International
Videos In The 1987 Melbourne International Film Festival
published in Filmnews Vol.17 No.7,
Sydney, 1987
VIDEO
Quote
: (Take your pick of anything Godard has said on the cinema
- his passionate hatred for it has always been his fundamental
driving energy for making films and videos.)
A
Film Festival is perhaps the best place to show videos at
the moment. Not because a Festival is some glorious event
or hallowed ground (in fact it is one of the many mutant
offspring resultant from an unholy marriage between the
counter culture and the upper-middle class) but because
(a) their inclusion is a relief from the Cannes hot-line
and all its stilted cultural values, and (b) some videos
can say some things about the cinema which films are too
often incapable of saying.
Many
recent videos are part-opportunistically part-theoretically
proposing future directions for that apparatus or institution
we so salaciously label "The Cinema". The point is that
video can just as comfortably rest within that institution's
walls as well as celluloid - and if you haven't noticed
this over the past three years or so, you can't be all that
connected with 'film' or The Cinema. Or to quote Richard
Franklin at his Festival seminar on Hitchcock's TOPAZ and
the director's right to final cut : "Video? Don't look now
- it's coming right around the corner."
Punning
on that quote, we have a very apt description of video :
existing on an expansive periphery which we see only out
of the corner of our eyes. Festivals - as strange spectacles
of cultural obsessiveness and reclusiveness - have us pay
little attention to peripherys, be they technological, cultural
or artistic. With sharpened focus (probably from an aesthetic
overload of photography/cinematography) we pinpoint films
at a Festival with some supposed clarity, as if we have
some worldly view of this thing we call "The Cinema" - when
so many of us haven't seen film installations in galleries,
student films at institutes, dusk-to-dawns at drive-ins
or porn flicks at strip joints. Obviously, a Film Festival
is just as culturally loaded as the next site of screen
flickering, but more importantly, it is probably the narrowest
through its attempts to bring us what we couldn't see anywhere
else - a true irony considering that we're probably not
looking anywhere else anyway. Videos in a Festival are one
clear way of reminding us how little we do look in other
places apart from those forged channels we presume charter
the world of The Cinema.
(The
following review covers 58 of the 66 international videos
screened. Dates are given where available. The Australian
works and the 9 hour compilation of INFERMENTAL 6 are not
covered as they warrant separate analysis outside of the
international focus of this review.)
CINEMA
Quote
: (Fill in your own cliche about how film is so much richer
than video, etc.)
Godard
sells video by making film. And vice versa. THE RISE &
FALL OF A SMALL INDEPENDENT PRODUCTION COMPANY (1986) is
another rich essay on the cinema, this time spoken through
a video grain and through the production channels for film
which rely on video for their flow (casting, research, even
computer accounts). In many instances, Godard has been able
to subordinate the video medium into a cinematic mode, by
accenting the inevitable effects caused by one's production
situation (hence the whole scenario about trying to make
a film with true aim and purpose but not enough money).
The message of this video is not how the medium is the message
but that the message is a medium : its cultural, material
and linguistic effects are translatable and recodable. The
filmmaker in the story is not the tortured director, but
the accountant - he can adapt plus he can account for his
adaptation.
The
voice of Godard wafts through two interesting English videos,
which can be made even more interesting by contrasting them
against one another : John Adams' INTELLECTUAL PROPERTIES
(1985/6) and Mark Wilcox's MAN OF THE CROWD (1986). Both
come from a peculiar British milieu where the odd Screen
mag must have crossed both directors' paths at one stage
or another, fueling their fictional constructions with Brechtian
devices, deconstructivism and New Wave modalities. This
is not a bad state of affairs at all. Hopefully a day will
come when we won't make such a fuss over such basic forms
and methods and instead treat them as open narrative options.
Interestingly,
both films are concerned with the random image of extras
and people walking past cameras in the street, and then
formulating stories out of the stills and freeze-frames.
INTELLECTUAL PROPERTIES takes a short film (supposedly made
by John Adams himself) and then totally tears it apart through
a series of narrative detonations which make up dense interconnecting
stories from the original film's scattered sequences of
images. It is divided into 6 parts which deal with the blockage
and releasing of authorial flows emanating from an original
text : 1 - THOSE HELICOPTERS (music as crosser of language
barriers, featuring music by Ken Winokur & Ken Field
which uncannily sounds like the music of a quirky English
group from the early 80s called Those Helicopters) ; 2 -
LOOKING FOR JOHN WAYNE (the link between ideas and commerce
; artworks as 'intellectual properties') ; 3 - MEDIAOCRACY
(copywrite as guarantee for professional status) ; 4 - WATCH
OUT FOR THE CRAZIES (product consumption chains) ; 5 - THE
MODERN COUPLE (the commodification of information) ; and
6 - POWER PLAYS (insecurity of the author function). Occasionally
a bit droll and witty in its humour and idiosyncratic detailing
(what some people would probably call 'clever') the bulk
of this video moves along with great speed and complexity
(especially parts 4 & 5), creating a textual giddiness
not unlike the work of Robbe-Grillet, minus the senuousness.
MAN
OF THE CROWD drowns in senuousness, even though it attempts
a similar textual play. The image of intellectualism shines
brightly on the surface of this video : Duras, Bausch, Fassbinder
and Brecht all are put through the grinder in a display
of self-deconstructed theatrics and sophisticated artificialism.
A tricky game to play (QUERELLE is a rarity, and is so because
it fully discloses its own problematics) and this video
loses out to win a capital "F" for Art. While the role of
photography is viewed as fraudulent empiricism in INTELLECTUAL
PROPERTIES (as in Robbe-Grillet's LAST YEAR IN MARIENBAD
and especially THE MAN WHO LIES) in MAN OF THE CROWD it
is viewed as a seductive deception, sort of like pulping
a New Novel with BLOW UP. It starts off well enough in its
split flow from the original Poe story of the same name,
but eventually gets distracted by its own imagery (period
costumes, painterly backdrops, gothic-styled lighting, Grecian
ruins, tableaux vivants, etc.) instead of concentrating
on its own textual effects. The kind of thing boring film
reviewers would tag "sumptuous", "breathtaking" and "evocative".
The kind of thing inspired by looking at INDIA SONG without
listening to it.
If
INTELLECTUAL PROPERTIES goes back via Straub to Clayton
& Curling's SONG OF THE SHIRT, MAN OF THE CROWD goes
back via MONTY PYTHON to Mason & Burch's THE IMPERSONATION.
Therein lie their surfacial, formal and critical relationships.
Along with the Godard video, though, they are videos that
could have been films - but didn't suffer because they weren't.
Without wishing to type so-called intellectual films, there
is something in their textual preoccupations that can momentarily
discount the aesthetics of filmic grain. As uncomfortably
'clever' as it is, SONG OF THE SHIRT is worth remembering
here (and I believe that 'cinematically' it stands up well
in a current climate where theory is regarded as a tedious
dinner guest) because like Godard's later work and Bellour's
video texts it clashes film and video grains to set up material
rhythms that eventually cancel out or at least reorient
their purported differences. Similarly, could not films
by Mulvey & Wollen, Burch, Ruiz, Straub et al be videos
instead of films? (And while you're at it, throw into the
oil Duras, Kluge and Gorin and see if they boil too.)
The
whole issue of the precious filmic object is all too often
tied in with tacky erotics of its surface - that whole thing
of its warmth, wavering and width. For example, Rappaport
and Greenaway are perhaps no more than pseudeo-intellectual
David Hamiltons, clinging to the filmic grain out of artistic
desperation - which is probably why they have a broader
appeal to likewise desperates who think the cinema should
be filmic (even though they're probably the same people
who couldn't bear Brakhage). What I'm trying to ball out
here is the suspect nature of film : the fact that it is
the image of 'filmicness' which so many makers and viewers
wish for, rather than integral inquiries into filmic nature
or instigative plays with the problematics of grain. To
reposition McCluhan, the medium really is a massage here
: all grain and no brain.
Whilst
the U.K. has been prominent in making films and videos around
these critical fissures, the European continent (particularly
Italy, France, Belgium and the Netherlands) seems to have
used video to come to the cinema through theatre. This year's
festival showcased a lot of Italian videos, most of which
were full of style but not much else (which I guess is very
Italian anyway). Two videos that are a very good example
of this theatre-video-cinema transformation trend are Mario
Martone's GLACIAL TANGO (1983) and TREACHEROUS ENCHANTMENTS
(1985). (Martone is director of the Italian theatre-dance
group False Movement who appear in both videos.)
GLACIAL
TANGO smarts of a dance group who've just discovered the
dreaded chromo-key and go for an all too obvious artificial
look. For some reason, chromo-key has suggested to so many
video artists that the medium is ideal for the depiction
and manipulation of icons, and GLACIAL TANGO is no exception
with its short'n'snappy image-narrative fragmentation of
a series of cartoonish sub-surrealistic situations that
borrow heavily from movie imagery. The weird thing about
chromo-key in this mode of 'high artifice' is that it unintentionally
showcases a lack of critical depth, flattening out the artists
against a background of video nothingness. TREACHEROUS ENCHANTMENTS
refines the method further (with more sophisticated keying,
camera work, set design and editing) but flits through the
cultural memory of Hollywood's great image bank so predictably
it becomes a cliche about how to 'manipulate' visual cliches.
You know the story - throw in some movie references and
instantly you're addressing (in the form of either a critique
or a hommage) the great classical text of Hollywood. How
Cahiers, darling.
Alessandro
Furlan's NIGHT THRILLER (1986) uses the most overworked
cliche for narrative deconstruction : the Detective. How
long do we have to suffer this endless discovery of a relationship
between writer/reader/text and event/detective/puzzle? The
New Novel and related French linguists played with such
relationships 30 years ago - and without utilizing the image
of the Detective. Conversely, much film noir contemporaneously
relocated such textual movement into the image of the Detective.
But the fetishism of noir imagery in the name of "playing
with the conventions of the genre" amounts to no more than
aimless visual mimicry.
Less
specific in its chosen fetish is B. Geduldig & Tuxedo
Moon's GHOST SONATA (1983) although it is just as overwhelmed
by the effect of its imagery as NIGHT THRILLER. GHOST SONATA
reconstructs the Ibsen theatrical narrative as a flow of
visual ambience and mood that (incongruously) ranges from
the gothic to the surrealist, evoking an aura of desire,
memory, obsession and all those standard things that for
some reason are meant to be rich in literary values. With
occasional poetry by Tuxedo Moon's poet-collaborator Winston
Tong, the whole scenario really doesn't rise above a bunch
of art students in love with the act of being artistic (mannered
gestures, delicate costumes, bizarre connections, etc.).
While Tuxedo Moon's music since 1980 has often been quite
striking, GHOST SONATA appears thin in comparison. File
with Greg Karn, David Sylvian, Richard Jobson, Bill Nelson,
Ryuchi Sakamoto and sundry sensitive artistes whose love
for passion gets in the way for their passion to create.
Theatre
(as opposed to the image of appearing theatrical) marked
its presence in two video adaptations of staged works. While
Ulrich Herrmann's THE RESTING BUDDAH & THE LARK (1985)
is a fairly straightforward documentary of the White Tiger
group's Butoh performance (although his editing is an aggravating
disruption to the core rhythms of the performance), Ken
Kobland's FLAUBERT DREAMS OF TRAVEL BUT THE ILLNESS OF HIS
MOTHER PREVENTS IT (1986) reshapes the Wooster Group's staging
of Flaubert's THE TEMPTATION OF ST. ANTHONY during its rehearsal.
This is an interesting concept - shaping the video before
the finished production. The finished video is quite sumptuous
(that word again) but somehow its rhythmic repetitions and
minimalist movements allow one to dwell past the static
imagery into a more temporal zone of those images' narration.
The whole tape is in slow motion and visually it resembles
a Cindy Sherman staging of Wegee photographs with Warhol
superstars. It all sounds like a compact hip package, but
its audio-visual layering (thanks to a considered sound
mix) governs its effects more than its overtly arty imagery.
Out
of all the videos mentioned (excepting Godard's) John Sanborn's
SISTER SUZIE CINEMA (1985) touches on the aura of cinematic
construction in the most original way. It is an awkward
work : adapted from 14 Karat Soul's accapella routines perfected
on the N.Y. subways and reshaped by Lee Brauer and Bob Telson
into an Off-Off-Broadway late-night musical (sort of a black
Nylons music/theatre crossover). Basically the whole thing
stinks. But through its overload of cute and naive references
to The Cinema (silver dreams, Monroe's lips, the face of
Garbo, reel life, etc.) Sanborn has managed to use video
effects to restate those glorifications of stardom in a
visual mode alien to the cinema. It's hard to describe,
but this video 'images' The Cinema in ways that invest a
different type of visual symbolism into the filmic cliches
- to such an extent that perhaps if it were made on film
it just wouldn't be all that engaging. Visually, SISTER
SUZIE CINEMA resembles the Hollywod range of Paper Moon's
modern graphics, but it is the material energization and
mobilization of such imagery that makes this video both
confounding and fascinating.
ART
Quote
: (Let out your own gripe about how boring video art is,
etc.)
In
the beginning there was colourization. Then came chrono-key.
And now something else that equally shows little sign of
going way : computer graphics. Let's divide this into two
categories : (i) digital manipulation of stored visual data
; and (ii) digital creation of visual data. The first category
was well represented by Ko Nakajima's MOUNT FUJI (1985)
which actually comes in three different variations, each
as meandering as the next. A variety of images of Mount
Fuji and its surroundings are videoed in different ways,
providing source material which is then put through a mind-boggling
yet eye-soring range of State Of The Art (SOTA) joystick
effects. MOUNT FUJI provides an excellent picture of this
type of computer video art : a single dumb image seductively
yet mindlessly swimming, spinning and sailing around the
screen in a restless play with optical illusions and allusions.
Produced by Sony and Sponichi TV News and with music by
Stomu Yamashtu & Paul Buckmaster, it's ideal fodder
for technicians to run before a TV station begins transmission.
Whereas
MOUNT FUJI opts for a wallpaper function, Marco Marochini's
MANIFESTO (WE'RE IN THE PUSH-BUTTON AGE) (1985) attempts
to be the main painting on the wall. Conceptually, it reads
like a high school report on watching John Berger's hyper-orthodox
WAYS OF SEEING. It mixes a mess of images from the Renaissance
right up through to Modernism as if it is making some profound
comment on the encoding of perception. Computer wipes and
disolves abound with all the artistry of a plumber - which
in some instances could work well, but not in this tape.
Perhaps video artists should first pass some kind of test
before they're allowed onto Fairlights.
Created
graphics were well-represented by dozens of tapes, ranging
from the simplistic to the astounding. Marco Bechis' K-PAINT
(198?) is a short visual pun involving him chromo-keyed
in on the setting he draws 'live' on a Fairlight pressure
pad. The simplicity of Paolo Uliana's LINES, HOMMAGE TO
MONDRIAN and LIGHT TRAVELS (all 1985) went further to display
the BASIC language used to run their programmes, which gave
their banality a light self-reflexivity in contrast to the
ponderous technological introspective that marked Colour
Factory's BORN INTO LIGHT and Group THC's HOLIDAY OUTT.
An
Italian group called Young Mechanical Swingers are representative
of the internationalist trend to form multi-media production
units primarily concerned with a hi-tech hi-gloss mode of
style production (witness the failures and successes of
Heaven 17, The Wonder Company, Psychic TV, Test Pattern,
Radical TV, The Residents, General Idea, Sigue Sigue Sputnik,
etc.). While Y.M.S.'s work measures well on the hipometer,
their videos have that uncanny Italian trait that in bluntest
terms spells rip-off. The Italians, though, are nearly as
skilled and inventive in this area as the Japanese (check
out mainstream Italian film production for proof) so Y.M.S.
have got a long way to go on their trip of simulation, aspiration
and appropriation - all of which they have yet to master.
Their videos THE ADVENTURES OF MARIONETTI and MODERN MELODRAMA
(both 1986) go overboard with sub-SOTA computer graphics
that seem to declare "I'm in love with the modern age" but
without knowing how to plug into it.
THE
ADVENTURES OF MARIONETTI is a facile video (technologically
and conceptually) where a young man goes to a Marionetti
exhibition where all the paintings are moving. (Geddit?)
MODERN MELODRAMA is another computer graphic scenario which
does something that every second video artist in the world
thinks they invented : transposing photo and comic romances
into flat hi-key video imagery. There are points in this
tape which start to get interesting in terms of the wacky
mutant feel of the imagery (not unlike some of the fusion
of New Japanese Illustration with computer graphics) but
overall the tape displays a lack of control over its style
of depiction. Amigas and Fairlights are capable of fascinating
static visual graphics, none of which MODERN MELODRAMA taps.
Some
of John Sanborn's tapes included in the Festival drew strong
connections with some of his earlier computer work with
Kit Fizgerald from 81 to 83 (a snatch of which appears in
the TWO MOON JULY compilation video). DANCE EX MACHINA (1986)
with Dean Winkler and LUMINAIRE (1985) with Mary Perillo
are stacked with SOTA abstract computer animation which
are basically modern technological restatements of early
filmic experiments in sound and image fusion (particularly
Oscar Fischinger), but what gives these tapes an edge is
their sense of rhythm, syncopation and timing in the editing
of sequences and the synching of visual and aural gestures.
While Sanborn's abstract computer synthesis might not be
as advanced or 'hardcore' as other practioners of the form,
their fusion of sound with image evidences a precision often
lacking in the genre.
'Video
Art' (in the traditional sense of the term, that is as practiced
by refugees from the visual/fine arts) reared its head a
few times, sometimes with suprising results. Kumiko Kushiyama's
HOUSE WITHOUT WALLS (1985) is a meditative reflective analysis
of perceptual tricks, using video A/B rolling to produce
mirage effects to disorient one's sense of perspective,
but such formal play is by now a self-stating part of the
video medium and therefore not particularly exciting as
artistic intervention. Hiroya Sakurai's HARD CONTRACT (1984)
is more succesful with similar concerns, mainly because
of its framkness of structure in place of HOUSE WITHOUT
WALLS' wonder of illusion. Its play with monitors and close
circuit TV filming and standing in for various parts of
the human body has of course been done before, but this
tape's clarity and brevity states the perceptual effect
with strong definition.
The
play of monitors standing in for objects and scenes within
the video frame is interestingly employed in two tapes by
Mako Idemitsu : GREAT MOTHER CYUMIKO and THE MARRIAGE OF
YASUSHI (both 1986). Their typically Japanese scenarios
about the unbearable oppressiveness and repressiveness of
the traditional Japanese family unit are given extra dimensions
of claustrophobia, frustration and exasperation through
the use of monitors showing scenes from both the present,
past and future, condensing and stretching time to show
the flow of generations in the family structure as an ongoing
force.
A
different type of monitor-play (stemming notably from Nam
June Paik's early sculptural transformations of the monitor
as a light-emitting box) is presented in a video documentary
on the work of Italy's Fabrizzio Plessi in a tape simply
titled FABRIZZIO PLESSI (1986) directed by Felice Pesoli.
Plessi's work is simple and effective with its major formal
thematics of reflection, movment, axis and illusion as conveyed
through linguistic/visual puns and the material handling
of light and water in closed circuit installations. However
it's all a bit too refined and polished, with perhaps too
much attention given to the sculptural perfection of the
installtion as an object (Italians have a thing for 'design')
rather than the integral pulses of dynamism which give the
works some energy.
The
compilation tape put together by The Kitchen's Tom Bowes
and Carlota Schoolman TWO MOON JULY (1986) was really only
of interest as a 'Wish You Were Here' postcard flashing
how groovy Manhattan is, however there is a brief snippet
from Vito Acconi's THE RED TAPES (performed down in a basement
with the camera pointed down the stairs at a ranting Acconi)
; a short excerpt from one of Bill Viola's Japan works FIRST
DREAM (random circling lights flashing images of bamboo
trees in a lake at night) ; and a quick flash of one of
Dara Birnbaum's latter and more complex works THE DAMNATION
OF FAUST (which probably only makes full sense through the
sum of its 5 parts).
Similarly,
Soft Video's THE SUBTLE PLEASURE OF VIDEO (1986) is a compilation
of interviews with current well-known video artists who
either make fools of themselves or help make some sense
of their work. John Sanborn and Mary Perillo come off with
a strange mix of East Coast go-go-go and West Coast laid-right-back,
describing their part-situationist approach to collaborating
with other artists (dancers, painters, musicians, etc.)
to maintain a steady production output. Jean Paul Goude
(in French) talks about how he works with his art crew and
what type of music excites and inspires him, also explaining
his ease in moving from Art (Grace Jones) to Advertising
(Kodak). Steina & Woody Vasulka say the type of boring
things that only visual artists are skilled at saying -
how unique the video medium is and how one must strive to
make pure video. The type of thing that gallery directors
and curators still think is relevant to that wonderous thing
called Video Art.
Also
featured is an interview with one of the produceres of TOP
OF THE POPS where he talks about how the MTV model based
on FM radio formatting is slowly killing live studio productions.
(This tape was being screened probably just as the ABC was
writing out the death certificate for COUNTDOWN.) THE SUBTLE
PLEASURE OF VIDEO also contained an excerpt from another
tape CRYSTAL CONVERSATION (1985) which is an indepth interview
with Brian Eno, based mainly around his CRYSTALS sculptural
installations from 1985. Eno unfortunately comes off as
someone who once had a firm grasp on dilettantism (which
allowed him to produce what is possibly the first major
pre Post-Modern Rock LP TAKING TIGER MOUNTAIN BY STRATEGY)
but who hasn't noticed the changing of the times too well,
where such effete dilettantism is now largely mistaken for
essential artistry. Check this : when asked what book, painting
and film he would have been proud to have created, his answers
were Narbokov's LOLITA, Kandinsky's Pastoral Improvization
No.11, and Fellini's AMACORD. I felt sick. Still, his video
work (from his first major video experiment in 1984, MANHATTAN
DREAMING, to CRYSTALS in the landmark video installation
exhibition "The Luminous Image" at the Steglitz Museum in
1985, to HANGING CROSSES exhibited in the 1986 Venice Biennale)
is stark and effective, exemplifying his approach to simplistic
manipulation of complex technology.
ROCK
Quote
: (Throw in any video clip makers claims to be cinematic,
or any video artists declamation of rock videos, etc.)
In
CRYSTAL CONVERSTION, Eno finishes up with some badly chosen
words on rock videos, placing him among the mundane masses
who say the same tired things about how uncreative, repetitive,
insensitive and unoriginal they all are. This is a good
example of missing the good in clips to only state the bad.
In Paolo Nitti's JULIEN TEMPLE VIDEOREVIEW (1986/7) Julien
Temple waffles on about how important it is to be cinematic
in clip-making, describing cliches he doesn't exercise as
"That's not cinema". This is a good example of mistaking
the bad for the good. Put Temple and Eno in a room and they'd
probably argue the subject for hours without ever realizing
that they really are in total agreement with one another's
lack of perception.
John
Sanborn & Mary Perillo's GALAXY (1987) is quite standard
as far as 'over-the-top' clips go, spinning a mix of nightmare
imagery from THE 5000 FINGERS OF DR. T and Dali's sequence
in Hitchcock's SUSPICION, all translated into hi-tech flash.
The song is performed by David Van Tiegham, who is added
to the list of other musicians Sanborn has done clips for
: The Love Of Life Orchestra, King Crimson and Adrian Belew.
Van Tiegham also stars in a very funny piece which could
be part of a series featuring him doing improvised percussion
on the streets of New York. In this particular version titled
EAR RESPONSIBILITY (1985) he takes on the roll of a manic
Pied Piper of Percussion who converts any one he dongs with
his sticks into a rhythmitized zombie, madly following Van
Tiegham and drumming all the way. It's like a perverted
morality tale that mixes an AIDS metaphor with the fascination
of rhythm - perhaps as either a commentary on the physiological
attraction to beat in music or the rampant production of
snare sounds.
The
notion of rhythm and its various textual manifestations
have been central to Sanborn's work over the past 6 years
or so (and perhaps mention should be made of editor Tim
Ferrante whose name crops up in most of the videos' credits).
FRACTURED VARIATIONS and VISUAL SHUFFLE (both directed with
Perillo and conceived with choreographer Charles Moulton
in 1986) are particularly remarkable in their use of editing
to the rhythms of live sound, produced by the dancers' grunts
and whacks as they physically slam, slap and slide into
one another. Whilst so many dance videos concentrate on
visual rhythms produced by body formations within the dynamics
of the pictorial frame, these two videos utilize the 'rhythm
method' of rock clips (metronomic editing) to construct
a dynamic narrative of body sound and movement. In a way,
they return the function and form of montage (for so long
disavowed by video purists) to video art via the rock clip.
"Scratch
Video" generally doesn't effect such a return, as so much
of it is an orgiastic display of visual pulsation that I'm
sure has Eisenstein perpetually spinning in his grave. One
scratch video from Italy manages to go beyond this impasse
by taking everything that doesn't work in Paul Hardcastle's
clip to 19 and making it work. Four Frame's MASTERPEACE
(198?) is beautifully edited, even though its cliched scratch
content of political figures talking about nuclear warfare
is a bit unimaginative. The work of Japan's Radical TV from
1985 is highly unimaginative, although it does 'look good'
by exhibiting a better design sense and graphic flair with
its spfx and animation than the work of Italy's Young Mechanical
Swingers in their clips for Manhattan Transfer's BIRD and
Ella's DON'T ASK ME WHY (both 1985). Radical TV's HARD SCRATCH
uses a set of G.I.Joe dolls to hommage both the image and
sound of Kraftwerk circa Showroom Dummies ; PROGRAMME MUSIC
is simply a pacey edit of various Radical TV performances,
tapes and interviews which evidence the Japanese obsession
with marketing and packaging (most notably picked up by
the likes of Sigue Sigue Sputnik) ; and TV ARMY is another
hi-tech scratch tape chewed up and spewed out by a Fairlight.
George
Snow carries on the British legacy of scratch video with
some works that are sometimes inspired and other times exhausted.
His showcase is probably MUYBRIDGE REVISTED (1986) which
is funded by the British Film Institute, affording him a
budget which allowed him to explore the technology at a
high level (to such an extent that source material from
this tape crops up reworked in numerous other tapes from
the same year!). Still, if I have to sit through another
reworking of Muybridge's photographic analyses of movement
I think I'll freeze myself. The music let's it down further,
and the same happens in SHUTTLE DISASTER (1986) where composer
the same composer, Brendan Beal, seems to be trapped in
his beatbox/sampler/sequencer set-up with not much of an
ear for inventiveness. SHUTTLE DISASTER does a very predicatable
thing, too : rework televised footage of the shuttle disaster
with loops of Reagan talking about how "we must be brave"
etc. The music of The Art Of Noise energizes Snow's computer
work for their single LEGACY - 1&2 (1986) where a suitable
match of image and sound fragments push the explosive rhythms
along. Snow's clip for Howard Jones' ALL I WANT looks like
a re-edit of all his leftover MUYBRIDGE REVISTED material
and isn't all that exciting.
Like
all 'Scratch' exponents, the second half of the 80s has
presented them with an itch to shoot their own footage or
find different ways of manipulating broadcast info without
the beatbox. Snow presents both options with LOVE VIDEO
and DOGS (both 1986). LOVE VIDEO returns us back to the
shallow wallowings of video artists making references to
Hollywood iconography and symbolism, stringing together
images and sounds from great romance films treated through
the Fairlight's colourizer presets. Good for a Hendrix lightshow.
DOGS contains shot footage and is an impressionistic study
of a greyhound race. For some reason, a reworking of The
Chantays' Pipeline erupts on the soundtrack when the dogs
start racing. This work seems only half-finished and effects
no particular presence at all.
Next,
a batch of Italian mainstream video clips by varied MOR
and AOR popsters. Let's see - how about I relate them to
some Australian AOR dross : De Gregory (Italian Trevor White),
Luca Carboni (Italian John English), Ron (Italian John Farnham)
and Gianni Morandi (Italian Mark Holden). Also included
: Bryan Paris (whose clip reworks the Swatch/YoPlait ads
which rework Jean Paul Goudes French ads which crop up in
Grace Jones' SLAVE TO THE RHYTHM) ; Scialpi (whose clip
somehow mixes a teeny Gary Glitter denim-hunk with a macho-erotic
reworking of the vaseline work on EMANUELLE) ; Teresa De
Sio (whose clip directed by Young Mechanical Swingers tries
all at once to evoke Will Powers, Grace Jones, Annie Lennox
and Whitney Houston in its fashion overload) ; and P.F.M
(remember them? along with LeOrme and Goblin they spearheaded
the Italian push of Euro Art Rock in the mid 70s ; now they're
all dressed up like a modern Chicago in a clip that looks
like a Mulchay re-edit of BIGGLES).
To
finish with more grunge and less polish, Christopher Dreher's
clips for The Bad Seeds' TUPELO (1985, codirected with Ellen
El Malki) and THE SINGER (1986, codirected with Nick Cave)
suitably match some dark and desolate imagery with Cave's
tawdry histrionics. That's the great thing about video clips
: they can render seriousness into farce and parody into
tragedy. More interseting though is Dreher's and Malki's
short video doco on the making of TUPELO, titled WHO'S THAT
FAT BITCH IN THE CORNER? (How outrageous!) This tape perfectly
conveys the boredom that can't even mobilize some angst
in the shooting of a rock clip, as Cave verges on the prima
donna hassling the technicians to get their shit together.
A very common scenario indeed, and an indication of just
how much the construction of a clip in post production is
responsible for injecting the image/sound fusion with some
life.
END
NOTE
This
review of international videos in the 1987 Melbourne Film
Festival has attempted to look through them to the cinema
across a fault line that will be determining the state of
film for the future - that is, this moebius relationship
between film and video, one that becomes tighter and more
congested year by year. True, this batch of videos on the
whole weren't all that great, but even the bad ones provide
an intriguing view of that fault line. (And besides, aren't
Festival films 'on the whole' mostly crap no matter what
your tastes, especially for 'worldly cineastes' who know
good cinema when they see it?) Far from trying to extole
any of those shitty video polemics that blocked the 70s
largely into a mindless mass of technological rhetoric of
anti-cinema and anti-video (but for some ungodly reason,
pro-painting and pro-sculpture!) I think that to search
out, investigate and even critically redefine video art
of the 80s is a more productive way of contacting a current
potential for the cinema than hanging around for some new
radical filmic development. If you choose the latter, you
could be waiting for a long time.