I scored a movie that will appearing at the Georgetown Super 8 film festival (I also directed this movie). The deal is you have to shoot one roll of super 8 with no editing and they show it just like that. You can make a soundtrack, but they push play on the CD player at the same time they push play on the projector, so you are guaranteed to have your soundtrack be synced wrong. I took that to heart, but I really don’t know if it’s going to work.
We decided that it would be hard to create a narrative with only in camera editing so we wrote a little story about the death of the Greek philosopher Diogenes. It stars Bradley Hutchinson as Diogenes (also starring in the Hot Dog Cycle and soon to be directing a movie that I adapted for the screen). Please come out and see it on May 2nd (although the location is still TBA).
I found this video while I was going through some old hard drives yesterday. I made it for a friend while I was in Los Angeles for my sister’s graduation. I edited it using whatever software my sister’s boyfriend uses, so it has some very basic cuts and dissolves.
The beginning is a little goofy but I really like the end. I think it’s worth a watch, but the real reason I wanted to post it is that it is about landscape cinema.
There is a lot of rambling and searching for answers that I don’t have. But hopefully it will inspire someone to think about movies in a different way.
Another couple of smaller films I wanted to discuss on this idea come out of a more recent experimental film tradition that embraces a more low budget, personal approach to film making and hence the movies are generally less epic (but this by no means makes them any better or worse).
Bill Brown has made a series of films that reflect on the landscape in various ways.
I would say that he is a high nostalgist, a perpetual tourist (a well spoken, thoughtful tourist). He movies evoke what it feels like to be in a place that is not your home. His videos are about history and connection. They seem like small struggles to find a home, or at least find the authenticity of the landscape.
I like the ideas that his films bring up because the camera itself creates a distance between the filmmaker and the subject. This feeling is present with or without a camera (for me at least, almost all the time) and his movies seem to really capture this feeling.
Something different about his movies and the ones we have previously discussed is that Brown uses voice over heavily, a technique that make the movies more about a personal experience of the place. Man With a Movie Camera, and the Qatsi Trilogy seem to be using film to document a place as it is. Bill Brown, with this voice over, makes us feel like the camera is more related to the experience of vision and feeling rather then a map or a document of a place or event.
I couldn’t find a clip of one of his movies, although you can find out more about them here.
The last film I am going to discuss is the Subconscious Art of Graffiti Removal directed by Matt McCormick. McCormick and Brown have a lot in common, and their movies are in conversation with each other (they are also both distributed by McCormick’s video label Peripheral Produce).
Here is an excerpt:
This movie is also directly about the landscape. It uses several formal devices that spin the genre off in a new direction.
The soundtrack of this movie distances us from the experience of being there. Unlike the soundtracks of the Qatsi Triliogy, the soundtrack of this movie wants us to always be aware that we are watching a movie. And that is exactly why this movie is so interesting when compared to movies of the same genre.
The voice over is a parody of educational films and asks us to think of the landscape in new ways. Landscape Cinema in general asks us to consider experience as universal and brings up themes of the collective unconscious. But this film directly addresses this with the voice over.
There is another element of irony that pervades this movie. It is especially acute because this type of irony is a relatively new cultural force (or at least it seems this way), making this an especially contemporary film. Somehow this element reacts with the material in somevery subtle ways that I’m not sure I can describe here.
If you ever get a chance watch this movie. You can buy it here.
All that said, I have made a few Landscape Cinema movies. In preperation for my first one, I created a list of all the generic qualities of the films I had watched as a rough guideline for the editing. It was inspired by this movie, a mash up of a Flaming Lips album and movie Baraka. I noticed that the sequences in the movie very closed related to songs.
Here is my 11 point editing strategy:
1) Shots of similar content are grouped together.
2) Sequences are 3 – 5 min in length.
3) It moves toward a goal (progression from slow – fast, natural – unnatural). This is where you find conflict.
4) Day and night continuity are mostly preserved. A dark day shot may be substituted for a night shot at
the beginning or end of a sequence.
5) Moment and speed increase or decrease (not the time of the edits, but the motion in the frame).
6) There is a basic time allotment for each shot.
7) Exact shot length is directly proportionate to how dynamic the shot is and how long it takes the eye to travel around the frame.
Music / editing sync is used sparingly, at the discretion of the composer.
9) Going between locations must be done in montage style. You cannot make several cuts in one location and then move to another. The locations must merge into one space.
10) Sound sync is used sparingly and only as a device to draw the viewers’ attention to the actuality of the image.
11) Philip Glass is overrated…
Thanks for reading, I think there is at least one more post on this topic and I’ll upload my own movies soon!
Here is my longest Landscape film. I would like to say it’s the best, but I guess you can decide that. It’s about 10 minutes so please give it time to load.
I’d like to talk a little bit about how this was made but first I would like to define a couple of things for people who are reading this that are not video geeks. A codec (code / decode) is a language that video is written in. In order for the video to work, there must be a coder and a decoder on their respective ends (one on the camera, one on the computer). This works much the same way that written and verbal language works. In order to be understood, the person speaking (coder) and the person listening (decoder) must both speak the same language. That said, each codec treats video in it’s own ways. Some make blocky square shapes in the image, some restrict the dimensions, some are designed for the web and make tiny files, some are made for film post processing and take up banks of hard drives for a movie.
A format is similar to a codec in that it is a technology that deal with a video. VHS is a format as is Analog 8mm. For our purposes I will call different gauges of film formats.
Why do we care about this? Because as a beginning video student I was fascinated with how these different technologies seemed to have political and emotional qualities inherent in them. Part of the question I was trying to answer with this film was what are these qualities? How do they interact with each other? How can I harness their expressive potential to make the audience see things how I see them?
(As an aside, if you want to know what I mean by political and emotional qualities, watch a video on youtube and then watch a video on an HDTV. Both of these are video, but even watching the same content is not the same. The image “quality” changes the image and it’s meaning itself).
another name for fate… was shot on 16mm, Super 8, Analog 8mm video, SVHS, DV and various other video cameras with different codecs (some MJPEG, others proprietary). I was excited by each camera. I wanted to live inside of each one. The camera itself became the point in some of my shooting, the experience of capturing the world behind a lens. The way that felt more like life than life really did. Here is an example of rambling in my notebook from that time:
The codec then becomes a subtle signifier. Evoking the minutiae of emotion, shape, form, context and framing the content within a context of class, intent, politics. When used together they make an opera in a kind of explicitly direct Esperanto that is both organic and easily understood by a general audience and fully contemporary.
I found this to be one of the most exciting things about video and films in general. Here the tool told you things about the work that weren’t already in the work. I think I knew this before, being being able to articulate it was really the breakthrough.
I began with the discussion of this movie in technical terms, because that is what differentiates this movie from most, the attention to the technical details, and the inclusion of the technical details in the meaning of the film. Hopefully this attention added to what the movie was actual about. The content. The actual images and what they represent.
Like most Landscape Cinema I took an anthropological, “documentary” approach. This movie is about infrastructure. The premise of the movie is that the landscape is related to the collective conscious / unconscious. Or rather that our landscape is an exact replica of the place where our consciousness meet.
In real terms this means that we could make our landscape any way we choose. But we have chosen this particular way. This applies for all the structures we have created, our economies, our religions, all of the ways we connect with each other.
The misquotes from the bible are reinterpretations of our collective (Western) knowledge and a symbol of my concept of destiny. Just as these quotes are prophecies of a future, this is what those represent. Our buildings, our bridges, our structures are all representations of structures that were laid out for us both from the structure of our brains and in the structure of our history.
Here is another quote from my notebook that sums this idea up nicely:
The world is in a constant state of autobiography.
The two screen sequences represent the two conclusions at work against each other. Namely that the world is simultaneously an extension of a destiny, and that randomness is a part of that destiny. Some times the two screens show us the same image (that both destiny and random free will are the same thing) and sometimes two different and opposing things (that destiny and randomness are opposing forces).
I was inspired to use this strategy by Matt McCormick’s the Subconscious Art of Graffiti Removal. Hopefully I did more then just ape this technique. My aim was to add some visual and conceptual confines to the conceit and the enhance the expressive potential of parallel montage.
Here is a very rambly ramble from my notebook that touches on this topic:
Shared memory = culture = the blending (blurring) of individuality = media culture = ethnography -> science -> art -> autobiography -> postmodernism -> dialogic (parallel montage) (schizophrenia). How can one work express dialogic systems? How can one work become two? Contradictory and in agreement at that same time!
Scientific method through art. -approaching a hypothesis with multiple experiments and drawing multiple conclusions?
2 conflicting hypothesis, 2 conflicting conclusions within one experiment…
Lastly I would like to reflect briefly on the practicality of shooting this movie. This movie was done, by myself, with no money, as the final project of my first year of film and video studies at Evergreen. I have learned Final Cut Pro and how to actually operate the cameras on this movie and the whole thing took me about 12 60 hour weeks to complete. Some of my film negative got scratched, I lost weight, lost sleep, treated my girlfriend poorly while I was making this movie. That said, this movie made me evaluate whether or not making movies was actually a good way to live a life. I have conflicting views about this now, but I will save discussion about those for a later time.
Here are some of the film logs from my notebook:
Shot 7 = Aurora bridge from troll, 35th. Couldn’t find truly suitable shot. 25mm RX. Light meter 1.25k ish. f = 16. focus 200 feet – infinity. 45 feet? exposed end. Also try to make sure that i still have film. I heard a sound around 25 feet that made me nervous. Shot 8 = another one of aurora! 30 feet?
Thank you for watching. I hope that you enjoyed the movie.
Categories: Films, Theory Posted on March 23, 2009
Recently some had talked to me about experimental videos based on landscapes. She told me that she loved to just shoot landscapes and edit them together. She is not alone, there are lots of films and videos that take this approach.
I guess Landscape Cinema is an offshoot of the experimental documentary genre, although I’m not sure what experimental documentary means exactly. Maybe that’s the point. Maybe it’s a genre that means “any documentary that is unrecognizable as a documentary.” Or maybe it has something to do with formal experimentation.
Either way, I spent a great deal of time thinking about landscape cinema and I would like to help my friend on her quest. One of the hardest things you can do it to make a movie that you don’t know what’s it’s really about, or you haven’t ever seen one like it.
So here is a little bit of the research I have done and some places to get started if you wanted to know more about it.
The first thing to do is watch Man With a Movie Camera dir Dziga Vertov.
While I wouldn’t say that this was truly the best example of Landscape Cinema, I would say that it is an entry point to movies that explore the relationship between the camera and the subject, the landscape, and cinema as a visual medium.
This movie is less prosaic, more centered toward an anthropological view, and is certainly underlines the document in documentary. It unfolds as a sort of visual / musical poem and has no dialog or even any text besides the credits that I can remember. It’s a treat if you get to watch the whole thing especially if you can see it on a big screen or projected.
Now in my modest amount of research I have not found any movies that I have thought especially useful in my study of Landscape Cinema between this movie and next movies we will discuss. I’m sure they exist and if anyone knows about any of them please let me know.
The next is a series of movies that exemplify the genre.
Here is a clip from Powaqqatsi.
The Qatsi Trilogy is a trilogy of films by director Godfrey Reggio. Here is a quote from Reggio about the films:
So what I decided to do in making these films is to rip out all the foreground of a traditional film–the foreground being the actors, the characterization, the plot, the story–I tried to take the background, all of that that’s just supported like wallpaper, move that up into the foreground, make that the subject, ennoble it with the virtues of portraiture, and make that the presence.
These beautiful movies are really about seeing, feeling, the experience of being human and show us new and exciting ways that movies can express the human condition.
I would like to make the point that all of the movies we are talking about right now, and Landscape Cinema in general, is in a lot of ways a pretty major contrast to narrative films. First and foremost, they don’t contain a story. Secondly there are no actors, no scenes per se, and are not designed to convey textual information to bring about catharsis. They are in contrast to most conventional films for the same reasons (although both are by definition nonfiction).
When contrasted with dramatic narrative films, movies like this ask: Why make a movie? What is the point? For what subjects and ideas is the motion picture good for? How can the moving image be used to express new ideas, concepts? How can the moving image make me understand what it is to be a human (or whatever one is trying to understand)? Why do we not see movies like this more often?
I’m not going to try to answer any of these questions. Even if I could attempt such a feat I believe that my answers would detract from the movies themselves.
The Qatsi Triliogy really makes the point that a picture is worth a thousand words. Or rather there are some things that words can’t convey, and maybe film can. The delicate and poetic way that information is conveyed, the way that you feel like you are really there, and the beauty in life that these movies express show us that maybe film (and the moving image in general) can be used for more than telling stories. Maybe there is something special about the moving image that makes it useful to mankind for other reasons…
Thanks for reading. The second installment of this topic will be up in a few days.
I went on a road trip last summer with my mom and my nephew. I took some videos of the trip. Mostly it seemed like I was on a quest to try to find out more about my mother’s history. I am working slowly on a movie about my mother and father’s relationship and how it has effected mine. Here is a video of her talking about marriage.
Music / editing sync is used sparingly, at the discretion of the composer.