Diagonal Thoughts

“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)

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.

The Berlin-based Serbian artist Oliver Laric is part of a growing community of succesful (not in the least in the contemporary visual arts world) young creative producers (alongside people like Michael Bell-Smith, John Michael Boling and Cory Arcangel, to name just a few) who use digital forms to explore contemporary visual culture and how it is mediated through popular technologies. One of his most interesting projects is ’50 50′ (2007), in which he seamlessly strung together fifty YouTube clips of strangers singing three songs by hip hop artist 50 Cent. The video has received praise around the internet and the art world for its remix of both 50’s music and vernacular video culture. He has now made a recomprised version of the piece (’50 50 2008′) by using all new clips. “The mass availability of videos of people singing these three songs speaks both to the popular appeal of the music and of the act of performing for the home movie camera–thus deepening the initial resonance of Laric’s project” (Marisa Olson).For ‘Touch My Body’, Laric took Mariah Carey’s video for her hit single ‘Touch My Body’ and made a template for chroma-keyed remixes by YouTube users by digitally replacing the background images surrounding the starlet’s body with a flat green backdrop. “The music video begins like many classic pornos: Unwitting nerd rings doorbell, half-naked bombshell babe answers the door, contracted labor assignment is soon interrupted by a romantic interlude with a thumping soundtrack…The song is Carey’s foray into reaching out to the the geek set, and includes references to software upgrades, laser tag, and of course…YouTube! The video millions hits on the video-sharing site and, naturally, all of this makes the piece very attractive to an artist like Oliver Laric, who has a keen interest in digital culture and pop remixes. The artist’s newest piece is an edit of Carey’s video, with everything (the “compunerd,” the house, etc) but the singer masked out in green to encourage chroma-keyed remixes by online vi! ewers. Ironically, Carey’s lyrics speak not only to a mainstream paranoia about surveillance and privacy intrusions, but moreover drops hints about sharing footage online. She sings, “If there’s a camera up in here then it’s gonna leave with me when I do. If there’s a camera up in here then I best not catch this flick on YouTube.” Naturally, this is exactly what Laric is hoping will happen–and no doubt Carey herself. Fame is nothing if not a self-production and Laric’s taken this to heart in leaving the title of the video the same and modifying his YouTube video tags to attract more viewers. His real hope is not that the piece will become an artworld cause célèbre but that the larger public of YouTube surfers will adopt the piece and post remixes of their own. The key point made by removing the superfluous imagery from the video’s 3,000 frames is that, with her “come hither” gestures and the invitation “touch my body,” Carey’s certainly asking for it!” (Marisa Olson). You can a set of remixes watch on Laric’s site. Here’s his Green Screen version.

Also check out his other work, like Message The (2007), in which Laric slices up the video of Grandmaster Flash’s classic “The Message” into its individual words, then rearranges the lyrics in alphabetical sequence (a form of détournement that has been done by other artists as well, see Lenka Clayton’s fantastic Qaeda Quality Question Quickly Quickly Quiet) or (>’.’)>=O____l_*__O=<(‘.’<) (2008), based on thousands of tiny animated gifs that create an ultra-low-res illusion of cinematic movement, generating a barely discernible compilation of clips from a series of hip-hop music videos.

While doing some research on “animation” for our upcoming film program Drawn To Life (more info later), I stumbled upon some great autobiographical-tinted animation series, which are distributed via the net (where these vignettes are phenomenally popular). One is Tales Of Mere Existence by LEV (or Levni R. Yilmaz Esq), a wonderful series of witty (live) hand-drawn self-observations. Taylor Jessen writes: 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”. Take a look on Lev’s website, where you can suscribe to his films and comics. You can watch most of his animations on his YouTube or MySpace pages.
Here are some of my favorites:

A second series is Simon’s Cat by Simon Tofield. As a cat lover I find these Flash animations not only highly recognisable but also simply irresistible. The delightful vignettes (three so far) “accurately depict and exaggerate the comical aspects of nature’s odd couples, humans and felines, living together — especially the parts about ‘FEED ME!'”. One of the episodes has recently won “Best Comedy” at the British Animation Awards. Check out Simon’s Cat on YouTube and Simon Tofield’s work on the website of Tandem Films.

“For men at war, the function of the weapon is the function of the eye”
Paul Virilio

I’m currently reading a fairly interesting book entitled Witness, Memory, Representation and the Media in Question ( ed. Ulrik Ekman and Frederik Tygstrup, Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2008), based on the proceedings of a symposium held at the European Summer School in Cultural Studies, Copenhagen, August 25, 2004. One of the most striking essays is the one written by Mikkel Bruun Zangenberg, ‘Witnessing at War’. In it he comes up with the term ‘the belligerent gaze’ as “an umbrella-expression designating a diversity of perhaps internally heteregoneous modes of looking in and at warfare”. He focusses on two distinct events, World War I and the incidents in the Abu Ghraib prison, in order to explore the changes in modes and conditions of “witnessing”, referring to the writings of Erich Maria Remarque, Ernst Jünger, Primo Levi, and others. All these authors seem to agree on the “peculiarly aporetic nature of witnessing and trauma: be it in the form of blindness and insight, of a non-coincidence between fact and truth, of the detrimenal and coercive contamination of all on the inside as well as the outside, or of the bleak curse and guilt of the inauthentic survivor.” What is rejected is the ’emperical’ notion of the witness as someone who ‘saw it with his of her own eyes’. Zangenberg’s claim is that the condition of witnessing is evaded and destroyed, circumvented or paralysed. In WWI soldiers were ‘derealized’, turned into some form of ghost – or else, appearing as pilots (see Virilio’s War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception), in which case their sight is reduced to an exclusively streategic and destructive gaze – they see victims, but never witnesses their obliteration. 90 years later, in the Abu Ghraib case, the conditions of witnessing are perverted and caricatured by the degrading videos of humiliated prisoners. Or the deceased civilians are not seen at all, they literally become invisible (see Judith Butler’s Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence).

Zangenberg considers the erosion of these modes and conditions, leading to “the obliteration of witnessing”, in part due to the contemporary role played by media and the proliferation of digital imagery. He refers to the ideas of Virilio, who writes about the dehumanizing, automated appearance of surveillance and seeing in the 20th century warfare and proposes that the emergence of unmanned planes and missiles (“intelligent weapons”) inaugurated the virtual dissapearance of witnessing. In War and Cinema Virilio quotes W.J. Perry, a former US Under-secretary of State for Defense, as saying “once you can see the target, you can expect to destroy it”. Virilio adds: “For men at war, the function of the weapon is the function of the eye””. “Obviously”, Zannenberg writes, “this circumstance is intensified when there is only a machinic eye casting a belligerent, neutral and automated glance at an infrared shape representing a human body” (see Manuel de Landa’s War in the Age of Intelligent Machines). The new kind of automated images have suggested a new surgical precision of warfare. War is the subject of these images, but it is also a means of creating subjects, visual subjects. In the Gulf War strategy, the agency belongs to the “West” seen from the point of view of the weapons themselves. Pictures were transmitted showing their “view” of their targets right up until the moment of impact (see Nicholas Mirzoeff’ Watching Babylon: The War in Iraq and Global Visual Culture). In these shots – according to a theory put forward by the philosopher Klaus Theweleit- bomb and reporter are identical.

For example, these images were taken in 2002, when about 2.000 troops from the US led military coalition were engaged in close in combat with small pockets of suspected al Qaeda and Taliban fighters in the rugged terrain of northeastern Afghanistan, as part of an operation called Operation Acaconda…. This footage was filmed from US gunship helicopters that were part of this mission. At the same time these pictures show the distance between the pilot and the battlefield. (Found in OVNI’s Babylon Archives. Fragments of these shots were appropriated by Dominic Angerame – in Anaconda Targets – and Christoph Büchel – in AC-130 Gunship Targeting Video (Afghanistan 12/6/2002)).

The images below were recorded during NATO air strikes against former Yugoslavia. There were 4 US AIR Force airplanes flying from a NATO-base in Italy to a destination in Yugoslavia. Mission objective was to bomb several targets in the area around the city of Novi Sad. On the way back, after the mission was completed, one of the planes was shot. This tape was found near the crashed plane in the Fruska Gora mountains in the Srem region. It shows the electronic cockpit with basic graphical interface and voice communication between the pilots. This videotape is a regular flight document used by command structures to analyze its efficiency and success after very mission. It presents the last moments before the plane crashed. The blue image signifies the end for the pilot: no image, no place, no reality. (Found on Kuda.org)

The loss of the ‘genuine picture’ means the eye no longer has a role as historical witness. It has been said that what was brought into play in the Gulf War was not new weaponry but rather a new policy on images. In this way the basis for electronic warfare was created. Today, kilo tonnage and penetration are less important than the so-called C3I cycle, which has come to encircle our world. C3I refers to “Command, Control, Communications and Intelligence” and means global and tactical early warning systems, area surveillance through seismic, acoustic and radar sensors, radio direction sounding, monitoring opponents’ communications, as well as the use of jamming to suppress all these techniques.
Harun Farocki explores these issues in many of his films and installations. In War at a Distance (2003) he focusses on how, since the first Gulf War, it has virtually impossible to distinguish between real pictures and those generated on a computer. The image is no longer used only as testimony, but also as an indispensable link in a process of production and destruction. In Bilder der Welt und Inschrift des Krieges (1989) he researches the interconnection – and at times, disjunction – between cognition and recognition in Images of the World and the Inscription of War. The film is based on an event which took place in 1944, when an Allied aircraft took topographic photographs of Auschwitz during a routine surveillance operation for power plants, munitions factories, chemical plants, and any other industrial complexes that could potentially serve as bombing targets that, in the military’s myopic search for these high collateral targets that would cripple the German war machine, failed to recognize that they had actually taken an aerial survey of the layout of the Auschwitz concentration camp – an explicitly detailed, but mentally unregistered discovery for which the implicit meaning would not be realized until decades later, long after the tragic reality of the Nazi death camps had been exposed. Investigates this conceptual image of a “blind spot” and the binding of the gaze, the film illustrates the conceptual introduction of quantifying images measured from a “safe” distance into discrete elements that can be uniquely identified or accurately reproduced remotely into scale models and detailed simulations. Christa Blümlinger wrote about the film: “one’s thoughts are not free when machines, in league with science and the military, dictate what is to be investigated. This is the essence of media violence, of Paul Virilio’s ‘terrorist aesthetic’ of optic stimulation, which today appears on control panels as well as on television, with its goal of making the observer either an accomplice or a potential victim, as in times of war”.

For Zangenberg this concerns the duress of being the subject of the belligerent gaze. He writes: “I contend that the one who cast the belligerent gaze, the one who is the subject and master of that gaze, is barred from ever becoming a witness; he may well ‘see everything’, but since he is always at a safe distance, and since he is the one who produces death, he cannot properly turn into a witness. Being the object of the belligerent gaze, on the other hand, is a position of passivity, vulnerability, fear, horror, and suffering, if not being exposed to the numbing effect of alienation and derealization. Either way, war is engaged in a constant process of un-witnessing.”