Monthly Archive for July, 2008

I made a video awhile back and wrote an essay about it.

famil­iar, yet absurd from Claire Fox on Vimeo.

When­ever I attempt to cre­ate a piece of video art, I con­sider the respon­si­bil­i­ties I have both as an “artist” and as a twenty-year-old in 2008. When con­sid­er­ing the writ­ings of the­o­rists like Camus and Sartre, I attempt to cre­ate vis­ceral con­nec­tions between their writ­ings from mid-20th cen­tury France to the con­tem­po­rary social cli­mate of 21st cen­tury Seat­tle. In this par­tic­u­lar video, I worked with my friend Michelle Avery to cre­ate an exper­i­men­tal doc­u­men­tary that med­i­tates on ideas of famil­iar­ity, alien­ation, sin­cer­ity, time, and space in the uni­verse of the absurd.

To begin mak­ing any kind of con­nec­tion between the­ory and con­tem­po­rary indi­vid­u­als, I started with a very gen­eral con­sid­er­a­tion of exis­ten­tial­ist themes: how do we define our­selves as indi­vid­u­als? Video seemed like a par­tic­u­larly fit­ting medium for this con­sid­er­a­tion for two rea­sons. The first is that video is viewed (at least by me, since I’m new to the medium) as a new, fresh, and fun­da­men­tally democ­ra­tiz­ing method of the artis­tic expres­sion of ideas: any indi­vid­ual can rent a cam­era and take dig­i­tal video with­out hav­ing to shell out a large sum of money or hav­ing to exer­cise a high level of skill. The sec­ond is that video con­sid­ers images dif­fer­ently from film. Again, I have a very rudi­men­tary skill and knowl­edge level when it comes to video, but it seems as though this medium rests largely on the tran­si­tions between images (i.e. it depends largely on choices in edit­ing) than the images them­selves (choices made in pro­duc­tion). This idea of the impor­tance of tran­si­tions over images helps illus­trate one of Camus’ ideas about time: “Like­wise and dur­ing every day of an unil­lus­tri­ous life,” he writes, “time car­ries us. But a moment always comes when we have to carry it”. Since I view edit­ing as a process that oper­ates on a much more indi­vid­ual level than pro­duc­tion, and the addi­tional manip­u­la­tion of time can make for an espe­cially dis­ori­ent­ing envi­ron­ment where we are forced to con­sider con­tent out­side a sim­ple and auto­matic frame­work, it seems as though the video medium is an ideal method for med­i­tat­ing on themes in existentialism.

When it came down to express­ing the absurd in video, I felt that I’d either need to make a highly con­structed fic­tional space where I was respon­si­ble for every detail, or I’d need to go some­where where the spa­tial and aes­thetic ele­ments of my space as well as the actions of my sub­jects were com­pletely out of con­trol. I went into this process from the start with two pri­mary quo­ta­tions in mind. From Sartre: “We are alone, with no excuses”. From Camus: “At any street cor­ner the feel­ing of absur­dity can strike any man in the face”. Con­sid­er­ing those two quo­ta­tions, I decided to make my video into what can be called an exper­i­men­tal doc­u­men­tary. I was espe­cially enam­ored with the idea of the absurd hap­pen­ing with­out warn­ing on the street and I don’t feel that that kind of sin­cere real­iza­tion can be con­structed (at least not yet by me, with my ama­teur level of video skill), so I decided to take one sub­ject — Michelle — and put her some­where on the street (“alone, with no excuses”) and make her talk.

This type of footage was both sim­ple and dif­fi­cult to take. Though there was no setup involved, I had essen­tially taken a friend who was more or less aware of my inten­tions, put her in an open psy­cho­log­i­cal space over which she had rudi­men­tary con­trol, and waited for some­thing absurd to hap­pen. It was likely that noth­ing would hap­pen, and arguably, that’s the way events panned out: for Michelle, there was no wide-eyed moment of men­tal lucid­ity where she stopped speak­ing and con­sid­ered her set­ting with the eyes of some­one newly set adrift. We had, how­ever, a very spe­cial set­ting work­ing for us. We shot the footage in George­town, which is very close to the Boe­ing air­field. Michelle has always been a plane enthu­si­ast and even owns a book of air­planes, which she stud­ies for the sake of being able to iden­tify them from the street. She is highly aware of air­plane pres­ence in any neigh­bor­hood, but in George­town, this aware­ness was acute. George­town func­tioned as a sort of exac­er­bated envi­ron­ment, one where planes flew low over­head and couldn’t be ignored by any­one: when­ever a plane passed over­head, peo­ple (who lived in the neigh­bor­hood) would all look up, whether they were sit­ting on the curb, dri­ving in a car, or what­ever else. Michelle couldn’t stop laughing.

That type of set­ting rep­re­sents a fun­da­men­tal idea in Camus’ thought.

“A world that can be explained even with bad rea­sons is a famil­iar world. But, on the other hand, in a uni­verse sud­denly divested of illu­sions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. His exile is with­out rem­edy since he is deprived of the mem­ory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land. This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his set­ting, is prop­erly the feel­ing of absurdity”.

I aimed to make the struc­ture of this video hinge on the moments when Michelle is dis­tracted from the inter­view by planes fly­ing over­head. This idea lent itself to fur­ther­ing the con­tem­plat­ing of indi­vid­u­al­ism in two ways. One was that when Michelle turned or looked up to observe a plane or cov­ered her face after it went by, we got to know Michelle through her ges­tures and actions in addi­tion to the ideas she artic­u­lated ver­bally. The other more impor­tant idea was that these moments where she couldn’t help but look up, Michelle was removed from her very self-aware method of speak­ing or con­sid­er­ing ideas. She couldn’t help but look. She couldn’t help but smile. She was briefly divorced from her life and her set­ting and put into an exac­er­bated, unfa­mil­iar, and very present space. She was with­out words or mem­o­ries and could only focus on the sounds and sight that over­whelmed her senses.

In terms of the aes­thetic of the actual shot, I took some inspi­ra­tion from a Sartre quotation.

“It is nec­es­sary that his very thought should at every instant sur­pass the inti­mate con­tra­dic­tion which unites the com­pre­hen­sion of man-as-agent with the know­ing of man-as-object and that it forge new con­cepts, new deter­mi­na­tions of Knowl­edge which emerge from the exis­ten­tial com­pre­hen­sion and which reg­u­late the move­ment of their con­tents by its dialec­ti­cal procedure”.

I’m almost pos­i­tive that I’m assign­ing incor­rect mean­ing to this quo­ta­tion, but when I con­sid­ered my image com­po­si­tion, I looked for dis­tinctly com­pet­ing images to work with to func­tion as a sort of dialec­tic. I real­ize this sounds super­fi­cial and naïve, but I needed my shot to be ani­mated. What I mean by this is that there was a lot of respon­si­bil­ity weigh­ing on that par­tic­u­lar shot because it was the only shot I had to work with for the entire film. While I hoped that the sta­tic imagery would lend itself to our focused con­tem­pla­tion of Michelle as a human indi­vid­ual, I knew I couldn’t be lazy about her back­drop. The com­pet­ing left and right sides of the image have their own story, even with­out Michelle present, which can arguably place Michelle in a con­text where she can both be con­sid­ered “man-as-agent” (in the con­tent of her ver­bal inter­view) and “man as object” (some­thing that is sub­ject to and reacts to its setting).

On the left, we see many angu­lar, mechan­i­cal, life­less images with dull col­ors. In the back­ground, the large, black side of a truck bed reads “ALL METALS. There’s a piece of cor­ru­gated steel cut­ting Michelle’s image in half, where she rests her belong­ings. There’s a rusty old pickup in the back­ground, giv­ing some idea that these angles, which lead about 45 degrees to the upper right-hand cor­ner of the screen, and impos­ing struc­ture, as it were, are get­ting old and tired. What ani­mates this image is the vis­ceral organic pres­ence on the right side of the screen. There’s a lot of wiry, unre­lent­ing black­berry bush over­growth, which seems to be get­ting the best of the old machin­ery on the right side of the screen, and there’s an espe­cially wiry this­tle that sprouts up in the mid­dle of the screen and stands among the over­growth and the other slight angles with Michelle. Michelle is inter­sected by old lines of struc­tured metal, but in her more vul­ner­a­ble and unguarded moments, she some­times stands among the over­growth and more organic images that char­ac­ter­ize the right side of the screen.

One thing in par­tic­u­lar in the image knocked both me and Michelle out from the time I was shoot­ing: the dead bird in the lower left hand cor­ner. It’s lying there, unac­knowl­edged, in front of Michelle in one of the indents of the cor­ru­gated steel. In the dual­ity of this image based on the struc­ture and the over­growth, this bird adds the ele­ment of death to the image. There is so much ani­ma­tion in the space just based on the col­ors and the stark con­trast in com­po­si­tion from one side to the other, and then that lit­tle bird, which can go so unno­ticed at the bot­tom of the screen, not really even rec­og­niz­able in the gra­ni­ness of the image, gives a sense of final­ity. We can ignore death, we can ignore dead organic things, but they’re still there as objects and they still rep­re­sent the end of a lifespan.

The actual con­tent of the inter­view was extremely dif­fi­cult to edit and pair with Michelle’s ges­tures. As said, I hoped that we could get to know Michelle through her ges­tures in addi­tion to her speech, and so to oper­ate on these two lev­els, the con­tent and the ges­tures needed to be very clearly linked. In addi­tion, I knew that the video would need to be short because as ani­mated a char­ac­ter as Michelle is, a viewer can only stay with a sin­gle image for so long. I ended up divid­ing the video into two loose sec­tions: one where Michelle is describ­ing her­self (“I wish…I think…I don’t give a shit…”) and another where Michelle is describ­ing other peo­ple, or the “they-self” (“What you’ve seen…what you’ve been told…people don’t real­ize…”). The idea of the air­plane is used in this sequenc­ing again. In the first sec­tion, I try to imply that Michelle is more self-aware in that she only mim­ics the plane and we don’t feel its actual pres­ence. In the sec­ond sec­tion, I try to imply that Michelle is being removed from her set­ting and forced to artic­u­late other per­spec­tives by show­ing her actual reac­tions to the air­plane fly­ing over­head, even though we never see the actual vehicle.

These two sec­tions are book­ended by Michelle’s con­tem­pla­tion of her fam­ily. We begin the piece with her bit­ter con­tem­pla­tion of the idea that her fam­ily may never under­stand her. This poses the ques­tion: Should we care about express­ing our­selves to peo­ple whom we think will never under­stand us? In the second-to-last clip, I return to this idea where she explains the process of con­tex­tu­al­iz­ing her­self within her fam­ily, but she is inter­rupted by a par­tic­u­larly low-flying air­plane. At that point, we dis­re­gard the ques­tion and tran­si­tion to her analy­sis of the other things she said in the inter­view: “Maybe that’s my way of being an indi­vid­ual: not being an indi­vid­ual.” The impli­ca­tions of this state­ment are pretty huge and poten­tially con­tra­dic­tory with the ideas rep­re­sented by Camus and Sartre. I’m still unde­cided what she means by that state­ment: is she giv­ing up on human­ity and shirk­ing the respon­si­bil­ity of exis­tence pre­ced­ing essence?: “When we say that man chooses his own self, we mean that every one of us does like­wise; but we also mean by that that in mak­ing this choice he also chooses all men”. Or is she turn­ing inward and re-contextualizing Camus’ “con­stant con­fronta­tion between man and his own obscu­rity” in a media-saturated-21st cen­tury way?

All I know for sure is that she’s sincere.