"What's the Difference?"

If, as noted here again and again, documentaries enjoyed an all but unprecedented popularity last year, it already looks as if that popularity will be topped this year. We can probably point to a whole cluster of reasons. Technology certainly has a lot to do with it, specifically, the ongoing development of ever more affordable and lightweight digital cameras and the ability to edit without renting out a studio by the hour. There's a parallel to the advent of accessible analog video equipment in the 80s, but fortunately, this time around, we're not hearing a lot of the utopian rhetoric about the democratization of media we heard then; we're hearing some, but it's far more subdued and realistic.

But technology would only explain why more docs are being made - not why they're being watched. Part of it has to do, I think, with a universally shared awareness that Big and Important things are going on in the world, coupled with another growing awareness: The better media become at delivering more news faster, the worse media become at helping us comprehend it. What the current crop of documentary filmmakers you see linked and blurbed here day after day all share is that, first, they've chosen absolutely contemporary subjects for their films (even more so than last year; it's not birds and spelling bees this time around), and second - and this is, I believe, what's attracting audiences - to varying degrees, they're offering points of view, whether it be in the form of a narrative, an essay or a raging argument.

And if all this goes on, we may well find ourselves going back to some of essential questions about film as both a medium and an art (and of course, as a business, but that always goes without saying), which is what I find interesting about Jörg Heiser and Jan Verwoert's talk with artists Yael Bartana, Annika Eriksson, Anri Sala and Gitte Villesen about the differences between and the similarities shared by their work and documentary filmmaking. Someone picked a good title: "What's the Difference?"

As it happens, two recent issues of art magazines, Frieze and springerin, each feature pieces about film and video work that grapple with the essentials at a time of technological and social flux. There's Mark Webber, for example, reviewing the "X-Screen: Film Installation and Actions of the '60s and '70s" exhibition that only recently closed in Vienna. If that sparks your interest, Senses of Cinema ran a longer piece on a similar subject by Genevieve Yue last year.

Both issues happen to include pieces on Gerry Schum, a video art pioneer of sorts, but not exactly. He created art exclusively for the television screen, fully intending that it be publicly broadcast, and invited other artists to take part as well. Catrin Lorch's overview in Frieze is probably the one you want, since it's in English, while Christiane Fricke's is one of the few texts in springerin that have gone untranslated.

But among the many that have been:

• Georg Schöllhammer describes Hamlet Hovsepian's Washing Hair, Biting Nails, Yawning, which is a fine thing for most of us since we're hardly likely to see it anytime soon. It's a short made in a small village in the Caucasus at the height of the Breshnev era, and "[t]his one film alone places the filmmaker Hovsepian in a genealogy in which the films of the New York underground are also inscribed."

• Petra Löffler explains Armenian filmmaker Artavazd Peleshian's theory of "distance montage."

• Krystian Woznicki examines what Sean Snyder's been doing with the image of North Korea.

Online viewing tip. The television collection at Media Art Net.

Posted by dwhudson at June 15, 2004 4:26 PM