A still from Fallout
A still from Fallout
rationalize why I continue to use it for this strand of my work. While I identify with the experimental film tradition I feel I am really just a personal filmmaker. Maya Deren in her article Amateur vrs. Professional discusses the original sense of “amateur” as meaning the love of something – the love of making films. I think it is unfortunate that there is an increasingly narrow sense of what an experimental film is. This is partly driven by the choices of curators and programmers as well as what the people writing the history of experimental film think the canonical works and makers are and less by the filmmakers themselves, but it effects what gets shown and talked about.
work with appropriation in the Repurposed Web Reports series (of which Fallout is an example) are all digitally based and co-opted images and sounds from the archive of the internet that are compressed and are meant to be seen on a computer or smart phone/pad. They are ephemeral and only briefly responsive to a marginal moment or event, something reported and quickly forgotten. While these reports “document” it, they are electronically lo-fi and lo-res and compressible and limited in the range of color tones they can represent. This lack of “detail” is conceptually driven by their ephemeral nature as marginal events in the public sphere. Whereas the autobiographical moments I capture in film are precious and drawn like profound memories, stored in my brain to be recalled again and again, and contain the essence of an experience. For me analog film is a symbolic artifact that can contain those subjective and personal details.
Do you think that there's a "contrast" between our analogic tradition and the use of technologies like DSLR or Digital Bolex cameras? My Bolex is a mechanical spring wound device – there are no electronics, no battery, it is a totally green technology. I can just wind it up and shoot without any need for electricity. It takes time to set up a shot – it is not a point and shoot, out of the bag automatic imaging device, so it forces me to think about why I am making the image that is in front of me. Just like the expenditure for film makes me weigh more carefully what kinds of things I want to represent in my images. I embrace that thoughtful deliberative approach that analog filmmaking has towards this creative decision-making. I also understand the things that are amazing about DSLR’s and other affordable high quality digital image capture. With digital you can shoot much more cheaply, it is easy to duplicate and manipulate, you often can use existing light (though I hardly use any artificial light in my film based work) and it is a high quality and increasingly accessible platform that works well with digital and web based distribution that avoids having to scan and digitize the analog image. For me the contrast is conceptually motivated – certain strands of my work are conceptually suited to analog and other strands are suited to digital. For instance, my
How long does it usually take to finish a piece? It varies widely. I can complete a Repurposed Web Report in a matter of days from conceptualization to posting it on the internet and my autobiographical and essay films can take seasons or years to make. I often shoot something as an autobiographical gesture then put it away and revisit it years later in editing, very often because I don’t know what to do with the footage when I shot it, only later figuring it out. I find I edit the material very differently as a result of my time away from the period of my life that I shot it, and it often proves to be very illuminating to respond retrospectively through insights I have had about myself in the interim. There is also just never enough time! I am a teacher and recently a father of twins and as I don’t make a living through my work, it is always a challenge to find time to really focus on finishing a film. Lately I have been making a short film and web report on average once a year. I have gone many years with a project on and off. It’s something I think my students don’t have enough
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