewed as an extension of the primary pictoral storyline, adding to how we visualize the imagery of the characters. It’s hierarchy renders it more important than background music but less imortant than sequential imagery.

At about three minutes into the show my attention is drawn to a name appearing in the credits lower quadrant of the screen. It says, DIRECTOR: ROBERT MANDEL. Since my last name is Mandel, I enjoy a momentary pleasure at the fleeting interaction of my personal life experiences, existing at Level 1, but heavily influencing Level 7. This pleasure can be attributed to the uncanny nature of the acknowledgement of the separation of reality and fiction, an unintentional moment of metareferenciality with a filmed narrative 3. A woman named Agent Scully has been introduced. Through a series of questions from her superior, we come to understand aspects of her character background. She is asked to debunk a more renowned, but notably unpresent Agent Fox Mulder on his investigation into the “X-Files”, documentation of unexplained phenomena. I am watching pilot of the show for the first time. I am watching the pilot of the show 18 years, 3 months and 27 days after it’s original air date. I am familiar with the show’s reputation and know that the remaining seasons will continue following Scully and Mulder. Henceforth, I have external knowledge that allows me to understand that by four minutes into the series, which would last another nine years, the primary premise of the intention of the program had already been established The moment when I realized this Level 1 knowledge (Fig 1.3) directly influenced my Level 7 viewing of the show. As the series progresses, I continue to draw parallels between things presented within the fictionalized reality of “The X-Files” and my Level 1- the present I currently believe to be residing in. For example, Season 1, Episode 3, entitled “Squeeze”, begins with a sweeping landscape shot labeled “Baltimore, Maryland.” (Fig 1.4) As a current resident of Baltimore, Maryland, I can immediately place the landscape as the Inner Harbor area, one mile south from my house. I wonder if the camera crew has set up atop the hill at Fort McHenry to acheive height in their image. I think about Fort McHenry’s significance in the War of 1812, and “The

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X-Files’” unacknowledgement of that. In Season 1, Episode 6, entitled “Shadows”, I take note of the blouse worn by the episode’s victim/protagonist, Lauren Kyte. (Fig 1.5) It is similar in fabric, shape and styling to a blouse I purchased earlier in the week. I think of how I purchased my blouse on sale, and the fabric I bought to replace the collar. I skim through Season 1, Episode 10 (”Fallen Angel”) because I have grown disinterested in a developing plotline concerning Agent Mulder and a mysterious informant he consistently meets with. The show seems to be following a formulaic approach to every episode. At the beginning a monster is introduced, and Agents Scully and Mulder are called in to investigate. The episode crests with impending danger and ends with some sort of resolution. I have become comfortable with this trajectory and am proturbed when “Fallen Angel” centers around the informant and his larger ties to government conspiracies. I have also become, I realize, invested in Scully and Mulder’s relationship and the sexual tension between them. It embarasses me that this is what I am looking for in the show and I try to pay more attention to narrative structure. I notice an airstream trailer being featured in the episode. (Fig 1.6:1) It reminds me of the past summer, when I thought about dating Gabe, a man living in a similar looking trailer inside a studio. (Fig 1.6:2) I decide I am not watching constructively and resolve to continue vieweing the episode at a later time. Season 1, Epsiode 11 is called “Eve.” The episode begins with the murder of a man in Connecticut. He has been exsanguinated through his neck. His eight year old daughter was the only witness to the crime. The father’s death turns out to be a MacGuffin, a narrative building device designed to subvert our heavily tropic understanding of the trajectory of a filmed storyline. “Eve” centers not on the murder, but on a cult of women produced through eugenic engineering. The daughter of the man, and another girl, are offspring of the cult members. The women in the cult are referred to as “Eves” and “Eve 6” is in jail. Her nameplate is

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shown (Fig 1.7) . I recognize the name “Eve 6” as a popular rock band from the 1990s. I wonder if the band took their name from the episode. I don’t remember the name of their hit song, but I hum the tune to myself. Upon further investigation I learn that the band did in fact take their name from the television episode. I think more about “The X-Files” cultural impact on the 1990’s, a decade in which I was alive, but too young to be affected by cultural markers. During my viewing of Season 1, Episode 15 (”Lazarus”) I am dually engaged (in my Level 1 reality) in baking a lemon bread to give as a gift to friends. Because I am using an electric mixer, I have turned on the closed captioning for the show. The episode is centered around the occurence of a man being shot and killed, then revived. However, another dead man’s brain seems to be governing his body. The episode takes place in Maryland. During a particularly tense scene, I hear Mulder announcing something about Catonsville. I recognize Catonsville as a town near Baltimore, where I have eaten at a diner and bought things from department stores on weekends. I glance at the screen and notice that the captioning has incorrenctly interpreted “Catonsville” as “Kensville.” (Fig 1.7) My Level 7 investment is immediately disturbed, as I begin to question the familiarity of the transcriber who provides the closed captioning familiarity with the Baltimore area. My idea of this person, and the idea that this person exists, however, is just as fictional as the “X-Files” plotline. In Season 1, Episode 19 (”Shapes”) I become interested in my jawline. On screen, a woman, named Gwen Goodensnake is mourning her dead brother. She turns, her cheek to the camera (Fig 1.8:1) . I feel as if her profile looks similar to my own. (Fig 1.8:2) Upon further viewing, I am not certain. I decide that focusing on my jawline is a vain waste of my time while viewing “The X-Files” and I should take a break to refocus. I continue watching Season 1, Episode 19 (”Shapes”). Midway through the episode, a character is killed by a mythical Native American beast. As he falls, injured, the camera moves to focus on his cup of liquor in a glass

on the porch. As the liquid inside the glass sloshes (Fig 1:9:2), we are meant to understand the violence being infliced upon the character. I also draw reference to the scene within 1993 movie “Jurrasic Park” (Fig 1.9:2) in which ripples in a cup of water serve as a visual cue for impending doom. I know that “Shapes” aired in 1994, and I wonder if this was a conscious visual allusion. I wonder about the use of homages in film and when and why they fail. Throughout the series I have become specifically aware of characters I recognize from other roles. I find this fascinating- that although we have suspended our Level 1 disbelief for another work, we are able to do so succesfully again in a completely different context. Interestingly, I have noticed three actor overlaps on “The X-Files” that correllate to the television program “Twin Peaks.” in all three instances, the profession of the character has remained consistent in either program. Was this intended to provide easier suspension of disbelief for me or as an inside joke between directors? The characters are: David Duchovny as FBI agent Mulder in the “X-Files” (Fig 1.10:1) and Agent Denise Bryson on “Twin Peaks” (Fig 1.10:2.), Don S. Davis as Wiliam Scully in the “X-Files” (Fig 1.10:3) and Major Garland Briggs on Twin Peaks (Fig 1:10:4), and Michael Horse as Sheriff Charles Tsansky on the “X-Files”(Fig 1:10:5) and as Deputy Hawk on “Twin Peaks” (Fig 1:10:6)

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