Spent most of the weekend working on a new video piece for the t-minus 2006 festival, an exhibition and DVD produced by Joshua Goldberg and Chris Jordan, New York City. It’s likely to be the first in a small series of "lapses," which play with time and language by compressing popular films into a different space of relation:
video still from at interval
For at interval, I captured the entirety of Woody Allen’s Annie Hall, then removed all spoken dialogue from the film. Time is slowed down, through emphasis on breathing, silence, mistakes, facial expressions and music between the text, and paradoxically sped up, through an immense shortening of the film – from one hour and thirty minutes, to just over thirteen. at interval compresses the movie by removing Allen’s characters’ lapses in judgment, and instead plays with time to accent similar impossibilities within language.
play movie
quicktime and javascript required, from browser not feed; 11.7MB pop-up window, 13:22
{ 3 } Comments
outstanding. really, first class, breathtaking, outstanding. the second single film dilation we’ve had as a submission, and the only one this year. a true work of art, nathaniel, on many levels.
This seems to be an increasingly popular method of pop-culture ‘mixing’, that is, systematically removing structures of content from pieces of media. I have seen work by artists who have removed every piece of dialogue from a famous John Cage interview, edited an episode of Friends so that only the clips with a laugh track remain, removed all the dialogue from a presidential debate, etc. While I think this technique is a poignant gesture of dissasembling mainstream media, it seems somewhat tired, like a one-liner, unable to offer much beyond the initial novelty and humor. This is especially true with a running time of 13 minutes.
Thanks, Joshua. You made me jump up and down.
Michael: thanks for your comment. You make a valid point in and around that I am certainly not the first to come up with a formula to conceptually compress popular video and look at the spaces between; but I don’t entirely agree with your argument that this is a one-liner, a novelty worthy of nothing more than a glance. Many argued that Cage’s 4:22 only needed to be understood abstractly, not actually heard; but Cage’s point was very clear: the music of the audience’s shifting chairs, coughs and breathing, the aural oeuvre of our interactions.
While I agree that 13 minutes is a lot to ask of a viewer (most gallery-goers only give ANY video piece only one or two minutes, and I kept that in mind when working with my flow), I don’t see this work as merely an exercise in an already-accomplished (and exhausted) form of mixing. I think there’s value in emphasizing the stutters on both a macro and micro level. I believe the relations we find can reveal, and produce. And altho Allen may seem an obvious choice because of the forms his mis/communications take, I also selected this film because of its purposeful accents on sex, trauma, and most importantly, learning from our relationships. I believe these come through somehow in “at interval,” but in a way that asks us to “look again,” and question.
But that’s just me.
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