1. Shows this week
Christopher Harris "Speaking in Camouflage
Sept 20th 7pm Whitney Museum
The Whitney Museum of American Art will present an onsite film screening of three films by Christopher Harris for the 2024 Whitney Biennial on Friday, September 20 at 7 pm. Screened in the Museum’s theater, this program features the global premieres of two new short films, b/w and Speaking in Tongues: Take One, as well as the premiere of a newly restored 16mm print of Harris’s early masterwork still/here.
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bitforms gallery
131 Allen St, New York, NY 10002September 4–October 26, 2024
Opening reception: Friday, September 6, 7–9 PM
Gallery hours: Tuesday–Saturday: 11 AM–6 PM
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer RCA is a Mexican-Canadian electronic artist living and working in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. He creates platforms for public participation by using robotic lights, digital fountains, computerized surveillance, and telematic networks
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Alan Berliner with Phillip Lopate
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Assignment 1: Responses
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Underlying Concepts
1. Assembling a movie out of multiple disparate shots
Like the first assignment, many filmmakers create all kinds of works our of archival materials.
BRUCE CONNER, a sculptor, was as early American adopter of the technique. A Movie (1958) is his first film, an icon of experimental cinema.
A Movie -- the first 'found footage' film?
Music: "Pines of Rome" by Ottorino Respighi
Jen Proctor • BC/JP A Movie X 2 (side by side)
Blair McClendon America for Americans (2017) (T7 Red SSD reinit)
Blair McCeldnon is gifted editor who uses multiple post production techniques to re-presentt news and other publicly available footage revealing in a fresh way some of the most distressing aspects of US society,
• Top down / Bottom up: contrasting approaches to post production
• Top Down The production process begins with a plan such as a script, treatment, storyboard or other shot-to-shot description, developing the final work out of a preconception
• Bottom Up With an idea in mind, we create, shoot, capture or collect images and other materials such as sound, music, texts and abstract ideas, and consider this collection our archive out of which our final work will be assembled.
Both are valid and effective approaches.
Many thesis projects are hybrids of the two approaches. e.g. Jiani Wang's AI / Robot investigation
• DatabaseCinema
What is a Database? A collection of data that can be selected and sorted
Most databases are not time-based. E.g a bank statement, a recipe, a list of parts,
What is a Narrative? A sequence of elements describing an event or series of events
An event is something that happens in time
Therefore cinema, which is time based, is a good match for narrative
Music is also time-based and structured, but rarely sequenced by narrative
Music demonstrates that time-based database structures need not be narratives
According to Manovich: the two types of structure — database / narrative — are a result of the editing stage of a movie.
Some methods of navigation for video editing foreground the idea that the database is fundamental. But not all . . .
• Hollis Frampton Zorns Lemma (1970) (T7 Red SSD reinit)
• Jen Proctor Nothing a Little Soap and Water Can't Fix (T7 Red SSD reinit) reveals its database origin (too explicitly?)
Lev Manovich suggests that editing a movie is navigating through a database of audio-visual elements: shots, sounds, stills, texts, etc.
Database navigation involves:
• sample (digitize elements)
• sort (e.g. alphabetical, by color, by size)
• select / navigate (develop a route through the data)
• manipulate (change one or more values, e.g by combining or splitting data)
Consider Instagram as a database of audio-visual elements, and consider how you navigate it (as a viewer) or add to it (as a user). Hash tags and 'followers' are a means of selecting the data, and 'stories' as a means of navigating, building a llimited dataset, adding text or audio as manipulating or changing the data
• Links are an important feature of databases, especially in reference to the internet: we can link a datum from one database to a datum in another database, giving us a way of navigating between databases. But this concept doesn't usually apply to movie editing
• interactivity is essential to databases because all the above steps involve examination of a sub-set of the database. Videogames are no more and no less than exploration of a databases using the above four concepts.
Elementary techniques that transform a viewer's understanding of the image
Alan Berliner's exploitation of the fundamental ambiguity of the moving image:
• Alan Berliner The Sweetest Sound (T7 Red SSD reinit)
We read the words into the image, charging our understanding and interpretation
Myth in the Electric Age (T7 Red SSD reinit)
As means of navigating databases
Wide Awake -- Yawn montage (T7 Red SSD reinit)
• Jen Proctor Nothing a Little Soap and Water Can't Fix (T7 Red Reinit) reveals its database origin (too explicitly?)
Making a narrative may obscure the database origin of film editing: because elements are selected and ordered according to external criteria -- by which the content of each element advances (or retards) the story. There is much to say about narrative structures, which we'll get to later, but at this point the focus is on the concept of database navigation as central to the work of editing.
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The essential significance of motion: both of the subject with in the frame and of the camera
Bunuel / Dali Un Chien Andalou(1929)
Berliner's Everything at Once is a paradigm example (T7 Red SSD reinit)
Many transitions are based on motion.
• Dziga Vertov The Man With The Movie Camera (1929) [T7 Red SSD reinit]
ManWithTheMovieCamera_Machines-Sports-Beach_720X480
Motion (of subject camera or both together) are determinants of the edit -- keeping it flowing and building a unified sense of space over many individual shots
( Lev Manovich The Language of New Media p. 240 )
Vertov’s film consists of at least three levels. One level is the story of a cameraman filming material for the film. The second level is the shots of an audience watching the finished film in a movie theater. The third level is this film, which consists from footage recorded in Moscow, Kiev and Riga and is arranged according to a progression of one day: waking up – work – leisure activities. If this third level is a text, the other two can be thought of as its meta-texts. Vertov goes back and forth between the three levels, shifting between the text and its meta-texts: between the production of the film, its reception, and the film itself. But if we focus on the film within the film (i.e., the level of the text) and disregard the special effects used to create many of the shots, we discover almost a linear printout, so to speak, of a database: a number of shots showing machines, followed by a number of shots showing work activities, followed by different shots of leisure, and so on. The paradigm is projected onto syntagm. The result is a banal, mechanical catalog of subjects which one can expect to find in the city of the 1920s: running trams, city beach, movie theaters, factories ...
. . . Film editing in general can be compared to creating a trajectory through a database, in the case of Man with a Movie Camera this comparison constitutes the very method of the film. Its subject is the filmmaker’s struggle to reveal (social) structure among the multitude of observed phenomena. Its project is a brave attempt at an empirical epistemology which only has one tool – perception. . . .
. . . In contrast to standard film editing which consists in selection and ordering of previously shot material according to a pre-existent script, here the process of relating shots to each other, ordering and reordering them in order to discover the hidden order of the world constitutes the film’s method. Man with a Movie Camera traverses its database in a particular order to construct an argument. Records drawn from a database and arranged in a particular order become a picture of modern life – but simultaneously an argument about this life, an interpretation of what these images, which we encounter every day, every second, actually mean.
