over the architectural (esp. in L'Eclisse, where Monica Vitti spends half of the movie looking longingly at boughs blowing softly in the wind). By the time he gets to industrial Ravenna in Red Desert, though, he feels like he has to get crazy to properly communicate how this landscape works, what effects it has on the human mind. So that got me thinking about this dichotomy between the industrial and natural that's in film-cinema's DNA and has been a concern of all the great auteurs (from Murnau to Ozu to Antonioni to Tarkovsky to Dumont), and made me wonder how and where DV sits in that relation, what place it has against, say, leaves of grass and diecast metal. I couldn't really figure out many good ways to translate that to an affordable narrative film (those who have dealt with it, like Jia Zhangke or Gaspar NoĂŠ in Enter the Void or Carlos Reygadas in Post Tenebras Lux, have a bit more cash to realize these things), so I decided to perform it in a looser non-narrative form. It might be worth mentioning as well that the project was conceived and produced in a video production course taught by Roger Beebe, whose comments, along with my friends in the seminar, helped form the project and its concerns. How has your production processes changed over the years? Oh gee, I'm such an amateur that I'm not sure I have a 'production process.' I did pick up some really good tips for manipulating DV during a workshop held by Evan Meaney that have helped diversify what I do with glitched material. I did work with chromakeying more aggressively in this project than I had before as well.
A still from Naturesong #1
What’s next for Todd Jurgess? Are there any new projects on the horizon? I have three new videos that relate to "Ecstatic Gardens" that I'm calling "Naturesongs." They're all single-take, HDV pieces that use various means (off-syncing the camera shutter, glitching, etc.) to bring the process of digital capture and encoding/decoding to bear on what's being shot. I'm working on getting those into some festivals here in the US at present. I'm also hard at work on my dissertation at the University of Florida, which attempts to put these ideas into a phenomenological framework to show how cinema's responding to a digital cultural milieu.
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