A handful of weeks back while rummaging the many hours of old tapes on hand, I started to mess with some material I’d originally thought to make into an installation, and instead now have made into a film of some kind. Better hurry before tape goes the way of of the dodo – in fact just the past week went to have my old DSR-11 fixed as the tape insert mechanism went on blink and the authorized Sony repair guy, charging $120 or so for my bother, gave me back the deck in worse shape than I gave it to him: now not only doesn’t the in/out mechanism work, but it won’t play when the tape goes in; Friday it goes back but not for him to pretend to repair it. Will get it directly to SONY somehow.
This film is one in which 3 standard DV images share an HD wide-screen most of the time, though at a later point it’s two images. And I think towards the very end it’s likely to be a single image. These are culled from various things shot in the last 14 years, since I started working in DV – odds and ends that are of interest, but which I didn’t shoot with anything particular in mind. Slowly they’ve gravitated together.
A few minutes in
10 minutes in or so
30 or more
almost 50 minutes
The woman to the right was Portuguese Olympic-level sharp-shooter, exercising 2 hours a day – the shot is almost 60 continuous minutes; the middle is a rickshaw cyclist in Raipur, India, giving me and another guy a ride; and to the right is my own hernia operation, filmed by myself, about 8 years ago. I find all these images a bit disturbing, for differing reasons, and imagine they’ll shake up most people’s sensibilities.
A brief few seconds of scientific footage
Just over 50 mins
Portuguese acting as if they were afflicted with Tourette’s syndrome
Then some more scientific material.
About 55 mins
A bit more Tourette’s
A girl and a gun
And then a finale, which I kind of know what it should be, but haven’t come up with the material just yet. It should be very disturbing. [Update April 11 2011: the finale includes now 3 screens of hard-core porn, a bit more scientific imagery, and death.]
Just what this means, I am not sure. Just as I’m not sure why in the present situation I should plow on making these things at all. Of late my track record’s been rather minimal, to say the least: starting back in 2004, with Homecoming, and then with La Lunga Ombra, Over Here, and Parable, I’ve been pretty much shut out of festivals, each film going to just a festival or two, and then…. nada. Still waiting to see if Swimming in Nebraska gets anywhere. Since I haven’t tried at all, there’s been no television, though I suspect there’s still a few places where some of these would fit in, but maybe not. Maybe a few places or maybe not that they’d fit in.
Bottom line is that each film took more time and energy than I could tally up, and the end result is maybe a few hundred people see each one. Of course at the back end it is the same as at the front: no pay.
Now with a work like Dissonance I can kind of accept it: it’s a demanding, elusive, strange film, which even I have no idea what, if anything, it means, or if it should “mean” anything. It seems more related to some visual arts/painters than to 99.9% of cinema. But then I ponder, if painter X can unload his work on a museum for X hundred thousand or so, why doesn’t this do so as well. Or at least a little. The fact is if I went to show it at a prestigious museum, like MoMA, or the Walker, I’d be lucky if they coughed up $250. And probably they’d want me in the flesh but not pay to get me there. Or put me up. In fact, as with many others in America, the pay-scale has been sliding the last decade, not even treading water.
And so, then again, what’s the point? I scratch my head, and flick on the computer in the morning, and get on to the next one. It’ll be a portrait of Lisbon, shot mostly in 1996-98. [Update: shown at the Rotterdam Film Festival 2011.]
Imagens de um cidade perdida
[For earlier ruminations in the same realm, see this and this.]
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Looks good to me!
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