November 2008 Archives

With a nice touch of irony, REDCAT curators will counter the familial joy of Thanksgiving with some of the most obsessive explorations of domestic life in all of cinema by featuring the work of Austrian filmmaker Martin Arnold this Monday night. The artist, who began making films in the late 1980s, is known for taking tiny snippets of film - a few seconds in some cases - and rolling back and forth across single frames to create stuttering, dancing analyses that showcase hidden dynamics of power and violence within everyday interactions.

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I've been writing about digital media for a long time, and appreciate much of what it offers, especially as it has transformed access to image-making and opened up distribution. But I also love cinema - film emulsion and its delicacy; projectors and their clackety noise; even the idea of cinema and its 24 still frames magically transformed into motion. People in LA used to gather around projectors often but much of that has given way to video on small screens. That's why the next REDCAT screening os so special: artists Sandra Gibson and Luis Recoder will present a "projector performance" that celebrates the very essence of cinema, namely light.

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You see the leaves first, rustling, flickering yellow shapes blanketing the exterior walls of a small room. Then you hear grunting and jumbled, muffled thumps and thuds. As you enter the darkened space of the gallery, you come face to face with a huge brown bear. The video projection is doubled, and the bear seems to tower over you from two walls. He's in a cabin, but he's really too big for the small room. He paws at the bed, his claws catching in the yarn of a crocheted spread. A slight woman sits quietly next to him. She touches his paw. She leans on his shoulder. He leans back onto her. He sprawls sleepily across her lap. And he cuffs her hard, just missing her right eye.

The project is Hilja Keading's The Bonker's Devotional, a video installation that ponders the line between nature and culture, triggering the desire to know and understand the mysterious aspects of our own interior selves. For the Los Angeles-based artist - who is also the woman in the room with the bear - the project represents the culmination of a series of ideas and formal experimentation that she has followed for years. For viewers, it's a provocative, visceral treat.

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In a darkened corner of Cal State LA's Luckman Gallery, a cool haven from the dizzying smoke and ash, the infamous fight between Indiana Pacer basketball players and fans that took place nearly four years ago to the day unspools as a short 16mm animated film loop titled Brawl. Made by San Francisco-based artist Kota Ezawa, the film reimagines the video documentation of the event as flat, painted images that resemble paint-by-number cartoon characters in motion, with all the overt drama and violence emptied from the footage. The audio sportscast remains, however, emanating from speakers behind the 16mm projector. At one point, an announcer grimly exclaims, "This is an ugly, ugly scene."

The scene may indeed be ugly, but the animation is quietly beautiful with its pale colors and often indiscernible abstract patterns. Watching the film, you're left suspended somewhere between the ostensible truth of the original footage and the aesthetic conundrum of its remake, with a series of questions and contradictions that pivot on the recognition of shared historical moments as they're rendered visually.

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Last Thursday, artists Jean Rasenberger and Tom Knechtel invited me out to Art Center to give a talk. The topic? Tools. Yes, it's an odd subject, but the seminar is what's known as a "transdisciplinary studio," in which students explore a single concept from multiple perspectives; the collision of ideas is often exhilarating and unexpected.

I decided to talk about digital storytelling and the intersection of media-making tools and culture. I'm curious about new kinds of stories as the computer influences cinema. What happens when cinema is no longer confined to movie theaters or DVD players? What is cinema when it's on your cell phone or computer, on giant billboards scattered around the city and on mini-screens at the bank? And what are the tools that make this cinema happen?

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Imagine a magnitude 7.8 earthquake tumbling along the San Andreas Fault, then rolling through downtown on its way toward the ocean. If it's too boggling to even picture, take a look at Preparedness Now, a short video directed by Art Center College of Design grad Theo Alexopoulos that outlines the grim aftermath of a devastating quake.

Made in collaboration with USGS Multi-Hazards Demonstration Project as part of the Great Southern California ShakeOut earthquake drill scheduled for Thursday, November 13 at 10:00 a.m. when LA residents are asked to duck, cover and hold, the video exemplifies the energizing power of design-based visual communication. Its deft orchestration of photos, illustrations, statistics, music and voice-over renders a stark picture of devastation but does so in an way that communicates clearly and effectively.

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"I think of film as a 'space image' which is presented for a certain amount of time," said celebrated animator Robert Breer in an interview in 1962. "My approach to film is that of a painter -- that is, I try to present the total image right away, and the images following are merely other aspects of an equivalent to the film and final image."

REDCAT kicks off a stunning three-program retrospective Breer's work tonight with 14 35mm shorts recently restored by Anthology Film Archives, several of which showcase Breer's background as a painter.

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LA experimental film denizens have longed envied San Francisco for being home to the wild-haired filmmaker Craig Baldwin, who is the unrivaled champion of underground found footage filmmaking, leader of the notorious Other Cinema screening space located in the basement of Artists' Television Access, and maker of some of our era's most insane collage narratives.

The energetic Baldwin almost always talks with a furious intensity, the words coming fast, especially when he's describing his particular kind of filmmaking, which is at once oddly poetic and entirely political. Working in his basement archive piled high with literally hundreds of film cans, Baldwin slams together diverse snippets of footage culled from esoteric sources to craft what he calls "collage essays" and "exploded narratives." They're vast. They're vertiginous. And they're brilliant.

Recently, Baldwin turned his attention to Los Angeles to create his new film, described as a "not untrue saga," the 109-minute Mock Up on Mu. The film revels in the blurry line between fact and fiction, assembling hundreds of old found footage clips, bits of newly shot live action and a voice-over narration to tell a story concerning three Los Angeles characters from the past.

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