November 2008 – Page 2 – Diagonal Thoughts

NYT spoof

In an elaborate hoax, pranksters distributed thousands of free copies of a spoof edition of The New York Times on Wednesday morning at busy subway stations around the city of NY. The paper, an exact replica of the NYT, includes International, National, New York, and Business sections, as well as editorials, corrections, and a number of advertisements, including a recall notice for all cars that run on gasoline. There is also a timeline describing the gains brought about by eight months of progressive support and pressure, culminating in President Obama’s “Yes we REALLY can” speech. (The paper is post-dated July 4, 2009.) The hoax was accompanied by a Web site that mimics the look of The Times’s real Web site. A page of the spoof site contained links to dozens of progressive organizations, which were also listed in the print edition. Later on that day, the Yes Men issued a statement claiming credit for the prank.

According to the NYT’s City Room blog, there is a history of spoofs and parodies of The Times. Probably the best-known is one unveiled two months into the 1978 newspaper strike. A whole cast of characters took part in that parody, including the journalist Carl Bernstein, the author Christopher Cerf, the humorist Tony Hendra and the Paris Review editor George Plimpton. And for April Fool’s Day in 1999, the British business executive Richard Branson printed 100,000 copies of a parody titled “I Can’t Believe It’s Not The New York Times.” Also that year, a 27-year-old Princeton alumnus named Matthew Polly, operating a “guerrilla press” known as Hard Eight Publishing, published a 32-page spoof of the newspaper.

see video

inserted 2008-11-26T10:51:37+00:00

From Electronic Frontier Foundation:

Could the lawyers be far behind? Not surprisingly, the corporate targets of the parody were not pleased. Now, in what is becoming an all-too-familiar trend, one of those corporations has attempted to shut down the site by putting pressure on what is often the weakest link in the online speech chain: the domain name registrar. Stymied by the First Amendment and other legal impediments, those who don’t appreciate critical commentary and other “objectionable” online content have found intermediaries — providers of indispensable technical services like domain name registration and web hosting — much easier to intimidate.

This time, the complaining (and overreaching) party was the South African diamond conglomerate De Beers, the target of a critical fake ad on the web version of the New York Times spoof announcing that diamond purchases “will enable us to donate a prosthetic for an African whose hand was lost in diamond conflicts.” Miffed by the criticism, De Beers responded not by confronting the authors (whose parody is protected by the First Amendment) but instead by threatening their Swiss-based domain name registrar, Joker.com. De Beers has demanded that Joker.com disable the spoof website’s domain name or face liability for trademark infringement.

This certainly isn’t the first time that a sore target of criticism has threatened an internet intermediary in order to take down content it didn’t like. The motivation is simple: all too often, the intermediary will prove to be unwilling to stand up for the rights of its customers. For example:

* In September, 2008, the state of Kentucky initiated an ex parte proceeding aimed at seizing 141 domain names pointing to overseas websites permitting online gambling, arguing that the domain names were illegal “gambling devices” under Kentucky law. Without giving the domain name owners an adequate opportunity to defend themselves, the trial court ordered the registrars with control over the targeted domain names to transfer them to the state, a decision the court affirmed in October. Upon receipt of the court’s order, some of the registrars (such as GoDaddy) who were likely outside of the court’s jurisdiction nonetheless locked the domain names and purportedly transferred control to the Kentucky court. (EFF filed an amicus brief arguing that the orders were unconstitutional; the matter is pending appeal.)
* In January, 2008, Swiss bank Julius Baer filed suit against (among others) Dynadot, the domain name registrar with which the domain name wikileaks.org was registered. The Wikileaks website to which the domain name pointed — a self-styled “uncensorable Wikipedia for untraceable mass document leaking and analysis” — hosted (and still hosts) documents which anonymous third-party posters argue document financial wrongdoing. Instead of challenging the operators of the Wikileaks site directly, Julius Baer targeted Dynadot which quickly agreed to lock and permanently disable its customer’s domain name. (In response to briefs such as the one filed by EFF pointing out the illegality of the court’s order approving of the ill-advised agreement, the district court ultimately dissolved the permanent injunction, leading Julius Baer to dismiss its case.)
* In December, 2006, on behalf of its affiliate radio station KSFO-AM, media giant ABC sent a cease and desist letter to 1 & 1 Internet, the then-host of the blog www.spockosbrain.com, a site that criticized what its author argued was offensive and violent rhetoric broadcast by KSFO. Despite the fact that it had no risk of liability, 1 & 1 Internet promptly shut down Spocko’s site in response to receiving the threatening letter. (EFF subsequently represented Spocko, successfully moving him to Computer Tyme, a web hosting company that promised to stand up to future threats.)

Intermediaries frequently argue (incorrectly) that they have no choice but to shut down domain names or sites when they receive a legal complaint. But they do have a choice, at least in the United States. As EFF has explained to De Beers, U.S. law provides ample protection for intermediaries, in large part to ensure that online speech and commerce continues to thrive. For example, in 1996, Congress passed Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act which immunizes internet intermediaries from most kinds of liability associated with the content that their customers place on their own sites. Similarly, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (passed in 1998) provides a safe harbor from copyright infringement liability for intermediaries who follow straightforward procedures in response to valid takedown notices. With these strong legal protections, intermediaries can and should refuse to respond to pressure from companies like De Beers.

Will the poignant work of the New York Times parodists stay up for the world to see? Will other critical online speakers be silenced by improper threats against their virtual soapboxes? The answer may ultimately depend more on the ability of targets to intimidate domain name registrars than on the legality of the underlying speech itself.

Drawn to Life / Program

DRAWN TO LIFE
reanimating the animate

Maison des Cultures Saint-Gilles, Belgradostraat 120, Brussels. 25 & 27 November 2008
Film and video program in the context of ‘SE JETER À L’EAU’, an event organised by Atelier Graphoui.
Curated by Stoffel Debuysere and María Palacios Cruz, in cooperation with Courtisane.

“animate … v.t…. [< L. animatus, pp. of animare, to make alive, fill with breath < anima, air, soul]. l. to give life to; bring to life. 2. to make gay, energetic, or spirited. 3. to inspire. 4. to give motion to; put into action: as, the breeze animated the leaves." We all know: animation is a form of cinema. And yet, one could argue that all cinema is in fact animation, and furthermore that life itself – anima – can be understood as cinema. Our existence, inscribed in perception, imagination and memory, is constantly animated, deformed, edited. The question is whether and how we can ourselves give form to our own experiences. Certainly, the incessant flow of images in which our daily lives are submerged seems to leave little room for analysis and intervention. Its intention is that of synthesis, of a continuous illusion of life. The world is thus objectivized, but inevitably doubled, devoid of its soul, “deanimated”. The artists and filmmakers in this program attempt to revitalize perception, offering an alternative or counterweight to the ways in which technological interfaces determine our relation to the world. At the crossroads between cinematographic codes and genres, these films and videos seek to dismantle the common a priori assumptions on animation film and its limitations. Fragments of collective and individual memories are redrawn, with pencils and pixels, light, movement and (algo)rhythms, in search of new possible relations between world and representation, image and subject, dream and data, the aesthetical and the political. Animation as re-animation.

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PROGRAM 1
Tuesday 25.11.2008 20:00

“We know that behind every image revealed there is another image more faithful to reality, and in the back of that image there is another, and yet another behind the last one, and so on, up to the true image of that absolute, mysterious reality that no one will ever see.”
— Michelangelo Antonioni

Robert Breer
Fuji
US, 1974, 16mm, colour, sound, 10′
Bang!
US, 1986, 16mm, color, sound, 10′

Robert Breer has been at the forefront of experimental animation filmmaking for over half a century. His work, in which he explores the role that movement plays in understanding form and space, represents an important link between the abstract films of Hans Richter and Viking Eggeling and the avant-garde cinema tradition. “Once I avoided conventional narration and replaced it with real time”, he writes, “I could put the images together in non sequitur impositions. This might be what you call ‘daily seeing’. It might be similar to the visual and aural experience of ordinary daily life – collision of experiences”. Fuji is one of Breer’s experiences in the early 1970’s with primitive forms of rotoscoping, in which live action is redrawn image by image. Fragments of footage of a journey in Japan are transformed into a lyrical exploration of colour and form, constantly swayed between representation and abstraction, between images that refer to precise objects and alternative spaces, offering a new look at the everyday. Bang! is Breer’s most autobiographical work : an associative collage of nostalgic childhood memories and bitter-sweet contemplations.

Dirk de Bruyn
Rote Movie
AUS, 1994, 16mm, colour, sound, 12′

A road movie across the emotional landscapes of the filmmaker, whose inner monologue shares his reflections on his feelings of exile, trauma, loneliness and alienation. His state of mind is evoked by increasingly fragmented images – direct-on-film animation collage, rotoscoped animation and reworked photographic images. The material aspect of film becomes a metaphor for the devastating effect that mental stress has on the body.

Frank & Caroline Mouris
Frank Film
US, 1973, 16mm, colour, sound, 9′

“I treat objects in a very subjective way, and I treat subjects by themselves in a very objective way”, affirms Frank Mouris. He describes Frank Film as “that one personal film that you do to get the artistic inclinations out of your system before going commercial”. This animated autobiography is composed of more than 11.000 images collected from magazines and catalogues, which shift and mutate across the screen as Mouris recites a list of words beginning with the letter ‘f’. The words bounce off the images and generate an associative flow of memories, which Mouris recounts on a second track, interwoven with the recitation. The result is an obsessive and mesmerizing collage, which film critic Andrew Sarris described as “a nine-minute evocation or America’s exhilarating everythingness”.

Stuart Hilton
Six weeks in June
UK, 1998, video, b/w, sound, 6′

“11,000 miles across the USA and back in a transit van with a rock and roll band, a pencil, a stack of A6 paper and 6 weeks in June to do it”. Stuart Hilton scribbles his films in a seemingly careless way, almost as if the doodles from his notebook jumped off the pages and started to move spontaneously. The simplicity of his technique seems to rightly feed the imagination. The traces of landscapes, human figures and objects that unfold in Six weeks in June, capture perfectly the feeling of restlessness and detachment that comes with living “on the road”. The “musique concrète” collage of found sounds and conversation fragments adds an extra dimension to the impression of “daily seeing”, as Robert Breer calls it. Image and sound sway from one to the other, separated and asynchronous but nevertheless inevitably linked in a continuous game of attracting and rejecting.

Bob Sabiston
Snack and Drink
US, 1999, video, colour, sound, 3’40

Bob Sabiston invented the Rotoshop software in the 1990’s to make rotoscoping– manually tracing and redrawing existing images – possible for artists working on video. In the current image culture it is no longer possible to determine what is “animated” and what isn’t, this technology being a good example of how digital video and computer animation have the same potential when it comes to representation. Snack and Drink is one of the early experiments with the software, based on a short documentary about an autistic teenager. The image material was coloured and stylized by a dozen of animators, giving it a dreamlike quality. A few years later, Sabiston would use the same technique in films like Richard Linklater’s Waking Life (2001) and A Scanner Darkly (2004), as well as The Five Obstructions (2003) by Lars Von Trier en Jørgen Leth .

Josh Raskin
I met the Walrus
CA, 2007, video, colour, sound, 5’15

“In 1969, a 14-year-old Beatle fanatic named Jerry Levitan, armed with a reel-to-reel tape deck, snuck into John Lennon’s hotel room in Toronto and convinced John to do an interview about peace. 38 years later, Jerry has produced a film about it. Using the original interview recording as the soundtrack, director Josh Raskin has woven a visual narrative which tenderly romances Lennon’s every word in a cascading flood of multipronged animation. Raskin marries the terrifyingly genius pen work of James Braithwaite with masterful digital illustration by Alex Kurina, resulting in a spell-binding vessel for Lennon’s boundless wit, and timeless message.” Josh Raskin: “I just wanted to literally animate the words, unfurling in the way I imagined they would appear inside the head of a baffled 14-year-old boy interviewing his idol.”

LEV (Levni R. Yilmaz Esq)
Tales Of Mere Existence (selection)
US, video, b/w, sound, 5′

“Tales Of Mere Existence is not necessarily about interesting stories, It is what it’s title indicates, anecdotes about the gloriously mundane. Everyday stories told not by the Devil on your right shoulder or the Angel on your left, but the voice in the middle of your head that doubts himself, questions everything, and sometimes doesn’t let you get out of bed. An unseen narrator tells the stories in a monotone voice, while his doodled illustrations come together on the screen. The stories deal with issues such as Sex, identity, and social confusion and just about anything else you would have written in your journal in High School. Tales Of Mere Existence goes for laughs in fearless ways that shock you even as you nod your head in recognition” Taylor Jessen, Animation World Network

Jonathan Hodgson
Night Club
UK, 1983, 16mm, colour, sound, 6′

Jonathan Hodgson, one of the most celebrated filmmakers in the rich British animation film scene, made this film when he was still a student at the Royal College of Art. We can already find here what would later become the main characteristics of his work, which sets its basis on the observation of the everyday and a preference for the spontaneous and the associative, in order to explore the tension between stasis and movement. “Nothing I’ve ever done has really been based on escapism”, he explained in an interview, “It’s always been about life”. Night Club is based on a series of sketches that Hodgson did in Liverpool drinking pubs. An observation of human behaviour in a social situation, hinting at the loneliness felt by the individual lost in the crowd.

Sky David
Field of Green: A Soldier’s Animated Sketchbook
US, 2007, 35mm to video, colour & b/w, sound, 8′

Like all “good Texan boys”, Sky David enlisted in the U. S. army at the end of the 1960’s. He documented his experiences of the Vietnam war in a sketchbook. These drawings remained untouched for over 30 years until he decided to make an animation film based on them. In the words of Cathy Caruth: “Trauma is not locatable on the simple violent or original event in an individual’s past, but rather in the way that its very unassimilated nature – the way that it is precisely not known in the first instance – return to haunt the survivor later on”. The film carries the scarred memory of a North Vietnamese soldier in whose rucksack David found delicate watercolours and pencil drawings. This film, according to David “happens when the “enemy” becomes a human being identical as myself. It is the film that this unknown would have made had he survived”.

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PROGRAM 2
Thursday 27.11.2008 20:00

“The worship of pattern, the one and only, at the expense of the subject matter from which it comes. How do we rediscover it, and how do we impart or describe it? The ultimate challenge of the future – to see without looking: to defocus! In a world where the media kneel before the altar of sharpness, draining life out of life in the process, the DEFOCUSIST will be the communicators of our era – nothing more, nothing less!”
— Lars von Trier

Kota Ezawa
The Simpson Verdict
GE/US, 2002, video, colour, sound, 3′

In his videos, slide projections and photo prints, Kota Ezawa re-animates iconic moments from his personal and cultural history. He describes this practice as a form of “video archeology”. Using primitive graphic software, he manages to extract, from the many layers of mediation, the essence of the original material – very often images that have been so frequently repeated that we seem to think we know all about them. As he says, “Stylization can transform an image from a means of representation to a direct solicitation of viewer’s emotion”. The Simpson Verdict is 3 minute video-animation of the final moments of O.J. Simpson’s trial in 1995 for the murder of his wife and her friend, as the verdict is being read out. (Note : to the surprise and dispair of many, Simpson was declared innocent, partly because many of the evidence photographs weren’t judged “truthful” enough by the jury. “Photography is no longer evidence for anything”, as read a 1982 announcement from Lucasfilm)

Jenny Perlin
Box Office
US, 2007, 16mm, b/w, silent, 2’25

Jenny Perlin: “In each aspect of my practice I take a close look at the ways in which social machinations are reflected in the smallest aspects of daily life. Whether it is copying a receipt from Wal-Mart, a headline from Reuters, or filming documentary-style interviews at the corner store, my interest is in the ways in which the sweeping statements of “History” affect specific details of human experience”. This short, hand-drawn animated film begins with a quote by Ryan C. Crocker, the current U.S. Ambassador to Iraq. In July, 2007, the New York Times quoted Crocker as comparing the current war in Iraq to a three or five-reel movie, depending on where one is living. In contrast to this quote, a list of the top-ten grossing films at the U.S. box office from the same day presents itself onscreen, along with other animated panels of related drawings that function as an associative commentary.

Ken Jacobs
Capitalism : slavery
US, 2007, video, b/w, silent, 3′

In the words of Ken Jacobs : “An antique stereograph image of cotton-pickers, computer-animated to present the scene in an active depth even to single-eyed viewers. Silent, mournful, brief.” The work of Ken Jacobs, a key figure in the post-war experimental film world, is often concerned with the cinematographical reanimation of historical image material. In many of his films and performances he dissects and manipulates existing film material, deconstructs each sequence and gesture, applies himself to texture and space and choreographs as a self-appointed “cine-puppeteer” a secondary discourse of forgotten and explored time. In his Nervous System performances he creates, with the help of two modified film projectors, so-called “eternalims” : “unfrozen slices of time, sustained movements going nowhere and unlike anything in life.” Using external shutters, which interrupt the light of both projectors alternately, a new cinematographic space is created, somewhere between 2D and 3D. This effect, similar to parallax in binocular vision – in which objects and figures appear to be at the same time in a state of suspenstion and caught in a continuous movement – has been successfully transposed to the digital domain in his recent video work. “3-D without spectacles (as if people would watch flat movies). Pummeling exercises in cinematic insistence: Let the image prevail! “.

Cathy Joritz
Negative Man
GE/US, 1985, 16 mm, b&w, sound, 2′ 30″
Give AIDS the Freeze
GE/US, 1991, 16mm, b/w, sound, 2′

Rosalind Krauss wrote in reference to the work of Cy Twombly : “the formal character of the graffito is that of a violation, the trespass onto a space that is not the graffitist’s own, the desecration of a field originally consecrated to another purpose, the effacement of that purpose through the act of dirtying, smearing, scarring, jabbing”. This could also be said of the films of Cathy Joritz, who uses various direct-on-film animation techniques to penetrate and appropiate the existing images on the celluloid. In Negative Man and Give Aids the Freeze, Joritz uses this technique to comment sarcastically on two television speeches, of a TV presenter and a psychologue respectively. In a time span of a few minutes they become the objects of a continuous transformation that is draped on them like a second, celluloid skin. Joritz’s drawings not only serve to adjust the image but also as a way to unmask the representation of authority.

Paul Glabicki
Diagram Film
US,1978, 16mm, colour, sound, 14′

“Perception is a tool” explains Paul Glabicki. His work is driven by an obsessive inclination towards analyzing his own experiences, combined with a personal research on form, time and space. His drawings, paintings, films and computer animations reflect a personal perpective that filters and processes information, encodes layers of meaning and representation, and dissects relationships of parts to the whole. For Glabicki, one single image or object can generate an endless chain of new images, relationships, memories, experiences, and associations. In Diagram Film live-action and still images of objects and places are presented and then followed by animated diagrams that explain, transform or re-interpret what has just been seen. The result is a playful exploration of the borders between the abstract and the figurative, the rational and the irrational.

Jonathon Kirk
I’ve got a guy running
US, 2006, video, b/w, sound, 7’12”

When the images from the first Gulf War appeared in the international media, it became extremely difficult to make a distinction between “real” images and computer-generated ones. Since then, this development has had an enormous impact on the way we (de)code visual information. In this video, Jonathon Kirk explores the relation between cognition and recognition of war images, a relation that has been severely affected by the influence of simulation, surveillance and real-time media coverage. Images of a precision bombing, released by the U.S. Department of Defense to the glory of the American army and its weapon suppliers, are subject to algorithms, which gradually reveal the reality that lies beneath them.

Dietmar Offenhuber
paths of g
AU, 2006, video, colour, sound, 1′

The long backwards tracking shot through a trench in Stanley Kubrick’s WWI drama Paths of Glory (1957) is reduced to pure geometry. Nothing is visible other than a matrix of rectangular figures and a line which follows the movement of the camera and counts off the spent frames. The soldiers’ corporality and the trench’s materiality are reduced to an abstract configuration of digital forms and values, surveyed by the camera’s mechanism – the single-frame transport, used for the first time during WWI, changing for once and for all the perception of war. In a certain way, this reduction gives a more accurate image of the first industrialized war in history than Kubrick’s original version. As Paul Virilio wrote in Guerre et cinéma: “as sight lost its direct quality and reeled out of phase, the soldier had the feeling of being not so musch destroyed as derealized and dematerializes, any sensory point of reference suddenly vanishing in a surfeit of optical targets”. It is precisely the conscious reduction within the film, the purely mechanical, geometric values which are able to reveal the true violence of this war. The fictionalized fact is not necessary, removing the sense from existing images suffices to return to the historically factual qua ‘techno-imagination’ (Vilém Flusser). The viewer sees less but learns more.

Persijn Broersen & Margit Lukács
Prime Time Paradise
NL, 2004, video, colour, silent, 11′

“We consume images at an ever faster rate and images consume reality”, wrote Susan Sontag in On Photography. While in that book she pled passionately for an “economy of images”, she would later admit that it could no longer be spoken of . “In our digital hall of mirrors, the pictures aren’t going to go away”, she wrote when the images of Abu Ghraib were published. “Yes, it seems that one picture is worth a thousand words. And there will be thousands more snapshots and videos. Unstoppable.” However, the potential force of images can be diminished by their overproduction and by the incessant search of dramatic impact, in a culture in which the shock effect appears as an stimulus for consumption. “How do you deal with the constant flow of information : do you turn yourself away or do you try to create a new, meaningful structure ?” Margit Lukács asks herself. In Prime Time Paradise Broersen and Lukács have frozen a number of images from the daily flow of news reports in a spatial collage, an infernal media landscape of conflict, death and depravation.The impact is postponed, the gaze renewed.

Karl Tebbe
Infinite Justice
GE, 2006, video, colour, sound, 2′

“La Guerre du Golfe n’a jamais eu lieu” (The Gulf War did not take place), affirmed Jean Baudrillard at the beginning of the 1990’s. The war he was referring to was a television war, produced as a soap series in which news announcements became trailers, content was delivered in daily episodes, and the show was perpetuated by a number of film sequels and video games. Nothing has changed much since then. Whoever controls the images, controls the war. “War-making and picture-taking are congruent activities”, wrote Susan Sontag about the current war in Iraq. “Television, whose access to the scene is limited by government controls and by self-censorship, serves up the war as images.” With Infinite Justice, Karl Tebbe deconstructs and interrogates the public image (and image experience) of war, embedded in the omnipresent television reality. Fragments from war reports shown on German television were re-animated frame by frame with “action figures” sold in the USA. “This isn’t Disney. Not Team America. This is war”.

Stephen Andrews
The Quick and the Dead
CA, 2004, video, color, sound, 1’30”

According to Stephen Andrews, “the cracks sometimes mean more than the picture”. The Canadian artist is aware of the erosion of the image as a form of testimony. With his drawings and videos, he seeks to “slow down the gaze”, through a process of reanimation. Existing images and sequences are reconstructed by hand and meticuously recreated as pencil drawings, underlining the tension between the subjectivity of the drawer and the objectivizing role that digital visual technology plays. “I have always been fascinated by technology because it can never do what the hand can do, which is to fail miserably. The machine can draw a perfectly straight line – the hand refuses. Technology thus becomes a prosthesis for our shortcomings. When I in turn render by hand what the machine has wrought, my intention is to decipher the medium’s message”. The Quick and the Dead is based on a short clip that Andrews found on the Internet – one of the many dehumanized images of “collateral damage” that have reached us from Iraq these past years. “A moment of random death is given consideration through the human act of retouching” (Atom Egoyan).

Carolee Schneemann
Viet Flakes
US, 1965, 16 mm film to video, bIw, sound, 7′

Viet Flakes was conceived as the central part of Snows, a Carolee Schneemann performance in reaction to the war in Vietnam. A shocking reflection on the violence and representation of war, the film is built as an obsessive collage of photographic images taken from magazines and newspapers, “animated” by Schneemann’s Super 8 camera’s travelling “within” the images. The visual fragmentation is heightened by a sound collage by James Tenney. “Schneemann constructs a sense of the violent dimensions of the war at a time when the true impact of the Vietnam War was scarcely understood. Using film as a plastic medium to create a metadocument, Schneemann gives the viewer a sense of the dimension of these atrocities, puts the war in a human perspective and goes directly to the source of the catastrophe, much in the way that the great Greek dramatists were able to situate tragedy so convincingly” (Robert C. Morgan).

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Thanks to Sky David, Dirk de Bruyn, Kota Ezawa, Jonathan Hodgson, Ken Jacobs, Jonathon Kirk, LEV, Frank & Caroline Mouris, Jenny Perlin, Bob Sabiston, Karl Tebbe, Mike Sperlinger (LUX), Christophe Bichon & Emmanuel Lefrant (Lightcone), Dominic Angerame (Canyon), Michaela Grill (Sixpack), Wanda vanderStoop (Vtape), Theus Zwakhals (Montevideo), Rebecca Cleman (EAI), Jeff Crawford (CFMDC), : jerry levitan, chris kennedy (vtape), Edwin Carels, Pieter-Paul Mortier (STUK), Dirk Deblauwe (Courtisane), Brett Kashmere, Jacques Faton (ERG / Atelier Graphoui)

Make Believe

“Cinema, Cinema, Cinema. The three things that can make us see the world like we want to see it, the way it is and the way it can be”
— Alfred Hitchcock

We didn’t include work by Bernard Gigounon in our program ‘Drawn to Life’, but we could have easily. Here is some of his lovely work along with a text I wrote some time ago for the distribution catalogue of Argos (translated from Dutch).

Cascade (2001)

Interlude (2001)

Starship (2002)

Jour de Fête (2005)

“Cinema, Cinema, Cinema. The three things that can make us see the world like we want to see it, the way it is and the way it can be”, Alfred Hitchcock once said. Precisely this perceptual ambiguity, the multiple layers of reality involved in the moving, time-based image, incited Bernard Gigounon to start using the video medium. Before that moment, after his studies at the Department of sculpture in Ensav-La Cambre (Brussels), he mostly made sculptures based on traditional materials like metal and wood. But even then his work was based on a fascination for the tiny, apparently trivial aspects of our everyday lives, from which he tries to draw magic and poetry.

It has been said that cinema is in essence a special effect. The video work of Gigounon reduces that notion to its minimal essence: cinema as an illusion, created by the manipulation of images in time. He does not create this effect with advanced, multi-dimensional digital technologies, but rather through simple, transparent magic, referring in several respects to the optic fantasies and the ‘persistence of vision’ techniques from the pre-cinematic age. But this is not about the simulation of reality through optical illusions, or the creation of immersive ‘scripted spaces’, but rather amazement itself, purposely allowing oneself to get carried away by the unreal, the surreal, the deviant. In an age when our outlook on the world is constantly mediatized and determined by all kinds of special effects, Gigounon carries us back to a proto-cinema: the experience of a train journey, the amazing effect of a cuckoo’s clock, the projection of a magic lantern. He uses video as an instrument to recreate everyday life, to tilt our perspective through a “suspension of belief” into an enchanted reality.

Fantasy worlds are always there, anywhere, just like images, the only thing we need to do as a spectator is to allow our imagination to run free. Gigounon gives us a boost to let go of trivial reality, even if just for a while. This results in tiny phantasmagorias, like ‘Jour de Fête’ (2005), in which skyscrapers seem to free themselves from their foundations, recreating the Brussels’ skyline into a setting for an elegant fairy dance accompanied by euphoric applause. Or ‘Starship’ (2002), a visual investigation of a passing ship, which turns into a weird and estranging object through the juxtaposition of its symmetrical reflection. The work of Gigounon supplies a key to our imagination, even though we have to create the opening ourselves – a reflex slowly rusting away. The simulation of reality, in television, cinema, 3D games, encloses our reality more and more tightly, it breaks through our perspective and undermines the experience of astonishment. Gigounon makes us believe again: in the stop-motion animated images in ‘Cascade’ (2001) or ‘Interlude’ (2001), in the unreal, chronology-defying stunts in ‘Héros’ (2001), in the tiny airplane, stuck to the train window in Remédie à l’ennui – shooting past, skimming over the treetops, always defying our lack of imagination.

Magic is often the result of convergence, of unexpected associations between one image and another, between a voice and a character, between image and sound. In ‘Standing Ovation’ (2001), originally part of a concert by Martha Argérich, a fragment from Jean Renoir’s Une partie de campagne is extracted and inserted into a new context, of time and sound. The backward travelling of a landscape in the rain is given new meaning on the sounds of a roaring applause. In ‘Prélude n°3’ (2003) Gigounon plays a graphical game with musical onomatopoeias, dancing and interacting within the confines of the white screen. The minimal chords and melodies of Debussy’s ‘Prélude N°3’, connected more by logic than by surreal observation, are given a visual counterpart in a pallet of coherent letters, constantly moving, shifting colour and size. Just like the composer paints an impressionist musical world with warm notes and tone colours, Gigounon creates a language of his own from sterile, achromatic graphical elements, in which the letters don’t merely derive their existence from the music, but their meaning as well. Gigounon, isn’t merely a visual artist, he is a composer as well. Like Debussy he is looking for suggestion instead of description. Like Debussy he collects tonal compositions of everyday observations, parallel visions not merely transcending reality, not even resisting it, but rather liberating and poeticising it.

Daily Seeing

“Once I avoided conventional narration and replaced it with real time I could put the images together in non sequitur impositions. This might be what you call ‘daily seeing.’ It might be similar to the visual and aural experience of ordinary daily life – collision of experiences – not necessarily chaotic.”
— Robert Breer

The film program we’re working on now, ‘Drawn to life’, is almost finished. I’m quite happy with it, especially since it gave me an opportunity to explore some realms of cinema I wasn’t very familiar with: the so-called “animation” film. What’s interesting about “animation”, for me – besides the fact that the concept itself is deeply imbedded in the roots of cinema – is that it transcends both fiction and documentary, especially in the light of new digital photographic technologies, which are more and more questioning the black box of live action. So, when we were asked to do someting about “animation” and “documentary”, we thought it could be interesting to explore how animation techniques can re-define or revitalise our daily seeing, the ways we percieve and experience the world we live in. One of the filmmakers I discovered while doing research is Stuart Hilton. He studied at the Royal College of Art, where the field of experimental animation is apparently blossoming (see also Jonathan Hodgson, amongst others). In many ways, he can be considered as a heir of Robert Breer, especially in the way he explores the border zone between the anecdotal and the abstract, between quotidian existence and more imaginative realms. Breer’s films, P. Adams Sitney once wrote, have the potential of transforming daily eyesight, making our visual world more alive. And that’s just what some of Hilton’s films do. Hilton has a way of animating his doodles and drawings and combining them with live action images, so that they connect “film projection and the glitches of hand-made work back to eyesight and to the physiology of daily seeing” (as Fred Camper once wrote about Breer’s ‘Fuji’). This effect is further enhanced by the soundtracks, which consist of musique concrète collages of found sounds and media snippets. The conjunctions of image and sound generate a kind of consciousness and emotional dynamics that remind me of Arthur Lipsett’s films. Pieces of sound and image worlds are arranged in an non-lineair way without losing the sense that there is a experiential structure holding them together which transcends the gaps between the pieces – all the more total for being fragmented.

Here’s some of Hilton’s stuff. There’s more on his YouTube page.

Argument In A Superstore (1992)

Save Me (1994)

Six Weeks In June (1998)

Animating War

One of the movies that really struck me lately is Waltz with Bashir, Ari Folman’s animated account of his search to piece together some lost fragments from his memory, from the time that he was a soldier in Lebanon 25 years ago (leading up to the rememberance of his experience of the Sabra and Shatila Massacre). In fact, seeing this powerful film, considering its queries about the status of documents and film documentary, about the ethics of the image and the relation between media and memory, was one of guiding forces for putting together a new film program, Drawn to Life, which is partly about “animation” as “reanimation”, as a tool for revitalising history, memory and perception.

“How does one avoid overly aestheticizing violence when using animation?” asks Michael Koresky in Reverse Shot. “Despite a radical, unified look, the imagery in Waltz with Bashir ranges from the mundane to the dreamlike, and often those distinctions collapse, expand, and mutate right before our eyes. Folman isn’t gussying up a difficult chapter of history in accessible pop extravagance; rather he’s using a new form to investigate the terrible persistence, not to mention unreliability, of memory and perception, and how personal and political deceptions often go hand in hand.”

Here’s a few fragments from interviews with Folman, in which he talks about his reasons for using animation techniques (actually a specially designed combination of Flash animation, classic animation and 3D, so NO rotoscope animation. Each visual was made up of independently moving pieces) to deal with memory and trauma.

“WALTZ WITH BASHIR was always meant to be an animated documentary. For a few years, I had the basic idea for the film in my mind, but I was not happy at all to do it in real life video. How would that have looked like? A middleaged man being interviewed against a black background, telling stories that happened 25 years ago, without any archival footage to support them. Then I figured out it could be done only in animation with fantastic drawings. War is so surreal, and memory is so tricky that I thought I’d better go all along the memory journey with the help of very fine illustrators.”

“Using animation is like magic. You have freedom to go from one dimension to another pretty quickly, a freedom to move from the subconscious to the conscious, from dreams to memory and hallucinations and testimonies. (…) How do you depict a dream? You can write it down, which would be fairly accurate, but if you want to film it, you would have to have a set and actors,” he said. With animation, however, “you get rid of the ‘middle-man.’ And in some cases, you have a tool that is more truthful.”

“A journey trying to figure out a traumatic memory from the past is a commitment to long term therapy. My therapy lasted as long as the production of WALTZ WITH BASHIR: four years. There was a shift from dark depression as a result of things discovered to being in euphoria over the film finally being in production with complicated animation being done by the team at a pace better than expected. If I was the type of guy who believes in the cult of psychotherapy, I’d swear the film had done miracles to my personality. But due to previous experience, I’d say the filmmaking part was good, but the therapy aspect sucked.”

“I don’t care whether it is documentary or fiction. maybe it is the first animated documentary ever, but does it really matter? (…) The whole idea is that it was basically subjective memories, so there is no real or unreal.”

“I believe that there are thousands of Israeli ex-soldiers who keep their war memories deeply depressed. They might live the rest of their lives like that, without anything ever happening. But it could always burst out one day, causing who-knows-what to happen to them. That’s what Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder is all about.”

Folman is now working on an adaptation of Stanislaw Lem’s novel The Futurological Congress.