Kristin Strayer, a volunteer at the Carnegie Museum of Art and a lecturer of Film Studies at the University of Pittsburgh, wrote something about the nature of curating experimental film that caught my attention.
She criticizes contemporary curators and scholars who write about experimental film and generally only address “those already converted” at the expense of less-knowledgable but receptive viewers. She writes:
The authors address a rather small group of filmgoers: scholars, filmmakers, artists, and occasional cineastes. Whether amateur or professional, these are viewers who haven’t just seen particular films but know the historic details surrounding the films, or which filmmakers worked with other filmmakers, or stories of how so many films were made by circles of friends with little money or resources.
This was one of my chief complaints about the recent screening of Gil Wolman’s L’Anticoncept at Light Industry. To “get” this film, I needed to be fluent in French and well-versed in Lettrism and the mid-century French avant-garde. I confess: I am neither. This is where a curator can really shine, explaining the importance of this film and suggesting an approach for watching it. Curating a film involves more than just selecting it. You need to describe the work—sometimes overly pedantically—so your audience can appreciate it as much as you do.
Another challenge experimental film faces in contemporary exhibitions, according to Strayer, is the gallery setting itself. She notes that “the exhibition gallery is radically different from a theater that shows [a] traditional cinematic text.” Whereas “a theater expects a stable subject who watches and the consistency of a darkened room,” a gallery accommodates the visitor’s physical movement around the space. This poses a challenge for any experimental film or video longer than five minutes because people can’t stand still much longer than that.
As I wrote last week, the staff at Light Industry mitigated some of the major challenges of screening this work. They procured an appropriately sized white ballon for a screen, instead of simply projecting the video on to a white wall as they do for their other screenings. They distributed printed copies of the English-language translation of the narration. And, to their credit, they seated us in a darkened room to watch in a theatrical setting. As a testament to that last bit, a patron even shushed us and asked us to leave for ruining his experience.
And because we didn’t know how to watch this film or how to contextualize it, we left as quickly and as quietly as we could.
Yesterday, I linked to a Wall Street Journal article criticizing television networks for speeding up movies and television episodes to squeeze in more time for commercials. While an informed first-impression might react in horror at such a practice, I argued that it’s no big whoop for two reasons.
TV broadcasts and in-class screenings are, at best, proxies for the original work. No one should expect these viewings to be the canonical version of a film or a first-run broadcast.
Whereas time and pacing might be crucial for some films, speeding up a film by 2-4% doesn’t really matter for other works. An educated expert in film history and aesthetics like me should be able to determine when it’s appropriate and when it’s not.
All of this was before I had read Marco Arment’s defense of letting people listen to podcasts at whatever speed he/she wants, published on Tuesday. He has an interest in the matter because he developed Overcast), a popular podcatching app for iOS. One of the unique features of that app is Smart Speed, which allows listeners to skip moments of silence to reduce the overall listening time of the program. In his nuanced argument, he distinguishes between certain podcasts, where timing and pauses are essential, and other podcasts where it is less relevant. He notes:
Podcasts (and video) are impossible to skim effectively, but we can vary our listening speed. Just as not every article is worth reading slowly and completely, not every podcast is This American Life. Even most episodes of This American Life aren’t as timing-sensitive as the Mike Daisey retraction. Some podcasts are painstakingly crafted, artistic “storytelling” shows, but most aren’t, by far.
The same is true for most feature films and television programs. There are some works where pace and tempo absolutely matter and others where it does not. As I wrote yesterday, I would never speed up a Hitchcock or Maya Deren film—or an episode of The Wire—because speed and tempo absolutely matters in those works. The same is true for even less artistic works, but it takes a trained and experienced viewer to know when it does matter. For example, in college, a well-respected film professor—I won’t say who—confessed that she “skimmed” certain silent films at double speed because, in her expert opinion, the time saved outweighed the original intent of some long-dead hack studio filmmaker making five films a week (my words, not hers).
One of the unique aspects of Overcast is its approach to reducing listening time. Most other podcatching apps simply allow listeners to speed up playback. For example, Downcast for iOS allows listeners to audition a podcast at 1.5x and 2.0x speed.1 I have used Downcast for years but never used its 1.5x/2.0x feature because it altered the pitch to such a degree that l simply couldn’t enjoy the content. Smart Speed in Overcast, on the other hand, is a compromise. It retains the same pitch, a crucial aspect of sonic fidelity, but also allows listeners to “skim” the content. Reducing the moments of silence might be terrible for a chilling interview on 60 Minutes, but it might not matter as much for a group of journalists discussing the television industry, despite the fact that both are excellent, informative, and well-produced programs.
You can be doctrinal about screening and auditioning things at their original speed, but as with everything good and holy in this world, it is more complicated than you might have initially thought. That’s why we have to make our own decisions about balancing our precious time, in-class discussion (or advertising minutes), and the integrity of a work.
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Remember, that I have only sped up fewer than ten screening and only at 1.02x–1.04x. ↩
Joe Flint, writing for the Wall Street Journal‘s Digital microsite, exposes cable TV networks that compress programming content, such as when TBS broadcast The Wizard of Oz last November, to fit in more advertisements in the same block of time.
Tinkering with shows to squeeze more advertising dollars out of them has been done before. Cable networks have long made room for ads by shortening the opening credits. Reruns of “Law & Order” on TNT have a 24-second opening, in contrast to the original 1 minute, 45-second opening when it aired on NBC.
But speeding up the actual content is a more subtle tactic TV networks use to achieve a higher volume of ads. TBS also has sped up sitcom reruns of “Seinfeld” and other shows, and sister network TNT has also employed the approach as well. Viacom Inc.’s TV Land has done the same with “Friends” reruns.
A colleague, who forwarded the article earlier today, called the apparently unprecedented practice “scary.”
But is it, really?
First, is this even new? I thought this was already standard practice, especially for movies broadcast on television. I remember watching Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986) on Comedy Central in the 1990s with my roommate Rick. It was a movie we knew well, having seen it dozens of times between the two of us. We had even seen it on 35mm film, paired with Election (1999), at a double-feature at the New Beverly Cinema, in Los Angeles at the end of the Clinton Administration. But with this Comedy Central screening, we could tell something was off.
To confirm our suspicions, Rick fetched his VHS copy of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off to screen it and compare it to the broadcast version. Going back and forth between the cable net’s feed and the VHS deck, we verified that Comedy Central had indeed sped up the movie. It was most evident when Edward R. Rooney proclaims that, because of kids like Ferris, he “weeps for the future.” The voice of Jeffrey Jones, who played Rooney, was easily an octave higher on the broadcast than it was on the VHS version.1
From then on, we noticed this practice on countless other Comedy Central movie broadcasts, too. I guess once you see something like that, you can never unsee it.
Second, I’m guilty of having sped up screenings in class. In a few cases, after a lengthy lecture and class discussion, it was clear that we were going to go over time. To fit the screening, I have played a H.264 file from my Mac using VLC, which has a playback-speed control. I’ve gone as high as 104% but usually keep it at 102% or so. When I’ve sped up a screening, I’ve previewed it to ensure the playback doesn’t appear off, and I’ve only used it on films where pacing or tempo is not a significant element of the filmmaking. I’ve done it for films like Flaming Creatures and Sins of the Fleshapoids, where a viewer would be too preoccupied with horror or laughter, respectively, to notice a 2% increase in speed. However, I would never speed up a screening of a film by Alfred Hitchcock, Stan Brakhage, or Maya Deren. In those cases, the pacing and rhythm are really important dimensions of their filmmaking.
Maya Deren, in At Land, can take as much time as she needs in my class.
Finally, is this even a big deal? The whole screening experience—in a classroom or on television—is already compromised. We watch with cheap projectors and television monitors that produce rainbow and soap opera effects. We listen with low-fi sound systems that don’t reproduce a full range of sounds. And, for decades, we have watched films that have been panned, scanned and center-cut to fit the aspect ratio of our TV sets.
Some years ago, I helped organized the NYU Cinema Studies student conference, an annual event that started as a practice-run for the much larger Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference. Under my guidance, we expanded it from a single-day conference of about a dozen speakers to one where we had about a dozen panels, with about forty presentations, over two days.
One of my goals was to include as many students as possible to present and to have the faculty also contribute. Not only did we manage to get every single faculty member to either moderate or participate on a panel, we also included undergraduate students and even some graduate students from other departments, specifically some art historians from NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts. The IFA panel was controversial because the audience thought the papers were really bad. Was it sour grapes because someone outside our field encroaching on our turf? Or was it because, as novice film scholars, they were unfamiliar with the fundamental scholarship in our field? Whatever the reason, I distinctly remember someone—I won’t say who—told me an unforgettable nugget after the IFA panel:
This is why we don’t let art historians do film.
L’Anticoncept
On Friday night, I went with my friend, softball teammate and esteemed art historian Annie to a screening of Gil Wolman’s L’Anticoncept at Light Industry, one of my favorite microcinemas in New York. The screening was packed. Part of that was due to the rare opportunity to see this particular work and because the College Art Association conference held its annual meeting in New York this weekend, bringing all kinds of art historians into town. One of them was Kaira M. Cabañas, an expert on the Lettrist movement and the author of a new book that includes an extended passage on L’Anticoncept. I’m not an expert on Lettrism, but I do have a very rough idea about it: I wasn’t expecting a “night at the movies.”
L’Anticoncept consists of a circular white image, alternating (or flickering) between complete white and complete black, projected onto a two-meter–wide white balloon. The white image fits exactly on the balloon that hangs from the ceiling. The work is historically significant because it anticipates the flicker films of Paul Sharits, someone who used single film frames and persistence of vision to fuck with viewers, by almost twenty years.
Also, the form and rhythm of the narration is as much a part of the film as is the image. According to Light Industry’s screening notes:
L’anticoncept’s sound track begins with a voiceover that invokes the history of moving images. Part two presents TRITS, a Lettrist poem structured around a chorus and punctuated by the whistling, phonemes, and other sounds pronounced from four superimposed voices, seemingly all Wolman’s. In part three, the longest part of the sound track, Wolman reads a disjointed story that he authored. Here the voiceover’s incessant speech contributes in large measure to the experience of an aural assault. The sound track provides little respite (that is, few silences) from its verbal bursts and abrupt shifts in volume and pace. Finally, after a short “Post-scriptum,” the film ends with approximately three minutes and thirty seconds of superimposed mégapneumie, what Wolman elsewhere described as a poésie physique that is based on breath, rather than on the letter as with Isou, and that explored the use of “all human sounds.”
As interested and knowledgable I am about experimental film, Annie is writing her dissertation on screens. A moving-image work that uses a white balloon as a projection surface is right up her intellectual alley, but neither of us could figure out how to engage with this work. Maybe because we were sitting in the back of the room, and couldn’t hear Cabañas very well, we didn’t know why this work is important. Instead of explaining in accessible terms the meaning of the work, Cabañas read a passage from her book. As I’ve written before, one of my biggest peeves with academic presentations is hearing someone read their paper instead of, you know, watching someone present their work. There were some interesting bits of information from Cabañas’s introduction, like that the film was banned, but I would have like for her to “coach us” on how to watch this film.
Another issue was the French-language soundtrack. To their credit, Light Industry distributed printed English-language copies of the narration, but since the room was dark, we couldn’t read the text unless one of us illuminated it with a phone. Moreover, attempting to read the text made it impossible to watch the image and its flickering. I understand that form is crucial for experimental works like this one, but it would have been nice to engage with the content, too.
Thirty minutes into the ninety-minute screening, Annie and I couldn’t take it anymore. We stopped paying attention and started to observe the number of people sleeping, texting, and otherwise uncomfortably fidgeting in their seats. A few minutes later, I turned to her and suggested we leave. Right as I turned to Annie, who sitting to my right, a guy sitting to her right shushed us and firmly suggested, “I think you should leave.” I was offended for a split-second but then realized that if this guy is really into the screening, God bless him. We promptly and quietly headed for the door.
On our way out, we encountered another art historian who was also in town for CAA and also left the screening early. We spent the rest of the night swapping stories about art and academia over a few drinks. At first, I felt like a troglodyte for not only leaving a screening, which I never do, but also being asked by a patron to leave. However, when we confirmed each other’s reservations about the experience, I felt vindicated about what I learned many, many years ago from organizing the student conference.
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The spring semester started yesterday at CUNY, and as luck would have it, it came just after a historic significant snowfall that receded in time for the first day of instruction. Also, as luck would have it, I teach two classes on Wednesday this semester at Queens College. This is a welcome relief from the past three semesters: I’ve either taught only one class or have had to make an hour-long, ten-mile slog on multiple days, at rush hour, and in peak-travel direction. It will be much more pleasant to have to only travel one day a week and at midday.
With the semester officially underway, I’m lifting my self-imposed embargo on publicizing the syllabi for my two Queens College classes.
For the last five semesters, I’ve taught the evening section of this introductory course on the development of communications technologies. In it, we cover the technologies of writing and print, mass culture in the industrial age, electronic broadcast media, and, of course, digital media.
This semester, I changed the textbook from Crowley and Heyer’s Communication in History (retail price: $154.00) to Irving Fang’s Alphabet to Internet (retail price: $60). While the students should appreciate the economic relief, there is a significant trade-off in adopting the Fang textbook. Whereas the Crowley and Heyer book anthology is an collection of condensed writings on communication technologies, Fang writes a more traditional textbook. I usually prefer the former and to read a variety of different writings on a topic especially because it fascinates me how greatly scholarship can vary despite each author writing on the very same subject.
However, I sensed that most students weren’t reading the articles I assigned. With students enrolled in an evening section of an introductory course, almost all of whom are coming from day jobs and have pressing family responsibilities, it’s remarkable to me that they manage to attend class in the first place. Consequently, I have decided to lighten the weekly reading load by adopting a more condensed textbook, and I’ll use our class session to elaborate on each topic.
To be honest, I always dreaded teaching this class. It used to be a 300-level class, and when I started teaching it, I upped the difficulty to meet my expectations for graduating students. I curated a collection of long, challenging readings; I assigned several writing assignments with a capstone; and I gave in-class exams with difficult essay questions. But after the first few weeks, I realized that I needed to do a lot of remedial work. Instead of having passionate in-class discussions about each reading, I had to teach students some fundamentals, such as how to outline an argument, how to compose a thesis statement, and the importance of opening each paragraph with a topic sentence. One semester, I even taught some research methods, such as searching catalogs and electronic journals, and I spent a whole week on citations and bibliographies. But I stopped doing that after one peer reviewer censured me for teaching so many nuts-and-bolts. After that critical evaluation, I became frustrated and gave up on figuring out how to teach this class. Thankfully, I was not asked to teach it again.
A few years have passed since I last taught the class, and both the class and I have changed in that time. Media Criticism has been reclassified as a 200-level class, presumably due to Pathways reform, and I am more experienced with teaching seminar-style courses, where I can let students talk. I’m now ready to retry teaching it as introductory media theory course: a course where we “criticize media criticism,” as I explained in class yesterday. This semester, instead of “curating” an overly ambitious collection of readings, I had the students buy one textbook, we’re comparing three or so readings each week based on themes that the anthology’s editor, Laurie Ouellette, presumably organized them and based on my own interests in media and cultural studies.
One of the reasons I chose Ouellette’s edited collection is because gender and race aren’t put into a “topical ghetto.” Instead, those are addressed in almost every reading throughout the book. When I explained to my students yesterday about the importance of “studying (or criticizing) media criticism,” I offered the following diatribe:
A few weeks ago, the Academy Awards nominated ten film actors and ten film actresses for best of the year. Not one of them is black, Latino, Asian, or any other American ethnic minority. Are you telling me that there’s not one such actor who was among the best last year, or was it that those in charge of making movies didn’t offer some one “different” an opportunity? Either way, as a country, we have failed when our most visible cultural form disregards our own people…those that make up this country.
It was a rare moment of seriousness for me, and I probably prattled on a bit longer than I should have. But I wanted to make a point about why it’s important for budding creative professionals to study theory. I attribute the representational failures of the commercial film and television industries, as evidenced by 2014’s films and the attendant nominations, to its anti-intellectualism. A little reading and critical thinking could do everyone some good.
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During last month’s end-of-the-semester Gradeathon, which is as painful but not as fun as the Climbathon, I spent a bunch of hours sitting at a few coffee shops around my Superfund site grading papers and exams. I like grading outside of the home and office for several reasons: it allows me to feel like a social being watching other “knowledge workers” do their thing, someone other than me makes me a fussy coffee, and I get to listen to something other than my stale music collection and esoteric podcasts.
One song I heard during my “residency” at Budin in Greenpoint was “Hollywood,” a song by Canadian singer Tobias Jesso, Jr. The song is very simple: it consists of almost all vocals and a few notes on the piano throughout the song, and it is punctuated by a few horn riffs at the end of piece. The lyrics are filled with agonizing feelings about Hollywood, apparently referencing some really difficult experiences Jesso had while making a go of it in Los Angeles some years ago.
And I don’t know if I can make it,
and I don’t know if I should,
I think I’ll say goodbye to Hollywood.
I don’t know if I can fake it,
if they tell me I’m no good,
I think I’m gonna fry in Hollywood.
It’s a lovely tune for what is a common refrain about struggling in Tinseltown and might make a suitable musical accompaniment for Life and Death of 9413: A Hollywood Extra, a 1928 silent film by Robert Florey and Slavko Vorkapich. In 9413, an actor with dreams of stardom arrives in Hollywood only to find a series of rejections. Instead of stardom, 9413 is anonymous and disposable.
As I listened to Jesso’s “Hollywood,” I kept thinking of 9413.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xnAEHFhxuQI
Kino included a version of this film on the DVD set Avant Garde: Experimental Film of the 1920s and 1930s, which is the same as the one I embedded above (and linked here in case oEmbed stops working). The music is so grating and distracting I always try to watch it silent. “Hollywood” might be for a better soundtrack to accompany 9413, or at least it will make for something to keep in my head because the song is much shorter than the film.
But unlike 9413, Jesso’s prospects are looking bright. Earlier this week, he released a second song, “How Could You Babe.” He also has an album, Goon, in the work for release in March on Saint Patrick’s Day. And he’s touring, too. He’ll be in New York at Baby’s All Right on Friday, March 27.
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On January 15, 2015, eighty-six years after the birth of Martin Luther King, the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences announced that Selma, a film about MLK, was nominated for the Best Picture of 2014.
I have not yet seen this film, but I’ve been preoccupied with the coverage of how the film features speeches that sound like ones King delivered when, in fact, those were not King’s actual words. The film’s director Ava DuVernay had to rewrite all of the speeches King’s character delivers because she could not secure the rights to King’s actual speeches for her film. She discusses this with PBS’s Gwen Iffil.
One of the reasons that the speeches are not available for film is because Dreamworks and Steven Spielberg own those rights. Exclusively. While a public person, such an elected official, cannot copyright their speeches, a private individual can. According to DuVernay in an interview with KCRW’s The Business, Martin Luther King, Jr. is considered the latter and can exercise copyright over those speeches.
Today, we observe Martin Luther King, Jr. Day as a national holiday. Schools, government offices, and banks are closed in observance. I vaguely remember when we started to observe this day when I was in fifth grade. It was a good age to learn about King, in particular, and about the Civil Rights movement, in general. It would forever shape my outlook on civil rights and equality. To that young school kid, King became a public hero for all of us through that having a holiday.
I know copyright laws are often ridiculous, but I still can’t understand how someone whose life we honor through a public holiday can be considered a private individual. King belongs to all of us.1
One of my former students at Queens College was Tom Stathes.
In class after class filled with “special snowflakes,” students who demand constant attention only to fail the class anyway, Tom stood out as an exceptional luminary. Not only was he an excellent student, he also amassed an impressive collection of animated films from the silent and early sound era.
With help from many people, including celebrated silent-film accompanists, Ben Model and Robert Israel, Stathes has released a Blu-ray and DVD set of fifteen animated films.
The collection, titled Cartoon Roots, is, according to Stathes, a “sampling of many of the important characters, series and studios’ cartoons that populated the silent era of films,” which is Stathes’s favorite period, and “some very exciting rarities from the early sound era.”
Get it as a late Christmas gift for yourself or that film nerd in your life. Or, if you’re teaching a silent film class in the future, round out your curriculum with animated films that were never part of the silent film canon.
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In the 1960s, filmmaking in Cuba exploded like never before and probably not since. Fueled by the Cuban Revolution and funded by the government-sponsored ICAIC, there was an explosion of films that critically engaged the politics of the time. Forty-nine years ago, Santiago Alvarez produced one of the best-known Cuban films form this period: Now! (1965).
Appropriating found news footage and still photographs of civil rights rallies in the United States and the police’s response to these protests, the film rallies its viewer to take action and demonstrate against social injustice and physical violence at the hands of the state.
As with Alvarez, Johnson showcases the forceful response the police had in Missouri as a means to incite the viewer to protest social injustice and physical violence.
Add Wednesday’s decision of a Richmond County jury to not indict the police officer who killed Eric Garner earlier this year, and everything about Alvarez’s forty-nine year-old film Now! is again frustratingly current.
Earlier today, the Social Science and Cultural Studies department at Pratt announced that Laura Mulvey, one of the best known film scholars and experimental filmmakers, will be a scholar-in-residence this coming spring semester.
Professor and Chair Gregg Horowitz:
Laura Mulvey has accepted the invitation of the Department of Social Science and Cultural Studies to visit Pratt in the spring as our scholar in residence. We are still working out the schedule of lectures and seminars for Professor Mulvey’s residence, but we do know that her visit will fall March 10-12, 2015.
With this news, I wish I had scheduled Riddles of the Sphinx (1977) to this semester’s Experimental Film class screening list. However, it would have been tough to squeeze in such a long film into a class that meets only once a week for less than three hours.
