Morgan Dusatko | Storyteller / Project Manager |
an old blog from when I was in school.
Here are some of the better posts:
This one is about chimps and cyber altruism.
This one is about the fluxus art movement.
And this brain bender is about DJ Spooky and AfroFuturism.
This last one is about a Chineese blog.
Morgan
I just wanted to write a quick post and share this everyone.
This is a movie about the open source movement. In fact, the movie itself (or at least a version of the movie) is open source itself. It features Girl Talk, Gilberto Gil (Minister of Culture of Brazil), and Lawrence Lessig (the creator of the Creative Commons and author of many books on the subject of copyright law).
The issue here is specifically about music and remixing. I have thought about this issue a lot, from the point of view of a musician that is using unlicensed samples, from the point of view of a DJ, and as a musician trying to make a few dollars on my “original” compositions.
An initial question is: what is this issue like from the perspective of a musician? What is the issue about for the record industry? The musicians that make remixed or sample based music are usually using technology in ways that were unimaginable in the past. When a major music studio says “you can’t use this,” or that what a remix artist does with sound isn’t valid (as a commodity) unless you have enough money to pay for the licencing fees for the samples, that basically comes down to corporations trying the shut down a whole art movement.
I see remix artist as the forerunners of and an extention of the postmodern art movement. They express the way this movement alive today. In the music industry, mash up and sample based artists like Girl Talk are alive and striving. So to connect this thought to the issue: Copyright laws were first set up to deter plagiarism. Sample based music however is a different animal. Owning a Girl Talk album would never deter anyone from buying a Jackson 5 album. They are not the same thing. Not even close. So using laws that were designed for plagiarism and enforcing them on artist that are re-purposing cultural memes makes me think that the record industry has another agenda.
By the way, this has nothing to do with the illegal downloading of music or other media. I don’t think they should be lumped into the same conversation.
I don’t want to write a diatribe about this, there are many books and lectures about this by people who know way more about the subject that I do. I think it’s important. I think that the debate is about way more that about the major labels and bands making a few dollars.
Here are a few websites that explore this more:
Thanks,
Morgan
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.
Thanks for watching.
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!
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.