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!
Music / editing sync is used sparingly, at the discretion of the composer.