Phil Collins Film 'I Am My Mother'

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Daadgalerie Presents Phil Collins Most Recent Film 'I Am My Mother'

Phil Collins, 'Soy mi madre' (I Am My Mother) 2008. 16mm color film/DVD 28 min. © and Courtesy: The Artist.

BERLIN.- The films and film installations, photographs and performances of the British artist Phil Collins are humorous and serious, emotional and complex at same time. His interest lies in cultural anthropology and political phenomena and their symptomatic manifestations, i.e., in popular culture or in the way language is used. Collins’s 3-channel film installation “The World Won’t Listen” serves as a good example of this when Collins offers up a stage to fans of the British pop band The Smiths from Columbia, Indonesia and Turkey. They sing the karaoke version of songs from the eponymously named Smiths album, which was cult in the 1980s -- not only for subversive teenagers in Thatcher’s United Kingdom. As part of the Berlin International Film Festival’s program Forum Expanded and parallel to Phil Collins’s curated project “Auto-Kino!” in the Temporary Kunsthalle Berlin (from 5 February 2010) the daadgalerie will be presenting Collin’s most recent film soy mi madre (I am my mother) (2008, 16mm/DVD, 28min) for which the artist hijacks the ubiquitously popular telenovela format. Filmed in Mexico City with well-known TV actors, Collins translation of the Latin American variant of the soap opera falls into a hyperdynamic, jarring melodrama with opulent sets in which the archetypical identity patterns of the genre are sharpened to a point. Collins alludes to the romantic stereotypical telenovela of the 1980s and 90s at its high point, and where underlying music and facial expressions play a leading role. The daily broadcast TV-novel is famous for creating strong moments of identification which occasionally have lead to the spectator’s mingling of the fictional reality with daily life outside of the media. Earlier works of Collins also deal with the effects of the media on the consumer’s life; for example, his project for the Turner Prize Exhibition in 2006 “Return of the Real” – a press conference with “victims” of reality-TV shows in the UK. A real drama’s collision with its communicative effects through the media coverage were the events of 9/11. In Phil Collins’s early and rarely shown video hero (2002, DVD, 40min) a New York reporter stands in front of the camera delivering his own personal version of the events of September 11, 2001 – as if “freely associating” or undertaking a “talking cure,” albeit assisted by alcohol. Together both soy mi madre and its counterpoint hero make reference to the late 1990s in the USA and the following Bush years and their reflection in the media. A commission of the Aspen Art Museum, Colorado, soy mi madre will be soon broadcast on local television there. Simultaneous to the exhibition at the daadgalerie, an accompanying catalog to the exhibition by the Aspen Art Museum, Colorado, will be published. Phil Collins, born in Runcorn, UK, in 1970, was a guest of the Berliner Künstlerprogramm/ DAAD in 2009. In 2010 he will participate in the 6th Berlin Biennial. In 2009 in a one-person-show at the Tramway in Glasgow he presented the project “The world won’t listen” which he started in 2005 at the Istanbul Biennial. In 2006 he was nominated for the Turner Prize. Since the late 1990s Collins has participated in numerous international group and solo-exhibitions, for example, at the Tate Britain und Tate Modern, at CAC Vilnius, P.S.1 New York, Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, SFMoMA, Aspen Art Museum, Carnegie Museum of Art, Stedelijk Museum, Frankfurter Kunstverein and Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt. Phil Collins lives and works in Berlin.

Phil Collins Film 'I Am My Mother'

Kenneth Anger ‘Invocation of My Demon Brother’

Kenneth Anger ‘Invocation of My Demon Brother’ « Brask Art Blog: "

Kenneth Anger, ‘Invocation of My Demon Brother’, 1969 (film still)

Sprüth Magers London is delighted to present an exhibition of work by the legendary filmmaker and artist Kenneth Anger his first solo show in London for five years. Making films continuously since the late 1940s and considered a countercultural icon, Kenneth Anger is widely acclaimed as a pioneering and influential force in avant-garde cinema. His groundbreaking body of work has inspired cineastes, filmmakers and artists alike. Many channels of contemporary visual culture, from queer iconography to MTV, similarly owe a debt to his art.

Sprueth Magers

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Kenneth Anger ‘Invocation of My Demon Brother’

Rise and Fall of the Contemporary Art Market

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Ben Lewis stands outside of Christie's.

LONDON.- The contemporary art boom is now over, but between 2003 and Autumn 2008 the world witnessed a craze for collecting contemporary art unprecedented in history. During the last frenzied year of this boom, art critic and film-maker Ben Lewis followed the contemporary art market, travelling to art fairs, auctions, museums, and the offices and homes of billionaire art collectors,, interviewing dealers, auctioneers, gallery-owners, art market analysts and art collectors, trying to find out the reasons behind this historic phenomenon. He uncovered a world of complicated deals, distinctive market practices and widespread secrecy as well as passionate enthusiasm for contemporary art. On September 15th 2008, the day of the collapse of Lehmans, the worst financial news since 1929, Damien Hirst sold over £70 million of his art, in an auction at Sotheby’s that would total £111 million over two days. It was the peak of the contemporary art bubble – the greatest rise in the financial value of art in the history of the world. One art critic and film-maker was banned by Sotheby’s and Hirst from attending this historic auction: Ben Lewis. Why? He had spent a year making a documentary searchng for the reasons behind the booming contemporary art market, and they claimed he was “biased” against them and contemporary art. During the easy-credit boom years, there were bubbles in many assets – property, wine, copper, oil. But there was one bubble that was bigger than all the rest: contemporary art. An Andy Warhol sold for $72 million, a Rothko for $73 million, and a Francis Bacon for $86 million. While the rest of the economy began to falter under the Credit Crunch in late 2007, the contemporary art bubble kept on inflating, bigger and fatter than ever before. Art critic and film-maker Ben Lewis spent all of 2008 investigating this contemporary art bubble. Everywhere he went, the art world told him that the contemporary art boom would go on forever, fuelled by a new passion from the world’s super-rich. But Lewis found other big reasons for the contemporary art boom – a world of unusual market practices, speculation, secrecy and tax breaks that involved the whole art world – dealers, collectors, galleries, auction houses and, in some senses, even public museums. In the climax of the film, Lewis’ discoveries lead him to play his own part in the bursting of the contemporary art bubble, which is revealed for the first time in this film. Finally the moment came that he had long predicted. A month after the Hirst auction at Sotheby’s, the contemporary art market crashed, dropping by 40% in November 2008 and 75% by February 2009, and still falling today. The Great Contemporary Art Bubble is not only a film about the art market , it may be read as a parable for the delusion and greed which drove the world economy over the edge in 2008. In future years the contemporary art bubble may come to be seen as the epitome of the boom-times we have been living through.

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Rise and Fall of the Contemporary Art Market

Susanne M. Winterling

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Susanne M. Winterling at GAK Gesellschaft fur Aktuelle Kunst Bremen

Susanne M. Winterling, 'Feather Eyes', 2009. ©Susanne M. Winterling.

BREMEN.- Susanne M. Winterling works primarily in film, collage and photography. The various media of the individual installations developed for each of the exhibition contexts lead, altogether, to a whole. Her works produce thereby a system of concrete references, without resulting in the telling of a distinct story or following any clear narrative threads. But instead, meaning emerges in a delicate weave of references; narrative volatilizing and branching out. Literature, music, art, architecture and in particular film history become artistic materials for Winterling in just the same ways as everyday objects are staged in her works. They can be of a porcelain cup from an erstwhile family manufacturer, a bird's feather that changes colour in differing light, the delicate flying fiery spikes of a sparkler or of the historical inscription discovered at an exhibition site. These elements of cultural history and the everyday encircle and mould each of us. Thereupon they determine the actual moulding both of identity and individuality and general societal realities. Therefore when Winterling implements everyday objects, film, literature and historical references in her works, her choice tells us, on the one hand, of her personal proclivities. On the other hand they refer to material which is also (consciously or unconsciously) known to the observer and therefore can be filled with their own perceptions, without the necessity of attaining knowledge through linked facts that descend too far into detail. Through a sensitive grasp of the atmospheres and histories of the discovered exhibition spaces Winterling links the references from various areas in poetically charged arrangements. For the exhibition '...dreaming is nursed in darkness' at the GAK, the inscription of a founders crest at the Weserburg building indicating the Teerhof's (Teer = tar, Hof = yard) original significance as a tar works for 15th century shipbuilding, a quote by French existentialist Jean Genet and the explosion of a powder tower on the site of the Teerhof in the 18th century form the starting point for a versatility of works developed specifically for this occasion. Thus a close up of a burning sparkler is played back in 16mm film format, links to the historical incident of the destruction of the 'bride' as the former powder tower at the Teerhof had been called and refers to the immanent beauty of the destructive incidents of fire and explosion. Various sculptures of tar and feathers and another 16mm film, showing the colour-changing feathers in their dance-like movement in a dark room, refers back to the name-giving history of the Teerhof. But likewise it plays on the custom in the Middle Ages to 'tar and feather' as a punishment and form of torture. Here too, the aesthetic beauty of the motif is brought about in singular contradistinction to the image evoked by their history. Such subsidiary perceptions and the material of tar, so bound up with black, pervades and forms the appearance of the whole exhibition – in frames, film backgrounds or the gleaming fabric panels which accentuate the elongated spaces of the GAK and are thus duplicated by the Weserburg tunnel situated in front of the door. Another element of the presentation is formed by a modified cast of the crest/emblem inscription fixed above the tunnel entrance of the Weserburg. It alters the original formulation from 'männlichen festen Wollen' (firm masculine want) to 'weibliches festes Wollen' (firm feminine want) indicating at once the absurdity of such gender specific attributions upon which character traits are based. Furthermore it elucidates on the propagation of anachronistic, male and female connotations, which pervade our language to this day and pose questions on societal power structures. The historical crest is countered by a quote by Jean Genet the French existentialist that not only donates the title of the exhibition at GAK but is to be found again as an inscription in the presentation ('A man must dream a long time in order to act with grandeur, and dreaming is nursed in darkness'). In this way the exhibition title acts as a copula between the individual elements of the presentation such as the numerous reflecting surfaces, which are to be found in themselves – in the thought, that dreams are not only nurtured from positive and light, but can grow quite equally from the darkness, that 'grandeur' develops only where the debate also admits the violent aspects of things and where beauty is accorded its dark side. Susanne M. Winterling (born, 1970) lives in Berlin. After taking part in international group exhibitions such as the Berlin Biennial 2008, at the Museum für Gegenwartskunst Basel and the Kunsthalle Malmő and solo presentations in Vienna, St. Louis and Tokyo the presentation at GAK Gesellschaft für Aktuelle Kunst is her first institutional solo exhibition in Germany. The exhibition has been created in cooperation with the Badischen Kunstverein Karlsruhe.

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Susanne M. Winterling

Video Vortex V – Day 1

Institute of Network Cultures Blog: "
System Flaws and Tactics

After the opening speech by Bram Crevits (Cimatics) and Geert Lovink (Institute of Network Cultures), the 5th edition of Video Vortex kicked off at the amazing Atomium in Brussels.

The first session addressed System Flaws and Tactics. This session was inspired by the inherent errors, disabilities and restrictions of online video technology that often conduct our behaviour but can also provide inspiring new insights. Liesbeth Huybrechts and Rudy Knoops gave the first presentation of the day, titled ‘Playing that video’. They work at the School of Communication and Multimedia Design (C-MD) in Genk, Belgium, where they lead the research group Social Spaces, on the topic of social, societal and spatial issues, using the internet as a tool and interface.

After pointing at the rules of play and playground, and building on theory of tactics and strategy as defined by De Certeau, the presenters explored the diffuse difference between work and play in the age of new media. Knoops pointed out that Google employees get to spend 20% of their time ‘playing’, i.e. working on their own projects. In his recent work, Julian Kuecklich refers to this conflation of play and labour as ‘Playbour’. Knoops and Huybrechts showed impressive work by the C-MD students in Genk, and called for play as a critical tool, and encouraged a practice of tactical play.

Next up was Brian Willems, who lectures in media culture as well as British and Irish Literature at the University of Split, Croatia. In his talk, titled ‘Blindness: the inability of YouTube to read itself’, he argued that online video often demonstrates blindness,as theorized by Paul de Man, Agamben, and Proust, and rather than being readable. He presented two cases of online video: The Rodney King Story, and Natalie Bookchin’s installation ‘Mass Ornament’, which was presented by the artist herself at the Video Vortex conference in Split (2009).

According to Willems, the Rodney King story demonstrates how difficult it is to read video. In the video, King, lying on the ground, tried to get up when the police attacked him again. The police later stated that they considered his standing up as aggressive behaviour. The video does not clarify whether this was indeed the case. Therefore, Willems argues the video demonstrates its blindness. In this respect, the work by Natalie Bookchin is equally hard to read. Inspired by the chorus lines of the Tiller Girls, she selected and sorted YouTube dance videos so they form a chorus line, through montage, soundtrack and composition. Willems pointed out that the amount of screens, layers and motifs makes this video hard to read, and therefore confronts you with its illegibility or blindness.

Rosa Menkman, artist, VJ and PhD candidate at KHM presented her Glitch Studies Manifesto, in which she called for a more drain approach of technology studies, which includes the study of its flaws and failures:

1. The dominant, continuing search for a noiseless channel has been, and will always be no more than a regrettable, ill-fated dogma.
2. Dispute the operating templates of creative practice by fighting genres and expectations!
3. Get away from the established action scripts and join the avant-garde of the unknown. Become a nomad of noise artifacts!
4. Use the glitch as an exoskeleton of progress.
5. The gospel of glitch art sings about new models implemented by corruption.
6. The ambiguous contingency of the glitch depends on its constantly mutating materiality.
7. Glitch artifacts are critical trans-media aesthetics.
8. Translate acousmatic noise and soundscapes into acousmatic video and videoscapes to create conceptual synesthesia.
9. Speak the totalitarian language of disintegration.
10. Study what is outside of knowledge, start with Glitch studies. Theory is just what you can get away with!

The session ended with a presentation by the artist Johan Grimonprez, who guided the audience through his You-tube-o-teque. And while the sphere of the Atomium was shaking because of an autumn storm, grimonprez created his own whirlwind, going from the history of the remote control and the invention of zap-proof commercials, to hitchcock pastiches and the swine flu vaccine scandal from 1976. (www.zapomatik.com)

Go to the Institute of Network Cultures blog for reports on day 2:

Video Vortex V – Day 2 – Online cinema

Video Vortex V – Day 2- Politics of Online cinema

Video Vortex V – Day 1

New Work by Dave Lewis

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Dave Lewis, 'New Forest' (image from Field Work), 2009.

HAMPSHIRE.- ArtSway announced an exhibition of new work by Dave Lewis bringing together photographs and video. Dave Lewis is a photographer and filmmaker interested in identity and how people belong to a place. In making his work, Lewis attempts to act as both an ethnographer (the study of the characteristics of different people) and an artist. Field Work is a new body of artwork inspired by the idea of the artist as a ‘stranger’ who visits a place or site to gather first-hand evidence as research. Lewis has explored the New Forest in Hampshire and Newtown in mid-Wales for Field Work. Both of theses places are linked by their rural locations and also by their cultural differences to Lewis’ hometown of London. By analyzing and contrasting these areas, interviewing residents and documenting events such as local festivals and carnivals, Lewis examines the role of the individual within society and how that individual identifies themselves with a place. For his exhibition at ArtSway Lewis will present a series of large-scale landscape photographs taken on the outskirts of Newtown, and Sway. These photographs are taken from the viewpoint of the ‘stranger’ as he surveys a place that is new to him. Alongside these photographs are two filmed ‘journeys’ showing the ‘stranger’ as he conducts his research into Newtown and Sway, including interviews with local people. Other images in the exhibition will include photographs Lewis took at carnivals in Wales and the New Forest that further explore ideas of identity and belonging to a place. Dave Lewis gained a BA Hons in Film and Photographic Arts from the Polytechnic of Central London in 1985. Recent exhibitions and screenings include: Photo-ID Norwich Forum, 2009; Hybridity, Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts 2008; Anywhere but Here, Southwark Gallery, 2008; AfterShock, Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, 2007. Dave Lewis lives and works in London and is currently Visiting Research Fellow in the Department of Anthropology, Goldsmiths, University of London.

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New Work by Dave Lewis

MoMA Showcases Eight New Films in Exhibition of Foreign Language Cinema

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MoMA Showcases Eight New Films in Exhibition of Foreign Language Cinema From 'Postales de Leningrado' (Postcards from Leningrad), Venezuela, 2007. Written and directed by Mariana Rondón. NEW YORK, NY.- MoMA presents 'Iberoamérica: Our Way(s)', an exhibition of eight new Spanish- and Portuguese-language films representing collaborations among filmmakers from 10 different countries. The exhibition celebrates the quality and originality of these films, which have all received support from the intergovernmental organization Ibermedia, now in its twelfth year. 'Iberoamérica: Our Way(s)' is presented from November 5 through 13, 2009, in The Roy and Niuta Titus Theaters, and includes films that were made between 2007—the year of MoMA’s first Ibermedia series—and 2009. Ibermedia supports film production ... More

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MoMA Showcases Eight New Films in Exhibition of Foreign Language Cinema

Feature Film: Douglas Gordon's vision of Bernard Herrmann's Vertigo

FEATURE FILM Douglas Gordon's vision of Bernard HERRMANN's Vertigo : Film Music on the Web CD Reviews Sept1999: "

Book/CD/Video Review: FEATURE FILM Douglas Gordon's vision of Bernard HERRMANN's Vertigo

		CONLON/VERTIGO Book/CD/Video Review: FEATURE FILM Douglas Gordon's vision of Bernard HERRMANN's Vertigo This is an extraordinary visual and audio homage to Hitchcock's Vertigo and, in particular, to Bernard Herrmann's celebrated score. Vertigo, arguably Hitch's masterpiece, has always attracted attention. Acres of text have been written about the film and its deep psychological significance. Beautifully refurbished videos of the film have been released - the latest with a documentary about the film. Varèse Sarabande recordings have included the majority of the cues, including Joel McNeely's excellent 1996 recording with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra (VSD-5600). Now James Conlon's recording, running time 74:35, which is the heart of this project, includes all the music that Herrmann wrote for the film. The book shows Conlon conducting the Paris Opera Orchestra in this performance of Herrmann's score. Close-ups of the conductor's head and hands were filmed by Douglas Gordon's cameras. The selection of the shots from all the different cameras and the editing were all Douglas Gordon's decisions. These close-ups shots, together with deep crimson and black background dissolves, constitute the total content of the 75-minute 35mm film which is the version I saw. There is also the video installation version that exactly parallels the time of the Hitchcock film (122.5 minutes). This version shows Conlon, in frame during the musical cues, while the camera tracks through the concert hall during the unscored sequences of the film to the subliminal accompaniment of its dialogue and background noises. The book comprises stills compiled from the film. It includes, helpfully, a few small stills from Hitchcock's film scattered at strategic points through its pages These film stills are inset within a much larger frame of the conductor's gestures. The book has the actual CD inset so that it becomes an integral part of the front cover design. Inside the pocket, a booklet contains two detailed essays by Raymond Bellour on Gordon's work and an excellent thought-provoking article by Royal S. Brown on Bernard Herrmann's score. Review: The Film and the Book To quote Bellour's notes …'…to take the music and only the music whose spellbinding power and prestige lend it an autonomy which the composer's quality alone cannot explain - and to match this music to images inspired by the music itself, is a turn of the screw that strikes very near to the inner madness of its source…' The inner madness of its source. Yes, there it is, an inner madness that so many of us know in one form or another. That is why so many of us are fascinated with Vertigo because we can see our fears reflected in it. There is the fear of falling itself. This is very much a metaphor for the process of falling in love. We may fear it because we loose ourselves in it; we become vulnerable, we are made giddy by it, we drown in it. We loose control. Consider how often composers have associated love with turbulent waters and how poets have called falling in love 'a little death.' We become vulnerable, at the mercy of another. Sometimes, as in the case of Scotty, the love becomes obsessive and those that have experienced such an obsession will probably know its prolonged destruction and searing pain. Taking the psychology of the film to another level, there is a sense of both the 'Lieberstot', the love death of Wagner's Tristan & Isolde and, as Royal S Brown adroitly observes, the other side of the coin, 'Toten lieb', Death love, for Madeleine's obsession with Carlotta Valdes. There is, too, the connotation of Scotty being seen as something of 'an Orphic stalker.' The music matches the story; it is ambivalent - full of unresolved resolutions. Aural and visual images seem to combine to form a sort of dream verging on a nightmare; in fact, Scotty's nightmare is a crucial part of the film. How many of us, I wonder, can identify with such dreams? How many of us are fascinated enough to want to see Vertigo again and again so that we might discover some clue that might help us resolve its many mysteries in order, perhaps, to resolve our own unresolved resolutions? We can wonder and wonder, but we will never know what drew and held Judy Barton to Gavin Essler or what happened to Scotty after Judy's fall, or the answers to dozens of Vertigo's arcane enigmas. I offer all these thoughts because I believe they have a bearing on the film and book. But first, I am going to admit I know little of modern art and this film comes under that heading [The Pompidou Centre, Paris's museum of modern art figures strongly in the film's credits.] I therefore refuse to swim in shark infested waters to hazard an uninformed opinion of the film as art per se. I will therefore confine myself to making remarks about how well the film conveys the atmosphere, the intensity, the passions and the emotions of the film. After all, it is supposed to be the conductor's job to draw out all of these from his orchestra. I think this film partially succeeds on this level. Certainly, such sequences from the Hitchcock film, as the opening scene where Scotty looses his grip on the hand of the detective who falls to his death is powerfully conveyed. Conlon's quivering, folded fingers appear to be grasping on with a desperate intensity before they indicate Scotty's loosening grip. In many sequences, fluttering hands in close up, looking like frightened birds, give the impression of the sensation of falling and of a great unfathomable loss. But, of course, the conductor indicates emotions with his whole body and this is where I think the close-up technique falls down in its persistency. We only get a fraction of the communicative process. It might be the most important fraction (?) nevertheless, it is a fraction. Now Mr Conlon's reading is very good indeed as I observe below but he is young. I wonder if more might have been communicated had Mr Gordon chosen an older conductor who had lived in a more emotionally ravaged body? But, then, we might not have had such a wonderful performance! Review: The CD The first thing one notices is that the score is played through as one complete long cue (Douglas Gordon's decision). There are no separately screenplay-indicated cue divisions. For most people who know the film and Herrmann's score well, this will prove to be no problem for they will recognise the 'mile-posts' as they pass by. The breaks are brief and the music is remarkably seamless and works well as a complete composition in its own right. Conlon impresses immediately with great attack and lucidity in the opening credits music and rooftops chase music. He is thoroughly involved in the music all the way through and delivers a passionate, intense reading that is very satisfying. The tower climaxes are shattering in their dynamic intensity. In contrast his hushed pianissimos are delicate and sensitive to the nuances of the screenplay. I was very impressed with his take on those muted brass chords that sound so remote, so detached - a dream within a dream. His 'Scene d'amour' is approached well and its climax terraced most convincingly. This is definitely one of the best if not the definitive reading of Herrmann's score now available on disc. Reviewer Ian Lace Film and book CD Feature Film a book by Douglas Gordon (also includes the CD) is available from Artangel 36 St John's Lane, London EC1M 4BJ price £24:95 plus £6 postage and handling. Artangel e-mail: artangel@easynet.co.uk. In the U.S.A., the book is available, price $45 through D.A.P., 155 Sixth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10013 (phone: [212] 627-1999; fax: [212]627 9484). For any information on screenings of the 35mm version or showing of the video installation, contact Artangel.	Reviewer Ian Lace Film and book CD

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Feature Film: Douglas Gordon's vision of Bernard Herrmann's Vertigo

Paranormal Activity

Culture Warrior: Found Footage Filmmaking - Film School Rejects: "

Culture Warrior: Found Footage Filmmaking

Posted by Landon Palmer (landon@filmschoolrejects.com) on October 12, 2009

If there is ever a sleeper hit in 2009, Paranormal Activity is it. Accompanied with a lackluster visual marketing campaign (lame poster, lamer trailer), the years-long shelved film is now encountering success by an intense and calculated word-of-mouth, demanding a wider release through online petitions and an exponentially increasing per-theater average to an astonishing total this weekend in the #5 spot with $7 million in only 160 theaters. The film works with its rather simple, straightforward idea of amping up the creepiness slowly and with as minimal revealing material possible (rarely these days do horror films get so much out of so little). The device this movie uses to achieve its creepiness is also simple and is becoming an increasingly familiar way to make horror films, framing the film as an archive of home-video footage made by the victims themselves.

This approach to horror arguably started with The Blair Witch Project and has been since reawakened with more recent films like Cloverfield, Diary of the Dead, [Rec], its US remake Quarantine, [Rec] 2, and now Paranormal. Blair Witch ten years ago (yes, it really is ten years old) relied on a shrewd marketing campaign taking place on both the grassroots (it takes the disputed title as the first movie hyped up by the Internet) and professional levels (its trailer did accompany The Phantom Menace, after all). It also used the hype of its notoriously creepy Sundance screening to bankroll into its mainstream success. This, however, occurred when there was still a conversation going on regarding whether or not the footage was real, a conversation that ended shortly after the film’s commercial release. Inevitably, a huge backlash occurred, as many attested that believing the footage was real was integral to its effectiveness as a horror movie—without that, all you had left was nauseating camerawork and an ineffective gimmick of a concept.

As with many sleeper hits, a similar backlash will no doubt occur with Paranormal Activity, but the film seems to operate effectively as a scary movie whether or not one is duped into thinking it’s real, and it seems nobody involved with this film is trying to sell it as found footage. This I believe is indicative of a significant change in how we view fictional media objects posing as nonfiction, evidential, or found footage, and why a movie like Paranormal Activity can be released ten years after Blair Witch and use the same conceit to a much better effect.

While Blair Witch may represent progressive DIY marketing as much as it does clever (if still gimmicky) DIY filmmaking, its use of 16mm and home video footage is indicative of its status as part and parcel of a dial-up era still making the transition to the digital global neighborhood we know today. Blair Witch was part of Web 1.0, existing before YouTube, blogging and vlogging, or the many social networking sites that we use every day, enabling us to potentially express our random thoughts to people all around the globe.

Leading up to 2009 we’ve seen the collapse of grassroots and corporate worlds, lines blurred between amateur and professional sources of web content as the professionals have become able to convincingly imitate the amateurs, or the fake and staged being able to imitate what we previously accepted as real (e.g., lonelygirl15). We’re used to seeing talking heads on websites spouting varied opinions on subjects ranging from the Iran elections to Obama’s birthplace to whether or not Britney should be left alone. This remains a culture in which we’ve felt invited to turn the camera on ourselves, where our daily thoughts are worthy of dissemination as long as they don’t exceed 140 characters. Occasionally we take interest in the rare people out there documenting themselves who either have something important to say or say nothing in a compelling way—the problem is, we can’t always know where they’re coming from. Is this the puppet of a lobbyist, or is this a normal Joe just feeling the need to put his words in the ether of cyberspace? Am I being friended or followed by a person or a robot? At some point it simply doesn’t matter, as the compelling degree of the content trumps the validity or merits of the source.

We’ve done the same with documentaries, interrogating every detail and being aware of how the camera (both ideologically and aesthetically) frames an issue or the way a filmmaker stages events. Where audiences simply took the benefit of the doubt in decades before, blindly assuming that documentaries were objective documents of reality, audiences now are far keener (in healthy and in nitpicking ways) to question every little detail and seek out the documentarian’s agenda. Even Errol Morris—the anti-Michael Moore—was accused of agenda-driven filmmaking when admitting that he paid his interview subjects for last year’s Standard Operating Procedure, which is actually common practice in nonfiction filmmaking. On the other hand, we also consume narratives that are obviously fiction existing in the guise of nonfiction, as faux-doc shows like The Office and Parks and Recreation structure their laughs through shaky-camera immediacy and direct address, a format which would have been distracting for the sitcom format fifteen years ago.

There’s no way Blair Witch would have been successful today. The film would have been dismissed as fake immediately, or its veracity would have been so questioned or debated over as to render it irrelevant or label it untrustworthy. Telling a 21^st century audience “this is real” simply won’t work anymore. Why Paranormal Activity works is that it remains an effective piece of filmmaking whether or not one believes it to be a document. The “San Diego Police Dept.” header at the film’s beginning does not serve as forged evidence trying to convince the audience that the film is something it’s not (unlike the forged evidence on Blair Witch’s website), rather it simply exists to be consistent with the overall aesthetic. Paranormal Activity plugs into our culture’s acceptance that effectively pulling off the illusion of the real is not the same thing as passively accepting something as real. This film works off the notion that we’re used to normal people around the world turning the camera onto their own faces while we don’t know nor care whether or not it’s real or fake—the aesthetic is now so familiar and the content so compelling that it’s effective nonetheless. And the requirement of compelling content is probably why this approach has been so popular recently in the horror genre—there’s something exciting about the extraordinary posing as the mundane.

Read more articles by Landon Palmer

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Paranormal Activity

Filmmaker Nicolas Provost

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Seattle Art Museum is the First U.S. Museum to Survey the Work of Filmmaker Nicolas Provost

'Plot Point', 2007. Video projection with sound, 15 minutes. Nicolas Provost, Belgian, born 1969. Courtesy Tim van Laere Gallery, Antwerp © Nicolas Provost, Courtesy Tim Van Laere Gallery, Antwerp.

SEATTLE, WA.- The Seattle Art Museum is the first U.S. museum to survey the work of Belgian filmmaker Nicolas Provost. This installation comprises five video works, showing the range of approaches Provost has brought to his filmmaking since 2003. Provost has what could be seen as a 21st-century 'do-it-yourself' approach to making video, often appropriating found footage and editing it extensively with commercial editing software to make radically new and exciting imagery. While the end product is often grandiose, sweeping and emotionally charged, there is a low-budget ethos behind the work that gives hope to aspiring filmmakers. Nicolas Provost is a visual artist and recently moved back to Belgium after a 10 years stay in Oslo, Norway. Now he lives and works in Brussels, Belgium. His work is to be seen worldwide on both film- and visual arts platforms. His films have earned a long list of awards and screenings at prestigious festivals as among others The Sundance Film Festival, The San Francisco International Filmfestival, Cinevegas, The International Film Festival Rotterdam, The Viennale, The Locarno Film Festival, The Ann Arbor Film Festival, Clermont-Ferrand, Impakt Film Festival, The Asian International Film Festival (Seoul), …… The works of Nicolas Provost can be seen as cinematic experiences as much as they are poetic audiovisual paintings. They intend to walk on the fine line between dualities and balance between the grotesque and the moving, beauty and cruelty, the emotional and the intellectual, between cinema and fine arts. Time and again his phantasmagorias provoke both recognition and alienation and succeed in catching our expectations into an unravelling game of mystery and abstraction forcing the viewer to reflect on the fenomenon of the audiovisual. With manipulations of time, codes and form, cinematographic and narrative language is analysed, accents are shifted and new stories are told. Apart from the use of film and visual language, sound is also a constant factor in Provost’s body of work, as a rhythmical spine or an emotional guideline. In his found footage work, filmic memory and perception are stimulated by the use of film historical fragments, but Provost is as likely to write and direct contemporary cinema. Provost wrote, produced and directed the midlength fiction film EXOTICORE, which tells the tale of an immigrant ‘s integration nightmare in Norway. His acclaimed art film ‘Papillon d’amour’ received numerous awards and a Special Mention at The Sundance Film Festival in 2004 where he was in competition again in 2006 with EXOTICORE and in 2007 with INDUCTION, a cinematic deconstruction. Nicolas Provost: Selected Works is curated by Michael Darling, Jon & Mary Shirley Curator of Modern & Contemporary Art.

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Filmmaker Nicolas Provost

Indianapolis Museum of Art to Feature Recent Films by Josephine Meckseper

Artdaily.org - The First Art Newspaper on the Net

via www.artdaily.com on 8/7/09

Indianapolis Museum of Art to Feature Recent Films by Josephine Meckseper

Video stills from 0% Down, Josephine Meckseper. Courtesy of the Indianapolis Museum of Art.

INDIANAPOLIS, IN. The Indianapolis Museum of Art announced today that it will showcase the work of internationally renowned artist Josephine Meckseper in Josephine Meckseper: Recent Films. The exhibition, organized by the IMA, will feature two short films, titled 0% Down and Mall of America, and will open October 16, 2009 in the Carmen and Mark Holeman Video Gallery at the IMA. The exhibition will be on view through February 7, 2010.

Indianapolis Museum of Art to Feature Recent Films by Josephine Meckseper

Filmmaker Philip Haas Presents His New Films Commissioned by the Kimbell Art Museum

Artdaily.org - The First Art Newspaper on the Net

via www.artdaily.org on 7/17/09

Filmmaker Philip Haas Presents His New Films Commissioned by the Kimbell Art Museum

The young James Ensor at Mardi Gras, from the film installation Skeletons Warming Themselves.

Filmmaker Philip Haas Presents His New Films Commissioned by the Kimbell Art Museum