NYFF. Views. 2.

In the world's remaining cinematheques, and at film festivals everywhere, experimental film and video too often finds itself accompanied by a telltale sound. It's the thunka-thunka-thunka of an auditorium chair as the spring pulls the cushion back up into the folding position. In other words, the walkout, that pivotal moment when, for whatever reason, a spectator has had enough and their butt is compelled to defy inertia. Naturally, this sound accompanies challenging cinema of any stripe, and festivals seem to encourage the behavior more than other screening situations. And really, so what? No need for excess hand-wringing over the situation, since walking away from an unsatisfying film is a liberating experience, and besides, at any given screening, those who stay prove that the experience was worth offering.

This issue is only on my mind for a couple of reasons. First, in his GreenCine NYFF podcast, Armond White bemoans the fact the Views from the Avant-Garde segregates formally challenging films from the rest of the main slate. In theory, I completely agree, and anyone involved in nurturing film culture - critics, programmers, educators, preservationists, as well as filmmakers themselves - should adopt as catholic and capacious an attitude to cinema as possible. Cut the fence! Let Robert Breer commingle with Joel and Ethan Coen. But in practice, there's the thunka-thunka problem, and a showcase like Views is a practical, reasonable solution to that dilemma. The Views audience is well-informed and self-selected; virtually no one will wander into Ken Jacobs's hour-long Nervous Magic Lantern performance and wonder where the sets, costumes, and characters are. Yes, a hypothetical moviegoer who stumbled upon an avant-garde film could very well experience a religious conversion. (Ernie Gehr frequently tells the story of wandering the streets as a young man and ducking into a random film show to get out of the rain, thereby accidentally discovering Stan Brakhage, "and the rest, as they say...") But more often, folks will just be ticked off.

The smarter strategy, and one that Mark McElhatten and Gavin Smith have adopted over the years, is to keep that imaginary fence intact but demonstrate its permeability, and even its arbitrary nature, through careful, intelligent programming. In recent years Views has presented work by Godard and Mièville, Guy Maddin, Straub / Huillet, and this year, the Memories omnibus from the Jeonju International Film Festival. (Sadly, I was only able to see one of the three works in the group, Harun Farocki's Respite, which I found precise and irrefutably argued but lacking the formal depth of his finest efforts.) So I both agree and disagree with Mr White's statement. From the Views side, the avant-garde "ghetto" is, like most actual low-rent neighborhoods, far more welcoming to the outsider than the cultural imagination typically allows. But from the other side? Well, that's another issue. If, like me, you think filmmakers such as James Benning or Heinz Emigholz should have a place in the main program, you probably have the selection committee's home numbers. Give 'em a call. (But hey, until there's détente, at least there's Film Comment Selects.)

This brings me to my second point about walkouts. In a bit of delicious irony, a number of members of the Views audience took their leave (some in an audible huff) about ten or fifteen minutes into SpaceDisco One, the latest video-film by LA nutjob Damon Packard. As rapid-fire in its delivery as anything Craig Baldwin has spewed forth, but perhaps more prone to read politics through the filter of Packard's own bizarre obsessions, SpaceDisco One is practically a two-reeler (45 minutes) compared to Packard's infamous homemade epic, Reflections of Evil. Rhyming, when you stop to think about it, in odd ways with Michael Robinson's much more plangent work, Packard's video also describes a contemporary scene bereft of all utopian hopes. Channeling this despair through cracked science-fiction lenses (notably idea-lifts from Logan's Run and Battlestar Galactica, with some Orwell thrown in for stodginess), Packard gives us a roller-derby spaceship of glinting light, a final citadel against the forces of ignorance (theme parks, shitty fast food, Fox News, and above all NBC's Dateline: To Catch a Predator). Through it all, we get behind-the-scenes banter from B-rate starlets with rayguns, Winston Smith's media-saturated trip to Room 101, a whole lot of wind-up and very little pitch.

Obviously if you don't share Packard's sense of humor you'll find SpaceDisco overbearing to the point of claustrophobia, so walkouts are no surprise, regardless of venue. But was Space Disco One really some sort of barbaric gleet from beyond the pale, unworthy to screen alongside Peter Hutton and Robert Beavers? Hardly. Whether or not we can see it from up close, Packard is probably this generation's version of the Kuchar brothers. The obsessions may be different (George and Mike favored 1940s melodrama; Packard engages in ironic fanboy worship of Spielberg and Lucas), but the jaundiced-eye reflection of Tinseltown is very much the same. Likewise, Packard's propensity for exaggerated, white-hot video flares on anything and everything shiny (spangled disco suits, mirrorballs, the chrome wheels on a classic roller-skate) makes him a true heir to Kenneth Anger. (If we find the results less appealing, them's the breaks. Video killed the celluloid star.) Packard is an avant-garde video artist through and through, and hats off to Mark and Gavin for sticking their necks out to make the point.

Crazy as it may seem, Packard's was one of the few explicitly political works in this year's Views selection. This is no criticism, simply a statement of fact, and as various commentators have pointed out, this is actually true of world cinema as a whole in 2007. Even in the main selection, only four of NYFF's films are about ongoing political situations (the De Palma, the Jia, the Sokurov and the Pincus / Small Katrina doc), and naturally none satisfies every critic's vision of an "appropriate" political intervention (too ham-fisted, too abstruse, too non-interventionist, etc). In Views, works aiming for political criticism are also struggling to find new forms of communication, recognizing that ideas running counter to the dominant ideology most likely require a shift in the way spectators engage with media itself. One such work is Jacqueline Goss's video Stranger Comes to Town. The piece explores post-9/11 border patrol abuses and the Department of Homeland Security's unprecedented leeway for harassing foreign nationals entering the US. Goss draws on interview material from individuals who have been subject to such harassment, and as is appropriate under the circumstances, the video maintains the interviewees' anonymity. The testimonies are thoroughly damning of our government's frequently irrational compulsion to control the flow of human beings across national borders, always relying on racial and religious profiling and a general distrust of anyone articulate enough to question official practice. It's next to impossible to listen to these accounts without one's teeth involuntarily clenching.

Now, there are lots of ways Goss might have solved the problem of obscuring the identities of her subjects. As her solution, she combines Homeland Security training and demo animations with environments from the World of Warcraft videogame. Each interviewee is disguised as an avatar from the game, so we have the odd sight of hairy electronic cavemen and warlock-looking humanoids casually delivering their testimony. Granted, this decision is in keeping with a theme one finds in other of Goss' works, that being the collision of human desires with technological indifference. (Her 2001 tape The 100th Undone is a fine example of this approach.) But why Warcraft? The discrepancy provides easy laughs, but ultimately it's bizarrely off-putting. After all, the choice to use the videogame avatars is the single biggest creative decision Goss makes, and after one-and-a-half viewings of Stranger, I'm still at a loss as to what exactly this format contributes to the piece as a whole. One audience member likened Stranger to Nick Park's short Creature Comforts, a spot-on comparison that encapsulates the video's complex but rather tin-eared approach. I applaud Goss's willingness to adopt a playful attitude toward a subject that's too often treated with grim leftist humorlessness. The comedy isn't the problem. Rather, my inability to derive meaning from the dominant metaphor sticks in my craw as both an aesthetic and a political concern.

World cinema, experimental or otherwise, has too few mavericks capable of forging the necessary connections between radical ideas and bold new forms, changing both what we see and how we see it. This is why, without question, Ken Jacobs is a modern master and a cultural treasure. Of course, we'd have to have a very different kind of culture in this country for Jacobs, or any radical artist, to receive proper recognition, and in a way this is a paradox to which Jacobs's work indirectly speaks. In a society based on accumulation and greed, Jacobs produces ephemeral performances and, in his recent video works, turns single images from old stereoscopes (the epitome of handheld vision) into eyeball-quaking events that simultaneously lend objects onscreen a 3D solidity and melt them back into the all-over convulsion of un-forms. Jacobs was represented by four videos and a performance in this year's Views, all of them evolved from the Nervous System performance work he began in the mid-70s. These works have their basis in flicker and parallax, with two slightly shifted views of the same material alternating in time to produce vibrating 3D effects. Jacobs's live Magic Lantern performance with musician Rick Reed, Dreams That Money Can't Buy, was the most abstract and at times the most sensually absorbing of the group. Dedicated to Phil Solomon (whose ill health has limited his ability to travel, making his Manhattan appearance a significant event), Dreams consists of sliding sheets of textured light, ebbing and flowing in density. Paradoxically functioning as shadowy slices of oil-based impasto, these semi-forms indirectly allude to the encrusted surfaces of Solomon's own film work. What's more, more than other Nervous works I've seen, Dreams foregrounds the intangibility of many of the effects Jacobs can produce with his System. In his program notes, the artist lamented "Ubu and YouTube ripping off my more durable goods." Dreams That Money Can't Buy struck me as a deliberate reposte: "YouTube this!"

Regrettably, I missed Jacobs's two-minute video Nymph, wherein a woman is torturously subjected to a battalion of male gazes. This was a work I heard about all weekend from those who saw it, and all found it potent and frightening. Jacobs's other videoworks were of sufficiently high caliber that I have no reason to doubt those reports, and all combine piercing vision with trenchant social commentary. 2006's Surging Sea of Humanity uses digital superimpositions, kaleidoscopic reverb and flange, and differential focus to take us around an image of a late 19th century crowd gathered at the World Columbian Exposition of 1893. Jacobs shatters the picture but always brings it back together with a tunnel-like focus on a single individual from the crowd, as though both the orthogonals of the image and the crowd itself were organizing and reorganizing itself around a single body. In time, figures become paneled excerpts which strobe and flicker, and the two parallax views of the stereoscope are presented in rapid succession, giving the visual field the hovering shape and glow of a hologram. But Jacobs's continual realignment of "the mass" around shifting individual souls hints at a social theory, a radical democracy of both the image and the public sphere. Surging Sea provides a glimpse of how we might act collectively without sacrificing our subjectivities to the mob. Back in the realm of sexual politics, the one-minute-long Hanky Panky turns a split-second of old-fashioned courtship ritual into a vibration in the surfaces of the flesh, heterosexuality as both particle physics and stymied dialectic.

But by far the most emotionally shattering of Jacobs's Views entries, at least for me, was his 2006 video Capitalism: Child Labor. In this piece, Jacobs trains his digitized Nervousness on yet another stereoscope image. It's a factory scene. Early Indusrial Revolution. Here, we see the faces of young boys - no more than twelve years old, in all likelihood even younger - stationed around cotton-thread spinning machines, their expressions deadened beyond all pain or fear. These are blank gazes into hopelessness. Near the center of the image stands a foreman, his visage evincing complete self-possession. He is a slavedriver, of course, but his expression belies any sense of the unnatural in this scenario, as one finds in the bizarrely sexualized racist power slavedrivers typically exercised over slaves. Here, the foreman's demeanor is just an extension of the hard patriarchal prerogative that the boys' own fathers would lord over them in a different context. So in a way, Capitalism: Child Labor is a portrait of paternal cruelty and the horrors already implicit in childhood, put to work in the service of capital. Jacobs shakes the scene like a crystal ball, demanding truth from the still image, forcing it to life and also calling forth the ghostly memories of these lost, long-dead boys. In a manner somewhat similar to the photographs of Christian Boltanski, Jacobs displays the haunted corridors of the American past and its reverberations in the present. But the use of Nervous System animation - binocular vibration, looped partial rotations, details in the image folding inward against the larger photographic ground - makes the film screen itself into a kind of factory, a space for the production of a devastating counter-narrative against the authoritarian abuse of power. In conjunction with Rick Reed's skull-rattling machine-thump soundtrack, Jacobs gathers up the human toll of American progress and vicariously shifts the agony onto the viewer. In its combination of rage, sadness, and willingness to make stern demands of the sense, Capitalism: Child Labor is a superlative work of political modernism, and exemplifies why we need Ken Jacobs so very much.

-Michael Sicinski

Acquarello and Daniel Kasman review each of the three films that make up Memories: Farocki's Respite, Pedro Costa's The Rabbit Hunters and Eugéne Green's Correspondences.

"Correspondences is not composed visually like anything Baroque, per se - or rather, Baroque is a competing element with a certain (neoclassical?) austerity of line, color, and object that marks Green's frames." Zach Campbell is "about to take out Robert Harbison's Reflections on Baroque out from the library."

Posted by dwhudson at October 19, 2007 6:11 AM