Contemporary Independent Filmmaking

Ever since my time as an undergraduate film student, I have struggled with the idea of independent filmmaking and the state of contemporary independent films. The current state of indie films came to mind again while working on my final paper, which focused on the work John Cassavetes. His status as the pioneer of American independent filmmaking still resonates with filmmakers today.

It seems as though indie filmmaking has become an aesthetic style more so than a way of creating a film. During my presentation, Sam mentioned the cinematography of indie films. The use of the hand held camera has become the ubiquitous amongst indie films these days. This was used for very specific reasons by previous influential indie filmmakers, but it should not characterize a film as independent. Although indies lack major studio funding, they often have the advantage of more creative freedom. This does not only apply to the overall content of the film, but for the crew as well. I often found on professional sets that the people who had a background in film had the most difficult time adjusting to a lack of creativity on set. However, there are instances in which, even as an intern, I was given some creativity freedom on an indie film. These creative allowances were rarely given to anyone except heads of department on studio films.

Although there is more creative freedom, there also seems to be a pre-packaged style that has developed even for indie films. I cannot completely disregard film school since I attended one, but it is obvious that film schools have a tendency to instill a pre-packaged concept of the “perfect” film in its students. This applies to both studio and indie films. Indies have developed their own format for the “perfect” film over the years. However, this format often emulates that of earlier filmmakers without taking into account the best aesthetic choices for each specific film. Just because you are an indie filmmaker, does not mean that you have to make a serious art house film with your friend’s digital camera.

I am interested to see how the future of independent filmmaking evolves in years to come. In recent years, there seems to be an emergence of interest in indie films again thanks to events such as the Sundance Film Festival. Indie films have taken on an aura of being “hip” and “artsy.” Hollywood certainly did not fail to notice this trend in the popularity of indies. Currently, indie filmmakers have more possibilities for having their films seen than ever before. The internet has provided a perfect platform to showcase their work. The plight of the indie filmmaker is as relevant today as it was in the previous decades, except for the ability to have a film seen more easily due to technological advancements. Jonas Mekas created The New American Cinema Group and subsequently the Filmmakers’ Cooperative, which still distributes films today, to help aid the underground filmmakers in the production and distribution of their films during the 1960s (the manifesto for The New American Cinema Group can be found here, and is definitely worth reading). Thanks to the advent of digital film equipment and the internet, filmmakers do not have to rely as heavily on the help of others to have their films seen and distributed, and they may not have to spend money on film stock or processing fees.

Obviously there have been a lot of generalizations made here, and my thoughts are merely my constantly evolving opinions on the subject. Many of these opinions do not apply to every indie film, of course. I think that overall my issue with indie films is that they have taken on an aesthetic style that is not always necessary or relevant for each film. They often try to emulate the stylistic choices of previous independent directors, thus somewhat disregarding the greatness the indie film’s ability to have more creative freedom than studio films.

- Stephanie Class

Digital-Genetic Feedback

After reading Hansen's work on the enframing of data I found this comment by the brilliant but ethically challenged biotech pirate, Craig Venter chillingly resonant:

"It's the first self-replicating cell on the planet that's parent is a computer," says Venter, referring to the fact that his team converted a cell's genome that existed as data on a computer into a living organism.

Of course, the soundbyte is a drastic oversimplification of what's really happened here, but at the same time, as a proof of concept, it's a significant step towards the broader introduction of artificial, technologically derived forms into organic life.

This specific experiment only used genetic information that had been read, stored, and then reproduced chemically, without intervention into the functional content of the code. In other words, this experiment does not mean that we are any closer to developing artificial genes or in any deliberate way adding to existing, naturally evolved genomes. What it does represent is the entrance of genetic content into the circuit of digital reproducibility, and as holds true from Hansen, processes of manipulation potentialized by digitization.

Over the past three decades, genetic information from various sources (most notably in the 1990–2003 Human Genome Project) has been actively processed and recorded in digital databases. Nearly all of this data is still meaningless to us as the process of correlating genetic data to any form or function within an organism is supremely challenging (hence the controversy when Venter tried to patent the human genome despite having no insight into the raw data to which he was laying claim).

This particular experiment, however, allows the potential for the automated development of genetic code along the lines of the automated production of pharmaceuticals (eg. combinatorial biosynthesis) which has been successfully applied for decades. Having developed a process of effectively "stitching together [a genome] from smaller stretches of DNA synthesised in the lab" from raw data, Venter's lab has essentially created a method for producing genetic versions of Frankenstein's monster, the difference being that billions of attempts could be efficiently made in order to arrive at one that actually thrives. While this technology remains as yet unapplied, one cannot help but wonder how this engagement of the digital and the genetic has already altered our status in the universe. As Siegfried Kracauer wrote in "Boredom", "Radio likewise vaporizes beings, even before they have intercepted a single spark."

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18942-immaculate-creation-birth-of-the-first-synthetic-cell.html

Brian Johnson

Digital Art vs. Video Games

In class, we briefly talked about Hansen's problematic omission of the subject of video games in his book, New Philosophy For New Media. I believe the big question is: what is the difference between digital art and video game images? Hansen explains that in the digital image the body creates the image; the image cannot exist without the body. Our bodies serve as a filter of the data that the digital interface supplies and through our filtration, we create an image. Video games have allowed players to create different digital material as an effect of their bodily intervention since the early 1980's. The comparison is even more compelling now with the rise of new video game consoles and arcades that involve the human body to higher and more active degree such as the Nintendo Wii, the Rock Band games, and Dance Revolution.

So if both of these mediums engage the body, then what really sets them apart? For me, the answer is pretty straightforward. With video games, there is always an objective involved (as with all games). While the player is indeed creating and manipulating digital images by way of their bodily input, the manipulation of the image is only a byproduct of the objective of the player, and that is to complete the game, advance to the next level, save the princess, etc. The digital art that Hansen writes about is "objectiveless" for the viewer. Everyone can interact with these pieces in their own unique way and there is no prize for the viewer who completes the interaction in the best way. I think this simple difference separates the two mediums enough for Hansen that he feels it is not even necessary to mention. If there was a video game where the player merely just controlled a character through a digital space, but there was no other goal beyond that set forth for them, then I think the digital interface would cease to be a video game.

--Jonathan Masino

The City as a Milieu for the Virtual to Happen, Part One

Guy Debord, the leader of Situationist International, in “Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography,” introduces the term psychogeography, which means the study of the particular effects of the environment on the emotions and behavior of city habitants. The prevailing mode of acting in the city, according to Debord, is usually controlled and manipulated by the consumerist ideology, which constantly proposes the legitimated actions within the city. Therefore, a representational layout of the contemporary city supports already known redundant practices within it. In this connection, Guy Debord states that the city should be explored without any preconceptions or prejudices. The Situationists criticize the ordinary mundane interactions with a constructed urban milieu and propose the practice of derive. This practice proposes to read the city interpretively, to turn the city around (détournement) and reconstruct it. In this context, the city practitioners see the possibilities (or we can say virtualities) of the city in places of present fragmentation rather than in already known and constructed areas. In my opinion, the Situationists tried to demonstrate the contrast between how the city life practice is effected by representations and what it could be beyond spectacular, representational impact.

In this connection, I found remarkable similarities between how Deleuze describes the attentive, non-representational ways of becoming, for instance, art practice or traveling, and the open city explorations suggested by the Situationists (and to some extent by Charles Baudelaire earlier). As Bergson states, the virtual image is only possible by having the zone of indetermination in our relations with other objects. In this light, Situationist thoughts about their practices remind me of the distinction between actual and virtual images in Bergson and Deleuze. According to the Situationists, psychogeography suggests the possibilities of new findings allowed by the unpredictable influence of the environment on human feelings. So any situation or conduct of a city's inhabitants that seems to reflect the spirit of discovery was understood as a search for something creative and new. Consequently, the Situationists were trying to realize the new practices within the city (spontaneous, unknown in advance), instead of following the mundane routes and actions. Thus, I would say, that an openness to the unknown, the virtual, is essential for an attentive experience of the city. And that is why I found the Situationist approach to the practice of everyday life close to the Deleuzian one.

Lukas

Some Closing Thoughts re: "Art After Deleuze" and the Whitney Biennial

When Beom presented his project in our final class Wednesday night, there was some confusion as to whether the "work" itself was his sculpture, or the photos of his sculptures, or his lecture referencing the photos of his sculptures. His response was that it was not important to delineate between those processes or titles, since the "work" itself was composed of all three steps.

This nebulous mutation of art – a kind of constant coming-into-being within multiple different media – seems to me to be the most important recent development in contemporary art practice. It is both indebted to and contrary to Deleuzian theory in that his writing focused on singular works of art (i.e., in a single medium format) resulting from the artist's dynamic encounter with the ever-changing percepts and affects of the world. Yet the concept of creation-as-mutation is integral to work such as Beom's and the examples of 'relational art' and participatory, affective-response works profiled by Bourriard and Hansen. The implication is that Deleuze's 'becomings and trajectories' have moved from the stage of fabrication to the stages of conception, presentation, and reception – with fabrication now relegated to a supporting role to facilitate those stages. Artists are no longer passionate material craftspeople but thoughtful stewards or choreographers shuttling an idea through its various forms and ever-expanding applications. This change can be seen in all arts, from painting to music to sculpture to film/video, and it is being grappled with in widely varying ways.

Take the works on view this year at the Whitney Biennial. If this is any indication of the state of contemporary art (and maybe it is, maybe it isn't), confusion and apathy seem to reign. There is a paucity of moving or passionately conceived work in the exhibition, and after seeing it I felt as cynical about the power and potential of art as the majority of artists represented in the show seem to be. Though I don't follow the discussion closely, I know the various Biennials are highly political, buzzy, pop-culture events within the art world, and there are intense debates concerning their rigor and credibility. Leaving that debate aside, I'll focus on the Whitney exhibition in the context of our class material.

It seems as if many artists working today are unmoored by the shifting nature of art's "body." More often than not, their response is to simply literalize that concept – usually with disappointing results.

Some works attempt this through invoking a physiological affective response in the viewer (a la Jeffrey Shaw in Hansen's New Philosophy for New Media). For example, R.H. Quaytman's optical pattern silkscreens unsettle the eyes and therefore the body for no apparent reason except to foreground the 'nature of perception' (that old standby!) and skillfully invoke the building window that inspired them. Even the artist's statement cancels out the possibility of any determined aim. (“I seek to maintain and simultaneously disrupt painting’s absolute presence.”1 ) Uh, okay. So it's about non-space or non-presence? In relation to what – interior design?

The other common approach to literalizing art's shifting mediations is to obscure the work's affiliation to any particular medium. Because everything is art nowadays, nothing is – it is all derived from other areas of visual reproduction, and curators seem reluctant to draw hard lines between genres for fear of seeming conservative or limited in their thinking. Several works at the Whitney capitalize on that confusion and "inclusiveness." Pae White's smoke tapestry, Charles Ray's willowy flowers, and Aurel Schmidt's detritus-as-beauty drawings are primarily works of graphic design, illustration and political cartooning, respectively, that seem to have talked their way into the art exhibition circuit. The documentary photographs of Stephanie Sinclair and Nina Berman are powerful examples of photojournalism at its best, but they have nothing to do with the plane of immanence into which an artist, according to Deleuze, must enter in order to construct something new from the world.

To be fair, this confusion does not necessarily originate in the artists, as art institutions dictate to some degree the playing field. Case in point, the Whitney's description of this year's Biennial is totally noncommittal ("…simply titled 2010 [it] embodies a cross section of contemporary art production rather than a specific theme" 2 ….to which I'm tempted to ask, "Then what are we paying you for?"). It's true there isn't much of a theme among the new works, except perhaps "creepy suburbia" (e.g., Josephine Meckseper's "Mall of America," James Casebere's "Landscape with Houses", Duane Hanson's lifelike sculpture of a middle-aged housewife).

Rather than simplistically literalizing or trivializing the process by which art is shifting form, blurring genre boundaries, and engaging viewers in disorienting ways, some artists are attempting to engage with this ambiguity in genuinely risky ways. Duane Hanson's sculptures are rigorous in their conception and execution; their careful fabrication process seems to require the artist's personal engagement with the affects and percepts of human figuration, while forcing him (and us) to grapple with figurative sculpture's transition from idealized portraiture to arbiter of decaying social relations.

Among the video works, Sharon Hayes' "Parole" applies skillful filmmaking techniques to portray moments defined by body language and movement (e.g., interviews, interrogations, and dance) and creates an immersive environment for the viewer in which screens and sounds layer upon one another, building in relation to the timing of the viewer's entrance into the space. Like the immersive projection environments of Aernout Mik, this work is passionately political yet nebulous in its aesthetic footing and genre classification. There is a sense we are on a journey with the artist through the works' multiple permutations – as if the images' independent juxtapositions and interactions (the "something that goes beyond testimony to the photographer's art" described by Walter Benjamin3) determines the outcome. The work does not exist solely inside the frame of the images, but in the conflagration of all the screens interacting at once, through and without the viewer – who may be a witness or a participant to the videos' content.

Whether successful or not, today's questioning, unsettled art works show that we are grappling with a new kind of practice whose trajectory must cross not only different media forms but different states of being, in order to become whole. With regards to my own web-based and film/video projects, which feed into and grow out of one another in various shifting ways, I am discovering that the creative process is a kind of constant reconfiguration (Bergson's 'kaleidoscopic' assemblage of images in relation to "the privileged image" of the body4). With no fixed entry or end points, this process unfolds within the germinating pool of ideas or images that I find myself constantly revisiting in one form or another.

Thanks, Sam and everyone, for a great class. Happy summer...

---Noelia

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1Whitney Biennial website [http://whitney.org/Exhibitions/2010Biennial]; accessed May 20-21, 2010.

2 Ibid.

3 Benjamin, Walter. "Little History of Photography," The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media, ed. Michael W. Jennings et al., trans. Edmund Jephcott et al. (Cambridge and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008), p. 276.

4 Bergson, Henri. “Of the Selection of Images for Conscious Presentation,” in Matter and Memory, trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1911), pp. 12-13.

Crisis of the Historical-Image

One of the things that struck me in Andrei Tarkovsky's book Sculpting In Time, was his theories on films embedded in specific time periods. He spends a small section of the essay talking about the challenges his crew faced when filming Andrei Rublyov, which takes place in the fifteenth century. He makes the bold claim that by focusing too much on "how everything was" the filmmaker actually does the cinema a disservice [1]. In virtually every big production period piece we see today, the primary emphasis is put on historical accuracy: Do the costumes match the period? Are the actor's speaking in correct accents? Do the props and the scenery evoke the proper time? These obsessions with period and detail only detract from the emotion, the rhythm, and the character of the film. Asking these questions will only kill time, which Tarkovsky tries so hard to sustain. The image becomes completely historical, but for Tarkovsky, history is not time; it is only a consequence of it [2].

Tarkovsky would probably argue that when making a period piece, the filmmaker should be emphasizing the likeness between the film and the viewer instead of the difference. This would be the only way to enable the audience to endure time through the cinema. By magnifying the minute details of the period, the cinema becomes more of a museum hall than a proper theater. The material is instantly frozen in time and made into a relic, inaccessible by the audience. The viewer is distanced from anything the filmmaker might be trying to convey.

In Andrei Rublyov, while the art direction is appropriate for the times, it isn't beaten over the viewer's head. The audience is able to experience the characters more closely and the long takes become more contemplative and visceral as opposed to simply visual. I'm actually trying to achieve the same thing in my graduate film, which takes place in an unspecified time and place circa war torn Europe in the early twentieth century. I was undaunted by the difficulty in shooting a period piece on a low student budget, because of the notion that I could establish a better sense of time without emphasizing the era, but how I believe that time was experienced by the characters. Just because a film is made in a classical period does not mean it must be made classically; one can make full use of the more modern time-image, which Deleuze speaks of. As he also states, the time-image creates a sense of present/pastness. The films that focus on capturing historically accurate details are only considering the past, and are not merging it with the present viewing, which is necessary for the time-image. This historical-image is fully crystallized in that it has already achieved everything it can; there is no more virtual and there is no more connection to the body. The historical-image has become all it can before it is even viewed by an audience. The affect for the viewer would only be one of an academic appreciation at best, but not new though process would be generated. With the time-image, the image is still alive and can continue to become.

(1) Tarkovsky, Andrei Sculpting in Time, p.78
(2) Tarkovsky, Andrei Sculpting in Time, p.57

--Jonathan Masino

The Whitney Pla(q/g)ue

The Whitney Biennial 2010 validated a problem I encountered with the same museum six years ago: the fetishism of theory. I do not know if it is from the curators or the artists, but there is a tendency to finalize the experience of the artwork with overreaching statements. While I did like some of the work displayed, I will not go into details about them. What bothered me was that after looking at the artwork, I read sentences that I found perplexing. I felt like I was reading something movie commercials on TV would do. One superimposed text for commercial for Taken (2008) read, "Move over Bourne, here comes the next action hero." The former film is about human trafficking; The Bourne Identity is a film about espionage. Of course, the movie industry was forcing the action angle, and it seems that the Whitney was the authority of ideas, as Hollywood is the authority of wish fulfillment.

The "art world" theorizes like a secret that visitors stumble upon, yet this secret is revealed because it conceals a problematic within the art world: the art definition. Words like "Surrealist can draw romantic flights of the style, "weird" or "avant-garde." Instead of allowing viewers to exhibit the artwork, the curators allowed statements to represent the artwork. As a result, there is a severe disconnect between what you read and what you see. For instance, part of the description for "Michael and Charles," by Lorraine O'Grady, claims that the pairing of the pop singer and poet is "raising issues of class, race and the highly ambivalent nature of beauty that the new abstraction ignores." So Michael is black/Negro/African American, and Charles is French. Am I supposed to validate the ongoing struggle to demote white superiority? Are Jackson's standardized pop songs superior to Baudelaire's poems? Are they compatible? Hindering this line of thought I'm supposed to follow is a white ambulance/hearse in the middle of the room, spewing a female voice. Am I supposed to appreciate the photographs by being distracted? As for the "highly ambivalent nature of beauty," I guess those ads for Gap, Mabelline, and Calvin Klein make ambiguous statements. Why do women wear make-up, and why do men unbutton their buttoned shirts?

The plague of catchwords disseminate the infect visitors with the 'oh" response, so that they can proceed to the next artwork and nod along. Thus, the plaque narrows discourse by imposing an ideological wall, where one the other side "they" know what's going on with art these days.

by Raul Garcia