TMAR Blog #12.5: 2016 Notes
(Blogs #1-12 and others are available on Patreon, I'll make them free or copy-paste them here at some point, I haven't decided yet)
I’ve been itching to do my first blog for Substack, but I’m currently preoccupied with a magazine article. I’ll get around to it soon. In the meantime, by chance I came upon some notes I made for a talk I gave in 2016, in a shipping container in a community garden in Hayes Valley in SF that's long since been developed. TMAR Blog #12, on Swamp by Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson, consisted of me trying to revisit those ideas 9 years after the fact, so it’s interesting (for me at least) to see what I was writing down back then. Between graduating college in 2011 and starting TMAR in 2019 I only finished two essays for self-printed publications, so it’s “rare content,” I guess.
-real v fictional (virtual) real is always real, cinema is always fictional. the act of recording with a camera creates a cinematic object. the frame, movement of camera through a space, the time of the recording which cannot be now, is always virtual. documentation is not a document of an object, it is a picture of a thing, it is something else in and of itself. it can never "be" the thing it seeks to document. there is always a space between the real object and its being recorded
-trad cinema is concerned with fictional, uncomplicated simulacrum, self-contained stories, a constructed narrative that follows a sequence of logical points towards an end. movement of narrative/momentum, not time. events occur for a reason within the plot structure.
-post WW-II "art films" aim to deconstruct, go beyond cinematic convention, to deal with something else. (i'm putting words in mouth) ennui (antonioni) time (tarkovsky) "real" failed relationships (bergman) ironic subversive use of traditional forms, technical/formal deconstruction (godard)
- bergman, is his work realer than ingrid bergman in casablanca? love is fiction: lacan (via Jamie): love is giving something you don't have to someone who doesn't exist (actually someone who doesn't want it) love is not "real" in the sense that emotions are not real. they are not objective, we foster them and learn how to experience them, often from cinema. stories are more perfect, more emotionally organized than life, we recognize life through our experiences with media, a pale imitation. Wilde: "life imitates art far more than art imitates life" i.e. landscape is picturesque, music when driving is a soundtrack. this feeling, it seems to me, is what being in the moment is, which in spite of the name is actually a moving through a moment outside of yourself into a fiction, immersion in everything outside of yourself. rather than happy/sad binary i think it is engagement, attention/numbness,indifference. PKD: "reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away". feelings are exactly what go away when you stop believing in them, when you disavow your interest in something it ceases to move you. weird thing about reality is that you can change it (kool keith, pumpernickel and seltzer water) self-identity is a feedback loop, you learn and develop and things change. as we consume cinema it influences how we perceive cinema. ex. watching a godard movie when you're 16 and when you're 26 are two different movies, hopefully you understand it by now. so, life imitates art, we learn to love through fictions like casablanca.
-but art also imitates life: plot is inconsequential, predictable. the content is in the activity, motion, colors, etc. plots are about the arising of a conflict and the resolution of that conflict, or failure of resolution. we should be able to tell immediately, in most cases failure of expectations is the result of writing that is doing a bad job. even a deliberately unexpected/surprising ending i.e. david lynch, is expected to be unexpected. not meeting the expectations is betraying the form of the film- paul klee: "Like man, the painting also has a skeleton, muscles, skin. One can speak of a particular anatomy of the painting. A painting having 'a naked man' as its subject should be painted according to the human anatomy, but according to the anatomy of the painting. To undertake a painting one starts by constructing an armature. To what extent this can be deviated from is a matter of choice: one can exert a deeper pictorial effect working from the armature than from the surface alone." take a "will they won't they" plot, of course they will, because that's the point, why the characters exist. the crux of that dynamic is not debating whether they will end up together but in the prolongation of sexual tension. the spell is broken the second they get together. sexual tension creates just that, tension, where actions, movements, become charged. desire suffuses everything, becomes an obsession. fictionally speaking, it is very easy to be caught up in that tension. when that desire is satisfied we are cast outside of it. i have no idea why. within that space of actions that embody desire (this is just an example) is where we find the reality of cinema, the details of acting which are not a clumsy artifice like the story. a look, inflection, gesture, while "acted" is real, comes from life. we feel for characters empathetically, when we can relate, when the feeling evoked on the screen "feels real" to us. in this way, cinema at its best (in an emotional sense, there are plenty more) when it resembles reality, and reality is at its best when it resembles fiction. (music is a good example) (EXTRA: Kafka - non-plot, inscruitable activity)
-movies cut up time, work in fast motion. they can express or imply the mood of drudgery at a shitty job for 8 hours, but cannot capture it. they can, however, capture experiences of being engrossed by the moment, where one is fully engaged in time passing. Tarkovsky:
TWEET what is the difference between cctv and tarkovsky? about 45 years -he captures the experience of looking at water and being engrossed by it. he achieves this state through narrative, because one could not capture that experience in the 70s (both in terms of technological access and audience's vision). he achieves that engagement with water through a spirituality, engagement with nature, narrative armature which leads to points where the movement of the story slips away into reverie, contemplation. if you showed up in a swamp with a camera and shot it in the 70s it would be different, i.e. to do that your motives would have to be different. ex. swamp by nancy holt & robert smithson. in the 70s that was how you had to do it, but anyone with a good smartphone can pretty easily pull off a copy of a shot from Stalker when they walk by a creek. hence instagram. we can experience the world around us aesthetically, as in a fiction, very easily through our phones.
-the reason the parts of youtube that i like are compelling is that people are producing work, unselfconsciously, fictional material of the world around us which does not actively push a fiction. the fiction is not active. regardless, it remains a fiction. it becomes more interesting (to me) when i think of it as a cinematic work, the uploader as artist, rather than "a weird guy who uploaded this boring thing". dismantling traditional criterion of cinematic quality. it will never be real, but engaging with the subject approaches the real. that proximity is not only interesting, but in expanding our imaginary fictions into these mundane territories our personal fictions become easier, smaller, and our engagement in the moment becomes less grandiose, more humble, and more ever-present. I'm not really shooting for a big point with it, but it is new, a reconfiguration of perceptions of reality, broadening our perspectives, which I think is always the aim of art.
-Nancy Holt & Robert Smithson - Swamp - 1971
film simply explores a space, camera moving with no clear objective, traversing the geography. nevertheless it wavers between form and abstraction through reeds. movie of "a person holding a camera, filming"
-Yun Mirror Exercises - Damo Yang - 2015
video similarly explores a space, but this has a subject (weird pseudo-swiss lodge in taiwan) and drifts from the subject, portrays it badly, unconsciously, aimlessly conveys the space. even less justification than Swamp. however the video/camera quality is high, semi-pro, almost unreal, surreal.
-Thunder storm in Hong Kong - B Lane - 2009
weather is important in these videos, daily minutae such as climate, geographic placement, time of day, sun placement, become the foreground of content rather than ignored/falsified/used for dramatic effect. this also has a noir feeling, something of the sublime, but rather than treated preciously/religiously as in tarkovksy it is simply "as is". noir is an odd phenomenon of real influencing fiction which becomes codified as an imaginary space - the signifiers of cigarettes, suits, rainy cities, femme fatales, have retroactively become a genre, one which did not exist when they were made. they were generally called melodramas but have become an iconic imagery which gets toward a certain feeling which is very particular but has only grown and taken a life of its own which was more or less absent at its conception. aside- i'm mostly (ungroundedly) drawn to asian videos more than american, partly because of setting, partially because it seems to me that americans can be hyperactive in their direction, zoom in on the car they're looking at, following their eye when i prefer it to be more ambient, a portrait of space, which is calming, anxious fiddling bothers me.
-black stockings and pointy shoes - shoe73mad
(sorry) i like these videos because they're very odd visually, sort of like extended shots from Bresson. fetishism is interesting because it creates a desire and sexual tension in an otherwise absolutely mundane situation for a non-fetishist. that engagement is uncoupled from normal avenues of sexuality into a reconfiguration of the plane of reality where intensity occurs outside of its regular boundaries. that's what i'm advocating with this, a disassociating of our methods of engagement with subjects, though not necessarily sexually, and reconstituting our eyes with new ways of seeing. Deleuzian deterritorialization, essentially.