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Given the relative brevity of most Moving Image work, it evades all of the capture and storage issues longer format film makers are experiencing when migrating from video to proxy-film
15 Sept 2009
9 Sept 2009
A Sentimental Education?
A Sentimental Education?
I have witnessed first hand and been deeply disturbed by the narrowness and superficiality in focus, of the vast majority of the UK's current creative theatre student curriculae.
Having taught everything from dance to Care and feeding of An Agent at all of the above, indeed most of the major graduate schools over 25 years, I remain aghast at the Graduate Theatre Courses' almost fetishistic focus on West End, drivelling MacMusicals, the insane and single minded need to ingratiate themselves with casting directors and the bland, paranoid competitiveness, the sad limits of their material and dramatic choices and paper-thin skills, with which an uncomfortable majority of the graduates turn up at auditions.
I find myself working with increasing numbers of producers and directors who when casting, simply bypass the MT and Acting schools no matter how reputable, because they simply despair of ever finding people who do not feel the constant and desperate need to perform for them, thereby obscuring who they really are, if indeed they have any idea once the Stage School veneer has hardened to its uniformly chromium finish.
Conversely, the academically focused private schools reliably acknowledge that they know very little about "professional" theatre and therefore go out of their way to work a great deal harder on behalf of their customers.
They tend to ensure that a far wider spectrum of theatre knowledge is taught and with all the depth and breadth that true education rather than "up-skilling" is all about.
It is a great irony that the "specialist" schools, with purportedly far more specialist teaching resources are actually far more limited and constrained in what they manage to impart to their students than is generally undrstood either by confused and worried parents or indeed a large number of professional employers.
Increasingly these poor angst ridden creatures merely get splurged out at graduation, like so many sausages, brainwashed into believing that unless they get an agent at their graduation show, preferably at least three auditions for musicals but mailnly I want to be seen by David or Pippa or Debbie or Anne or ...or..., 4 commercials or a Soap on A Rope, per month, then they are probably already headed for the scrap heap.
Theatrically, also described as creatively, at 20 to 25 years old, a person should merely display an interested, enquiring, open and humble mind.
Instead the stage schools provide us with ever increasing numbers of indefatigably smiling, bright and shiny, dyed-in-the-wool, kick-ball-change merchants, most of whom clearly ducked drama classes in favour of a lie-in on Thursdays for the last three years.
Unless they are incredibly well connected and/or powerfully aware of all of the other opportunities which their "training" frankly militates against, they might juuuuuust get lucky enough to build a bit of a career. I've bred and co-launched four of these, trust me on this one, I know.
By the way, I do wonder at what point theatre producers understand that part of their wealth if they are successful, is directly attributable to the well-being of their human resources.
I wonder how much more creativity could be channelled into helping develop talented young performers? Opening up instant stardom opportunities is not developing your talent bank, it is merely skewing the pitch. Nor is investing more in the schools merely to lubricate the sausage machinery.
The vast majority will get out of the business prematurely when confronted with the law of diminishing returns which is the inevitable legacy of the under-educated and thereby disempowered, no matter how "talented" they are. They wont reeeally believe it, because all the actors at every read through will mostly make them feel intellectually impoverished. The actors do it on purpose and er...its an act, to get their own back for knowing that they are going to have to ask the "trained" dancers to help them out of some tight spots when comes to the dance calls - but still, too many people are being turned out of too many courses with beautifully polished chips on their shoulders which are mostly the only things keeping their ears apart.
By the way, under-education and empty heads have been, still are and always will be entirely the fault of the educators - if the cap fits wear it.
I worked for one of the most successful Musical theatre agencies for six years. Of the 50 or so Graduates we took on from the start of their careers, only about 10 are still working with any regularity a few years later, and our agency used to get the pick of the litters.
All of them, premier league bright and well "trained", but resolutely ignorant of their true potential through creative under-development, by those responsible for the strategic development of their curriculae.
Real world basic career management strategies for real world people with aspirations and the education to enter and explore fully the vast and magical world of the theatre in its broadest sense, is probably the only set of skills upon which we should focus as educators. Once you know where to put it, your talent will take care of the rest.
I feel it essential to get through to the Stage Schools and Graduate Theatre Courses that a complete rethink of their curricula focus across the board, is desperately overdue. The ability to do 3 or even 8 pirouettes and a walk-over into splits in tune, is far less likely to pay the rent long-term than a true understanding of what it is and how to create eclat, a real awareness of the crucial importance of properly integrated choreographic design, a detailed understanding through study of theatre micro-economics and a firm grasp of the mechanics of how professional theatrical projects are budgeted, capitalised and production scheduled. Every single one of them needs this knowledge in its entirely if they stand a hope and they do not, repeat do not , qualify to further crowd this industrial endeavour until they can demonstrate they have.
Really, not a hard set of measurable criteria - tea..anyone?
Until this occurs, I'd far rather work with catholically well-educated and enlightened young people whose minds and aspirations have not yet been closed by the limited dreams and blandishments of West -End stardom or how to impress a theme-park choreographer.
More importantly for their own peace of mind, it is crucial to teach the simple ability to compute the relentless maths urgently pointing out that 4500 formal Musical theatre graduates a year, every year, year after year - you get my point - chasing approximately 476 annual job opportunities, makes absolutely no sense as any kind of choice, let alone that of a "career" unless you really have your mojo running..
And these numbers do not X -factor-in the Wannabees who get a free pass to knee-slide in ahead of all of them at the whim of a reality TV show text vote and the clenching of a buttock muscle.
However these last as ever fall by the wayside for even more of the reasons above and anyway, will present less and less of a threat as professional standards rise.
As far as Stage Schools are concerned, these are still truths which dare not think, let alone speak their name.
I have witnessed first hand and been deeply disturbed by the narrowness and superficiality in focus, of the vast majority of the UK's current creative theatre student curriculae.
Having taught everything from dance to Care and feeding of An Agent at all of the above, indeed most of the major graduate schools over 25 years, I remain aghast at the Graduate Theatre Courses' almost fetishistic focus on West End, drivelling MacMusicals, the insane and single minded need to ingratiate themselves with casting directors and the bland, paranoid competitiveness, the sad limits of their material and dramatic choices and paper-thin skills, with which an uncomfortable majority of the graduates turn up at auditions.
I find myself working with increasing numbers of producers and directors who when casting, simply bypass the MT and Acting schools no matter how reputable, because they simply despair of ever finding people who do not feel the constant and desperate need to perform for them, thereby obscuring who they really are, if indeed they have any idea once the Stage School veneer has hardened to its uniformly chromium finish.
Conversely, the academically focused private schools reliably acknowledge that they know very little about "professional" theatre and therefore go out of their way to work a great deal harder on behalf of their customers.
They tend to ensure that a far wider spectrum of theatre knowledge is taught and with all the depth and breadth that true education rather than "up-skilling" is all about.
It is a great irony that the "specialist" schools, with purportedly far more specialist teaching resources are actually far more limited and constrained in what they manage to impart to their students than is generally undrstood either by confused and worried parents or indeed a large number of professional employers.
Increasingly these poor angst ridden creatures merely get splurged out at graduation, like so many sausages, brainwashed into believing that unless they get an agent at their graduation show, preferably at least three auditions for musicals but mailnly I want to be seen by David or Pippa or Debbie or Anne or ...or..., 4 commercials or a Soap on A Rope, per month, then they are probably already headed for the scrap heap.
Theatrically, also described as creatively, at 20 to 25 years old, a person should merely display an interested, enquiring, open and humble mind.
Instead the stage schools provide us with ever increasing numbers of indefatigably smiling, bright and shiny, dyed-in-the-wool, kick-ball-change merchants, most of whom clearly ducked drama classes in favour of a lie-in on Thursdays for the last three years.
Unless they are incredibly well connected and/or powerfully aware of all of the other opportunities which their "training" frankly militates against, they might juuuuuust get lucky enough to build a bit of a career. I've bred and co-launched four of these, trust me on this one, I know.
By the way, I do wonder at what point theatre producers understand that part of their wealth if they are successful, is directly attributable to the well-being of their human resources.
I wonder how much more creativity could be channelled into helping develop talented young performers? Opening up instant stardom opportunities is not developing your talent bank, it is merely skewing the pitch. Nor is investing more in the schools merely to lubricate the sausage machinery.
The vast majority will get out of the business prematurely when confronted with the law of diminishing returns which is the inevitable legacy of the under-educated and thereby disempowered, no matter how "talented" they are. They wont reeeally believe it, because all the actors at every read through will mostly make them feel intellectually impoverished. The actors do it on purpose and er...its an act, to get their own back for knowing that they are going to have to ask the "trained" dancers to help them out of some tight spots when comes to the dance calls - but still, too many people are being turned out of too many courses with beautifully polished chips on their shoulders which are mostly the only things keeping their ears apart.
By the way, under-education and empty heads have been, still are and always will be entirely the fault of the educators - if the cap fits wear it.
I worked for one of the most successful Musical theatre agencies for six years. Of the 50 or so Graduates we took on from the start of their careers, only about 10 are still working with any regularity a few years later, and our agency used to get the pick of the litters.
All of them, premier league bright and well "trained", but resolutely ignorant of their true potential through creative under-development, by those responsible for the strategic development of their curriculae.
Real world basic career management strategies for real world people with aspirations and the education to enter and explore fully the vast and magical world of the theatre in its broadest sense, is probably the only set of skills upon which we should focus as educators. Once you know where to put it, your talent will take care of the rest.
I feel it essential to get through to the Stage Schools and Graduate Theatre Courses that a complete rethink of their curricula focus across the board, is desperately overdue. The ability to do 3 or even 8 pirouettes and a walk-over into splits in tune, is far less likely to pay the rent long-term than a true understanding of what it is and how to create eclat, a real awareness of the crucial importance of properly integrated choreographic design, a detailed understanding through study of theatre micro-economics and a firm grasp of the mechanics of how professional theatrical projects are budgeted, capitalised and production scheduled. Every single one of them needs this knowledge in its entirely if they stand a hope and they do not, repeat do not , qualify to further crowd this industrial endeavour until they can demonstrate they have.
Really, not a hard set of measurable criteria - tea..anyone?
Until this occurs, I'd far rather work with catholically well-educated and enlightened young people whose minds and aspirations have not yet been closed by the limited dreams and blandishments of West -End stardom or how to impress a theme-park choreographer.
More importantly for their own peace of mind, it is crucial to teach the simple ability to compute the relentless maths urgently pointing out that 4500 formal Musical theatre graduates a year, every year, year after year - you get my point - chasing approximately 476 annual job opportunities, makes absolutely no sense as any kind of choice, let alone that of a "career" unless you really have your mojo running..
And these numbers do not X -factor-in the Wannabees who get a free pass to knee-slide in ahead of all of them at the whim of a reality TV show text vote and the clenching of a buttock muscle.
However these last as ever fall by the wayside for even more of the reasons above and anyway, will present less and less of a threat as professional standards rise.
As far as Stage Schools are concerned, these are still truths which dare not think, let alone speak their name.
8 Jul 2009
Careering from career to career
It’s all one long Opening Ceremony
There seems a marked and growing disinclination to separate genuine in–depth theatrical skills and the results therefrom, from attention-seeking theatricality.
As a result we have more and more bad theatre masquerading as meaningful.
This amplification is further exacerbated by the new dance/alternate circus “sector’ weighing in with their inconsequential, backwards justified and solipsistic philoso-lite explorations of just about any theme from mother-rape to hairy-eyeball syndrome with all stops between.
Much of which, unless accompanying Mozart, Bartók or Janácek in a bewildering aray of anachronistic absurdist vignettes which more often than not, damage the composers' original and carefully wrought themes beyond repair and certainly the audience’s comprehension - is defined by extraordinarily banal, derivative and poorly performed rrrrrrrock muzik, accompanied by fun-fur clad frenzies bellowing backwards-Latin atop swaying poles.
While this is all very diverting and occasionally rent-paying for said swayers and decibel peddlars, a passing Lepage, Sellers or sundry other Magnificent Pretender who can then find expensively costumed ways to shoe-horn this dross into many of their conceits, it does very little for the development either of genuine and evolutionarily creative theatrical notions or the ability to distinguish between the talented and the noisesome.
The gradual and necessary development of an aesthetic, informed by skill, taste, experience and depth, the evolution of vocabularies of choreographic movement-design, the great arts and myths of circus and commedia and the important archaic truths buried beneath the behemoth of Operatic structures, fall increasingly into the thrall of the perilous, the untalented and the ill-informed as they continue to hurl themselves, with quantities of jejune abandon, artlessness and tendentious posturing, headlong into the Yarts via a loose grounding and the occasional Awayday Course in Capoeira Klowning.
It is now a recognised career-choice development process to be splurged out of one of the contemporary dance schools with a requisite Ology in Whatever, struggle around in the shallows of the Dependent Dance sector until the money, the ideas, the relief yoga/pilates teaching and/or sofa-surfing opportunities dry-up, then schlepp off to one of the Walloonian and Nether-outlandish Opera companies where much subsidised cavorting in twelve nippled fat-suits and bald-wigs to conceptual-Mozart in bad lighting will prevail.
This is to be followed by the development of a couple of sidelines in Yoga and the Poetics of Circo-Alternativo, breathlessly absorbed at the knee of some gnomish juggling academics in personality specs who have spent a winter Existentialist-Kino Lab with Derevo and have testimonials from Slava Polunin on the wall of tastefully furnished and well-funded Circus Spaces from Turin to Alma-Ata.
What is perhaps more alarming is that this extraordinarily unfocused curate’s-egg of what is ever more loosely termed, “skills”, is increasingly being employed at the highest level of the theatrical world.
Not only is the Emperor butt-naked, but the crows have begun to peck at his eyes.
In the absence of well-read and clearly assimilated classical sources and precedents, a growing coterie of Sunday supplement creatives are half new-minting the old as their own genuine novel discoveries.
This simulateneously impoverishes tradition, historical perspective, precedent, evolution and their own credibility as anything more than pretentious, ignorant arrivistes - in the kingdom of the increasingly myopic, the one-eyed will prevail - for a time.
However, this seems to be “where its at” for the theatrical career strategist.
One whose entire research background extends to a couple of afternoons on Youtube and a Uni-lite reading list.
This person has identified that the 21st century Prole appetite for Fries and Circuses is morphing into a voracious and indiscriminate consumption of creative projects, Events and Spectaculars running the gamut from Britney Spears The Opera to Olympic Opening ceremonies, accompanied as they often are, by yards of windy academically self-referential theoro-technocratic guff and supported by Sponsors or their advertising –industry panderers.
Dance in particular, opera in general and theatre in its broadest sense, are all the more impoverished for this appallingly prevalent, arriviste, lightweight and erroneous view of both the form and function of theatre. Accompanied as it is, by a conspiracy for the studied downplaying of discreet expertise, depth or learning, accompanied by a worrying inability to tell the difference between creativity and increasingly high-profile valueless activities which merely look like they ought to be creative, owing to a lethal cocktail of ignorance, arrogance, ill-education and commercial interest.
There seems a marked and growing disinclination to separate genuine in–depth theatrical skills and the results therefrom, from attention-seeking theatricality.
As a result we have more and more bad theatre masquerading as meaningful.
This amplification is further exacerbated by the new dance/alternate circus “sector’ weighing in with their inconsequential, backwards justified and solipsistic philoso-lite explorations of just about any theme from mother-rape to hairy-eyeball syndrome with all stops between.
Much of which, unless accompanying Mozart, Bartók or Janácek in a bewildering aray of anachronistic absurdist vignettes which more often than not, damage the composers' original and carefully wrought themes beyond repair and certainly the audience’s comprehension - is defined by extraordinarily banal, derivative and poorly performed rrrrrrrock muzik, accompanied by fun-fur clad frenzies bellowing backwards-Latin atop swaying poles.
While this is all very diverting and occasionally rent-paying for said swayers and decibel peddlars, a passing Lepage, Sellers or sundry other Magnificent Pretender who can then find expensively costumed ways to shoe-horn this dross into many of their conceits, it does very little for the development either of genuine and evolutionarily creative theatrical notions or the ability to distinguish between the talented and the noisesome.
The gradual and necessary development of an aesthetic, informed by skill, taste, experience and depth, the evolution of vocabularies of choreographic movement-design, the great arts and myths of circus and commedia and the important archaic truths buried beneath the behemoth of Operatic structures, fall increasingly into the thrall of the perilous, the untalented and the ill-informed as they continue to hurl themselves, with quantities of jejune abandon, artlessness and tendentious posturing, headlong into the Yarts via a loose grounding and the occasional Awayday Course in Capoeira Klowning.
It is now a recognised career-choice development process to be splurged out of one of the contemporary dance schools with a requisite Ology in Whatever, struggle around in the shallows of the Dependent Dance sector until the money, the ideas, the relief yoga/pilates teaching and/or sofa-surfing opportunities dry-up, then schlepp off to one of the Walloonian and Nether-outlandish Opera companies where much subsidised cavorting in twelve nippled fat-suits and bald-wigs to conceptual-Mozart in bad lighting will prevail.
This is to be followed by the development of a couple of sidelines in Yoga and the Poetics of Circo-Alternativo, breathlessly absorbed at the knee of some gnomish juggling academics in personality specs who have spent a winter Existentialist-Kino Lab with Derevo and have testimonials from Slava Polunin on the wall of tastefully furnished and well-funded Circus Spaces from Turin to Alma-Ata.
What is perhaps more alarming is that this extraordinarily unfocused curate’s-egg of what is ever more loosely termed, “skills”, is increasingly being employed at the highest level of the theatrical world.
Not only is the Emperor butt-naked, but the crows have begun to peck at his eyes.
In the absence of well-read and clearly assimilated classical sources and precedents, a growing coterie of Sunday supplement creatives are half new-minting the old as their own genuine novel discoveries.
This simulateneously impoverishes tradition, historical perspective, precedent, evolution and their own credibility as anything more than pretentious, ignorant arrivistes - in the kingdom of the increasingly myopic, the one-eyed will prevail - for a time.
However, this seems to be “where its at” for the theatrical career strategist.
One whose entire research background extends to a couple of afternoons on Youtube and a Uni-lite reading list.
This person has identified that the 21st century Prole appetite for Fries and Circuses is morphing into a voracious and indiscriminate consumption of creative projects, Events and Spectaculars running the gamut from Britney Spears The Opera to Olympic Opening ceremonies, accompanied as they often are, by yards of windy academically self-referential theoro-technocratic guff and supported by Sponsors or their advertising –industry panderers.
Dance in particular, opera in general and theatre in its broadest sense, are all the more impoverished for this appallingly prevalent, arriviste, lightweight and erroneous view of both the form and function of theatre. Accompanied as it is, by a conspiracy for the studied downplaying of discreet expertise, depth or learning, accompanied by a worrying inability to tell the difference between creativity and increasingly high-profile valueless activities which merely look like they ought to be creative, owing to a lethal cocktail of ignorance, arrogance, ill-education and commercial interest.
7 Jul 2009
Effete, effort and rose flavoured windiness
One of things which attracted me to becoming a dancer, apart from the fact that I would get to physically interact with lithe, dangerous and sexy human beings waaaaay bfore I was qualified or had earned the chops - was its unique combintion of muscularily, controlled power and sculptural formation. I saw in this combination of means, extra opportunity to go to places psychologically and emotionally in a way far more direct and unequivocal than words and symbols could never reach
1 Jul 2009
PINA BAUSCH - A tribute
PINA BAUSCH dies suddenly -
One of the few, true 20th Century Choreographic greats dies of cancer June 28th 2009.
I was personally completely heartbroken to hear the news of Pina Bausch's premature and sudden death at 68.
The small clip from her Sacre de Printemps has been visited 400,000+ times at Youtube alone, providing an insight into just how important she was to the dance world and the wider world of the arts.
She was unique and her passing leaves a yawning gap in the modern dance landscape.
So much of what she pioneered has gone on to be pastiched, reheated and drearily re-rolled in ever less vibrant and innovative ways by countless pale-imitators.
Too many of these have confused Ms Bausch's incisive musical and physical statements about the human condition with the un-dressing of tortured looking men and women in torn underwear and hedge-backwards hair.
This has managed to make an alarmingly large section of modern dance making, one of the few truly original 20th century artforms, look more and more like under-rehearsed concerts by Tourettes Formation Ballroom teams, by mistaking Bausch's forms for her content, and leaving the all too important audiences trailing in the wake with increasingly bemused indifference.
Who, in our current crop of physical-dance theatre creatives will have the chops to step-up, assume her mantle and take things forward again with the same quality and level of innovation?
Perhaps you have a view? Let me know your thoughts.
One of the few, true 20th Century Choreographic greats dies of cancer June 28th 2009.
I was personally completely heartbroken to hear the news of Pina Bausch's premature and sudden death at 68.
The small clip from her Sacre de Printemps has been visited 400,000+ times at Youtube alone, providing an insight into just how important she was to the dance world and the wider world of the arts.
She was unique and her passing leaves a yawning gap in the modern dance landscape.
So much of what she pioneered has gone on to be pastiched, reheated and drearily re-rolled in ever less vibrant and innovative ways by countless pale-imitators.
Too many of these have confused Ms Bausch's incisive musical and physical statements about the human condition with the un-dressing of tortured looking men and women in torn underwear and hedge-backwards hair.
This has managed to make an alarmingly large section of modern dance making, one of the few truly original 20th century artforms, look more and more like under-rehearsed concerts by Tourettes Formation Ballroom teams, by mistaking Bausch's forms for her content, and leaving the all too important audiences trailing in the wake with increasingly bemused indifference.
Who, in our current crop of physical-dance theatre creatives will have the chops to step-up, assume her mantle and take things forward again with the same quality and level of innovation?
Perhaps you have a view? Let me know your thoughts.
8 May 2009
The Raft of the Medua
HD, slo-mo, lit well, bags of committment.
Not entirely sure whether this is an exercise in vanity and somewhat under-choreographed soft-core porn or a genuine attempt to bring something new to the original idea.
In essence the original painting was groundbreaking as a result of its subject matter, the fact that it documented the back story to something over which which the "authorities" would rather have drawn a clouded veil and the emergence of a growing trend towards "art" as politics rather than merely decorative.
In construction the painter of the original "The Raft of the Medusa", Théodore Géricault worked with a number of geometric patterns and design motifs brilliantly drawing the viewer's eye into, across and around his painting in a way which both told the story and allowed the imaginative processes to enter into the individual agonies of the victims of this catastrophic episode in French maritime history.
As far as I can see, Lutz Gregor, has found a suitable title, a strong and ready reference point and then abstracted the "idea" whilst providing none of the narrative nor design strengths which so brilliantly and innovatively invest the original.
Instead what we are delivered is a hi-def video version of the opening moments of the Harrods Sale performed in extreme close-up by cellulite-free luvvies in varying stages of orgiastic undress.
I think we have to be very wary of the tendency for examples of overblown dancefilm such as this, to say more and more about less and less.
Mind you, more power to you if you can get some star-struck Arts-Funt Poobahs to stump up the cash. Inviting some hot-looking mates around to your place to bend themselves out of shape in their pants is not a bad alternative to truly innovative choreo-kino creativity.
Go here to see the Wikepedia article on the original work for contrast, comparison and a little critical clarity.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raft_of_the_Medusa
Experimental - Dance theatre
Not entirely sure whether this is an exercise in vanity and somewhat under-choreographed soft-core porn or a genuine attempt to bring something new to the original idea.
In essence the original painting was groundbreaking as a result of its subject matter, the fact that it documented the back story to something over which which the "authorities" would rather have drawn a clouded veil and the emergence of a growing trend towards "art" as politics rather than merely decorative.
In construction the painter of the original "The Raft of the Medusa", Théodore Géricault worked with a number of geometric patterns and design motifs brilliantly drawing the viewer's eye into, across and around his painting in a way which both told the story and allowed the imaginative processes to enter into the individual agonies of the victims of this catastrophic episode in French maritime history.
As far as I can see, Lutz Gregor, has found a suitable title, a strong and ready reference point and then abstracted the "idea" whilst providing none of the narrative nor design strengths which so brilliantly and innovatively invest the original.
Instead what we are delivered is a hi-def video version of the opening moments of the Harrods Sale performed in extreme close-up by cellulite-free luvvies in varying stages of orgiastic undress.
I think we have to be very wary of the tendency for examples of overblown dancefilm such as this, to say more and more about less and less.
Mind you, more power to you if you can get some star-struck Arts-Funt Poobahs to stump up the cash. Inviting some hot-looking mates around to your place to bend themselves out of shape in their pants is not a bad alternative to truly innovative choreo-kino creativity.
Go here to see the Wikepedia article on the original work for contrast, comparison and a little critical clarity.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raft_of_the_Medusa
Experimental - Dance theatre
Raft of Medusa from Lutz Gregor on Vimeo.
5 May 2009
Dziga Vertov's Man With A Movie Camera
Dziga Vertov's Man With A Movie Camera - Soviet Union 1929. Production Company: Vufku. Director: Dziga Vertov. Photography: Mihail Kaufman.
His given name was David Abelevich Kaufman, although he adopted the Ukranian Dziga Vertov (lit.trans. Spinning Top)during his early years after the Bolshevik revolution whilst working for Kino-Nedelya (Кино-Неделя, the Moscow Cinema Committee's weekly film series, and the first newsreel series in Russia.
Considered to be one of the most innovative and influential films of the silent era "Man With A Movie Camera" was made 10 years into a very focused film making career. It owed no small debt to a strict and thorough grounding in all of the cinematic techniques available at the time.
Dissolves, split screen, slow motion, freeze frames, whip-panning and Dutch tilts to out-Orson the Welles himself, the film further displays a fundamental grasp of the uses and forms in which cinematic *meta-text* can be exercised.
During the honeymoon early post revolutionary period, gradually freeing itself from the yoke of generations of stifling Russian Imperial bourgeoisism, the nascent thought police of the Soviet State could not prevent a measure of liberalism in artistic circles.
This allowed many of the Russian film makers to get regular access to much of the new cinema techniques being similarly pioneered under the sunny and pollution free skies of California.
Startlingly modern, this film utilizes a groundbreaking style of rapid editing and innumerable new-minted cine-effects to create a work of amazing power, energy and timelessness.
Broad in its cinematic eye, breathtaking in its apparent simplicity, masking a huge scope of urban, industrialised human life in the early 20th century, even prescient about the realities of early 21st Century urban life, MWAMC is entirely unique in its fly-on-the-wall record of life in Soviet Russia in the 1920's.
Subversive by any standards, in the increasingly febrile and propoganda driven atmosphere of officially sanctioned film making of the 1920's Soviet era, Man With A Movie Camera was an object lesson in how the camera or at least, what it sees, can be persuaded to circumvent many of the accepted "truths" of presentation.
This was at a particular time and within a peculiarly constituted political system in which "truth" in its broadest sense whilst becoming less and less evident, was nonetheless valued - particularly among those who understood its value and fragility.
For many commentators and learned cine-critics, it is fair to point out that in many ways Vertov's use of this plethora of techniques served to run counter to his creative view:
"It is far from simple to show the truth, yet the truth is simple."
However, on the basis that despite the use of advanced technologies to prove the moon is not entirely made of cheese, nothing can ever run counter to the actual truth, terrible beauty or sheer poetry of outer space, he comfortably argued against his own proto-Keatsianism with:
"Our eyes see very little and very badly – so people dreamed up the microscope to let them see invisible phenomena; they invented the telescope...now they have perfected the cine-camera to penetrate more deeply into the visible world, to explore and record visual phenomena so that what is happening now, which will have to be taken account of in the future, is not forgotten."
In my view, far from being antagonistic, this perceived ambivalence to cinematic artifice allowed Vertov both to explore a far more interesting set of realities beneath surface veneer and still make films which appear to stay "on message".
He succeeds in making to order an "...'aint life fun, fun, FUN here in Moscow amid progroms, secret police surveillance, acute shortages and civil repression..." film, all the while simple yet sophisticated cinematic choices quietly and powerfully imprinting graphic insights into the human condition by what appear to be stock framing decisions, deliberate cinematic cliche and occasional glimpses of stocking-top. A neat trick.
After the fact, Vertov seems to be attempting to find within a formal and quite traditionalist cinematic eye, a whole new set of communicative possibilities to encode a notion of time and linear narrative, but which are nuanced and distinct from the techniques and artefacts still strongly associated with literature and theatrical artifice.
We are fortunate that the movie camera brought in the wake of its invention and early development, one of the few true early examples of Cinema as the first (some might argue, only) self-contained and genuinely novel 20th Century artform.
Complete with all of the distinctions and creative possibilities which result from new ways of "seeing" the world, cinematographers of the time were the doing the equivalent of what this generation of Information Superhighway pioneers and digital film makers are trying to do now - plus ça change....
Whilst not original - Vertov's mentors and direct influences included Eisenstein and DW Griffiths among many - it could be argued that his work was consequent with the rapid commercialisation of "the movies".
Fuelled then, as is still is in the USA, by a voracious capitalist investment and return machine, the advent of talkies further drove cinematography as a catholic art-form for its own sake, towards the commercialisation of an emergent Hollywood aesthetic and its global ilk,
This with all of the imperatives and preoccupations of making fairystory-driven mass-entertainment to get bums on seats.
Dziga Vertov and his pioneering approach, whetehr by accident or design, set out on another road, helping forge a distinctive and sturdy European art-house style of film making, alive and well to this day.
His greatest work coming as it does nearly halfway through his 20 odd year career.
Eventually falling foul of the artistic and personal compromises required of Stalinist social realism, Vertov and his Man With A Movie Camera slides neatly and independantly between the making and presentation of meaning in simplified linear forms to appeal to the widest demographic of consumers in the west and albeit more propoganda-driven versions of the same semi-literate and conceited efforts behind what by 1934, was rapidly becoming an the Iron Curtain in all but name.
There's a piquant irony in those most unlikely of bed-fellows, The Mighty Dollar and The Great Five Year Plan/Leap/March Forward ending up sclerotically staggering around in the same ever-decreasing cinematic circles. At least until the Berlin Wall dropped on them both.
Dziga Vertov's personal blend of montage, multi-layered time frames, character, action, metaphorical juxtaposition and auteurish faux-naivete have been credited with feeding into a divergent and experimental flowering of a third-way of approaching film making.
One which has done much to inform on and inspire the work of directors as diverse as Jean-Luc Goddard and Bresson. His techniques clearly impacting on more audience focused masters of cinema from Kurosawa and Tarkovsky to Kieslowski, Jarmusch and even the Coen Brothers to name a few whose "originality" can so often be attributable to previous technical innovators such as Vertov.
To see the film in its entirety with a brilliant score by The Alloy Orchestra, go here:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6910724735856178670&hl=en
Here is a 9.00 minute clip from Youtube, with a more obvious and manipulative soundscape and score.
*meta-text*
Self-reflection on the actual process of making personal creative meaning as a formula.
This mindset can slip into conceited self-regard for the unwary, particularly if they suspect they might have a message for the world.
The notion of a movie audience, watching a man with a movie camera, being watched by another film unit, while the editor (in this case Vertov's wife) is seen splicing the footage of the audience watching a man being watched....all begins to engender the view that at least in terms of POV nothing much is new under the sun.
His given name was David Abelevich Kaufman, although he adopted the Ukranian Dziga Vertov (lit.trans. Spinning Top)during his early years after the Bolshevik revolution whilst working for Kino-Nedelya (Кино-Неделя, the Moscow Cinema Committee's weekly film series, and the first newsreel series in Russia.
Considered to be one of the most innovative and influential films of the silent era "Man With A Movie Camera" was made 10 years into a very focused film making career. It owed no small debt to a strict and thorough grounding in all of the cinematic techniques available at the time.
Dissolves, split screen, slow motion, freeze frames, whip-panning and Dutch tilts to out-Orson the Welles himself, the film further displays a fundamental grasp of the uses and forms in which cinematic *meta-text* can be exercised.
During the honeymoon early post revolutionary period, gradually freeing itself from the yoke of generations of stifling Russian Imperial bourgeoisism, the nascent thought police of the Soviet State could not prevent a measure of liberalism in artistic circles.
This allowed many of the Russian film makers to get regular access to much of the new cinema techniques being similarly pioneered under the sunny and pollution free skies of California.
Startlingly modern, this film utilizes a groundbreaking style of rapid editing and innumerable new-minted cine-effects to create a work of amazing power, energy and timelessness.
Broad in its cinematic eye, breathtaking in its apparent simplicity, masking a huge scope of urban, industrialised human life in the early 20th century, even prescient about the realities of early 21st Century urban life, MWAMC is entirely unique in its fly-on-the-wall record of life in Soviet Russia in the 1920's.
Subversive by any standards, in the increasingly febrile and propoganda driven atmosphere of officially sanctioned film making of the 1920's Soviet era, Man With A Movie Camera was an object lesson in how the camera or at least, what it sees, can be persuaded to circumvent many of the accepted "truths" of presentation.
This was at a particular time and within a peculiarly constituted political system in which "truth" in its broadest sense whilst becoming less and less evident, was nonetheless valued - particularly among those who understood its value and fragility.
For many commentators and learned cine-critics, it is fair to point out that in many ways Vertov's use of this plethora of techniques served to run counter to his creative view:
"It is far from simple to show the truth, yet the truth is simple."
However, on the basis that despite the use of advanced technologies to prove the moon is not entirely made of cheese, nothing can ever run counter to the actual truth, terrible beauty or sheer poetry of outer space, he comfortably argued against his own proto-Keatsianism with:
"Our eyes see very little and very badly – so people dreamed up the microscope to let them see invisible phenomena; they invented the telescope...now they have perfected the cine-camera to penetrate more deeply into the visible world, to explore and record visual phenomena so that what is happening now, which will have to be taken account of in the future, is not forgotten."
In my view, far from being antagonistic, this perceived ambivalence to cinematic artifice allowed Vertov both to explore a far more interesting set of realities beneath surface veneer and still make films which appear to stay "on message".
He succeeds in making to order an "...'aint life fun, fun, FUN here in Moscow amid progroms, secret police surveillance, acute shortages and civil repression..." film, all the while simple yet sophisticated cinematic choices quietly and powerfully imprinting graphic insights into the human condition by what appear to be stock framing decisions, deliberate cinematic cliche and occasional glimpses of stocking-top. A neat trick.
After the fact, Vertov seems to be attempting to find within a formal and quite traditionalist cinematic eye, a whole new set of communicative possibilities to encode a notion of time and linear narrative, but which are nuanced and distinct from the techniques and artefacts still strongly associated with literature and theatrical artifice.
We are fortunate that the movie camera brought in the wake of its invention and early development, one of the few true early examples of Cinema as the first (some might argue, only) self-contained and genuinely novel 20th Century artform.
Complete with all of the distinctions and creative possibilities which result from new ways of "seeing" the world, cinematographers of the time were the doing the equivalent of what this generation of Information Superhighway pioneers and digital film makers are trying to do now - plus ça change....
Whilst not original - Vertov's mentors and direct influences included Eisenstein and DW Griffiths among many - it could be argued that his work was consequent with the rapid commercialisation of "the movies".
Fuelled then, as is still is in the USA, by a voracious capitalist investment and return machine, the advent of talkies further drove cinematography as a catholic art-form for its own sake, towards the commercialisation of an emergent Hollywood aesthetic and its global ilk,
This with all of the imperatives and preoccupations of making fairystory-driven mass-entertainment to get bums on seats.
Dziga Vertov and his pioneering approach, whetehr by accident or design, set out on another road, helping forge a distinctive and sturdy European art-house style of film making, alive and well to this day.
His greatest work coming as it does nearly halfway through his 20 odd year career.
Eventually falling foul of the artistic and personal compromises required of Stalinist social realism, Vertov and his Man With A Movie Camera slides neatly and independantly between the making and presentation of meaning in simplified linear forms to appeal to the widest demographic of consumers in the west and albeit more propoganda-driven versions of the same semi-literate and conceited efforts behind what by 1934, was rapidly becoming an the Iron Curtain in all but name.
There's a piquant irony in those most unlikely of bed-fellows, The Mighty Dollar and The Great Five Year Plan/Leap/March Forward ending up sclerotically staggering around in the same ever-decreasing cinematic circles. At least until the Berlin Wall dropped on them both.
Dziga Vertov's personal blend of montage, multi-layered time frames, character, action, metaphorical juxtaposition and auteurish faux-naivete have been credited with feeding into a divergent and experimental flowering of a third-way of approaching film making.
One which has done much to inform on and inspire the work of directors as diverse as Jean-Luc Goddard and Bresson. His techniques clearly impacting on more audience focused masters of cinema from Kurosawa and Tarkovsky to Kieslowski, Jarmusch and even the Coen Brothers to name a few whose "originality" can so often be attributable to previous technical innovators such as Vertov.
To see the film in its entirety with a brilliant score by The Alloy Orchestra, go here:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6910724735856178670&hl=en
Here is a 9.00 minute clip from Youtube, with a more obvious and manipulative soundscape and score.
*meta-text*
Self-reflection on the actual process of making personal creative meaning as a formula.
This mindset can slip into conceited self-regard for the unwary, particularly if they suspect they might have a message for the world.
The notion of a movie audience, watching a man with a movie camera, being watched by another film unit, while the editor (in this case Vertov's wife) is seen splicing the footage of the audience watching a man being watched....all begins to engender the view that at least in terms of POV nothing much is new under the sun.
7 Apr 2009
FILM LONDON - Diversity, Accessibility and Institutionalised Mediocrity
An open letter to
REBEKAH POLDING
AUDIENCE DEVELOPMENT MANAGER
FILM LONDON
This letter was penned on the occasion that it became clear that The Black Audience Development Fund initiative by Film London was having to canvass for applicants for a second time and postpone the deadlines for application, as insufficient numbers had bothered to apply for the grants.
Ever fearful that being found out to be supporting entirely irrelevant Creative Initiatives might impact on their ability to continue to swan around expensive and graciously appointed offices in the City of London at tax-payers expense, Film London unilaterally decided to postpone their applications deadline.
Some of these tax-payers have been trying to raise funds to make important and culturally relevant films, but have been rejected on the basis that their work is already "more than adequately supported by the mainstream funding sector".
This is patently erroneous as there still exists a large and voracious appetite for cinematic explorations concerning important creative legacies and cultural concerns outside both the mainstream or the ethnically diverse and "plitically crect".
Films which explore subjects such as great artists or by artists who do not have sufficiently "stellar" faces for The Money to be interested. Nor are they devoted to unnecessarily gratuitous grandstanding or graphic and simplistic "insights" into the tabloid-centric areas of their private lives.
Films which might be regarded as elitist or "difficult" simply because they demand and expect more of the intellect of their audiences and presuppose given levels of education or breadth of cultural references in order to glean sufficient meaning from them.
Films which are clearly set in specific and definite cultural contexts.
Work for which no-one would ever dream of demanding any compromises in its ethnic, cultural or creative integrity, in return for support and funding .
Into this tiny but culturally crucial area of creative activity, I assign "serious" dancefilm.
To clarify in terms of the particular area of film-making under discussion:
This is dance presented cinematographically, created by experienced, highly regarded and skilled choreographic designers.
More specifically, making meaning in a cinematic form, imbued with the intellectual, philosophical, emotional and technical struggle to wrest shards of genuine universal truth from the dross of everyday existence.
As opposed to the jejune output from graduate students from Laban, Dartington, Bretton Hall et al with identikit pubescent issues. These are follies de jeunesse, distinguished by a complete lack of style, voice, historical perspective or the humility to acknowledge that only the slow, painful and difficult processes inherent in developing cinematic vision are the sine-qua-non of making moving images.
My acknowledgedly limited and personal definition of Dancefilm is one which features performances by highly trained and experienced professional dancers - rather than "performers" for whom choreographic training and a working knowledge of diverse dance forms is understood as merely tedious, archaic, elitist and unnecessary.
Filmed using the highest quality of cinematographic means, rather than somewhat wobbly outings on video (hi-def or not)located in cliche-ridden graffitti-strewn urban wastelands.
Film which insists on utilising a traditional agglomeration of cinematic skillsets as a pre-requisite for the production of relevant and meaningful content and high production values.
The audience for the quality dancefilm I describe and other outings which are likely to focus on the glories of high-culture is in the main, caucasian, middle-class, usually educated up to or beyond Higher ED level, professionally employed and tax-paying. An audience with sufficient aesthetic standards to be affronted at being continually required to watch people grow up on their time.
Here I am afraid I part company with the recieved policy of most of the government backed quangos in charge of doling out finacial support to "The Arts".
This audience for artfilm and particularly dancefilm, represents a HUGE market gap. It is absolutely the elephant in the room, being neither commercial mainstream white, nor particularly relevant to the immigrant and ethnically diverse populations.
Thus it is simply ignored as an inconvenient reality which can be satisfied neither by commercial interests nor nor the artificially enlightened wisdom which creates convenient politically correct reverse-apartheid-based creative funding systems and the organisations with engraved, wall-mounted positive-action policies feeding them.
The Indie Circuit is dominated by film makers who are predominantly making shorts as calling cards as their 'Look at Me" entree in the mainstream which anyway, we will agree is the not the place for artfilm of any description.
If one refers to "the usual suspects" for funding in the "dance" or "moving image" sectors, such as The Arts Council, or the impenetrable and alarmingly mysterious Portland Green Cultural Projectsof that ilk, well-defined and high-quality ideas inevitably get knocked back.
This is precisely because these are "seen" to feature erroneously and pejoratively described "elitist" dance forms which are not easily defined within the catch-all labels of "Moving Image" , "Video Dance". Or they fail to conform to being part of the fantastically well-funded self-promoting academically oriented experimental genres. Or the projects simply fail to push the ethnic/sexual/handicap diversity buttons with sufficient fervour.
The commercial film sector is now run almost exclusively by star-struck corporate raiders, gamblers and bankers who know the cost of everything, have a very sketchy interest, regard or even grasp on the value of anything and are entirely disinterested unless the return on their investment can be exactly measured and preferrably copper-bottomed.
What remains of "culture" on television has been completely marginalised, has no money and where commissioning editors can envisage the merest whiff of public interest or advertising colateral claw-back, without exception is immediately assigned to the nearest safe pair of hands to bring it on home.
This inevitably means Alan Yentob, Melvyn Bragg (both of whom coincidentally own their own commercial production companies who then get the commission to both produce AND present) or some well heeled Comedian whose powerful agent has decided to fluff-up (usually) his Cultural street-cred.
In genuine creative terms, all of them Non-Combatants who at best mock and point-score and at worst, simply skate straight across the surface and back into the bar at Soho House without even touching the sides.
You will perhaps get a small measure of mine and countless others' unutterable frustration when we encounter missives from yours and other august Government-funded organisations in which it is patently clear that despite your offer of free fivers, clearly no-one has bothered to get up early enough in the morning to fill out your forms, send them back to you or come and collect the loot.
You must forgive a sense that the process of cutting the slack for the lame and the lazy merely amplifies a sense that deadlines and other creative disciplines are irrelevant because the gravy train will always call again tomorrow.
It really does matter that we should require clearer definitions of the various degrees and shades of cultural activity.
It is esential as film makers, that we hold you accountable for complete transparency over the ways and means chosen to define shades of nuance and criteria for interest in specific areas of the culture over which organisations such as Film London have fiscal jurisdiction.
Is is crucial that you are seen to exist to help develop culture by, with and for every part of our society.
Particularly and despite being a rabid anti-racist, I am free to argue, the vast majority of the society in the United Kingdom consists predominantly of white tax-payers, without whom the funding and creative support organisations such as yours simply would not exist.
For myself, as one of many UK Creative Industry citizens, who cannot beg or borrow the money or support to make good films which inevitably fall slap bang down the middle of all of the various categories or funding criteria currently defined as being within the remit of the government funded Arts Administrations, I must express and reiterate my requirement as a tax-payer with a professional interest in this area, that my tithes be demonstrably apportioned with far greater discernment, finesse and effectiveness.
Further, that we must have a much more open, albeit less comfortable relationship and clearly defined opportunities to debate with those who have assumed the right to make these decisions, on the qualitative criteria they might use to make their judgements.
If not, why not?
I look forward to an opportunity to continue and widen this debate.
Kind Regards
Sandy Strallen
editors note:
Neither Rebekah Polding nor Film London have to date, been available for comment.
REBEKAH POLDING
AUDIENCE DEVELOPMENT MANAGER
FILM LONDON
This letter was penned on the occasion that it became clear that The Black Audience Development Fund initiative by Film London was having to canvass for applicants for a second time and postpone the deadlines for application, as insufficient numbers had bothered to apply for the grants.
Ever fearful that being found out to be supporting entirely irrelevant Creative Initiatives might impact on their ability to continue to swan around expensive and graciously appointed offices in the City of London at tax-payers expense, Film London unilaterally decided to postpone their applications deadline.
Some of these tax-payers have been trying to raise funds to make important and culturally relevant films, but have been rejected on the basis that their work is already "more than adequately supported by the mainstream funding sector".
This is patently erroneous as there still exists a large and voracious appetite for cinematic explorations concerning important creative legacies and cultural concerns outside both the mainstream or the ethnically diverse and "plitically crect".
Films which explore subjects such as great artists or by artists who do not have sufficiently "stellar" faces for The Money to be interested. Nor are they devoted to unnecessarily gratuitous grandstanding or graphic and simplistic "insights" into the tabloid-centric areas of their private lives.
Films which might be regarded as elitist or "difficult" simply because they demand and expect more of the intellect of their audiences and presuppose given levels of education or breadth of cultural references in order to glean sufficient meaning from them.
Films which are clearly set in specific and definite cultural contexts.
Work for which no-one would ever dream of demanding any compromises in its ethnic, cultural or creative integrity, in return for support and funding .
Into this tiny but culturally crucial area of creative activity, I assign "serious" dancefilm.
To clarify in terms of the particular area of film-making under discussion:
This is dance presented cinematographically, created by experienced, highly regarded and skilled choreographic designers.
More specifically, making meaning in a cinematic form, imbued with the intellectual, philosophical, emotional and technical struggle to wrest shards of genuine universal truth from the dross of everyday existence.
As opposed to the jejune output from graduate students from Laban, Dartington, Bretton Hall et al with identikit pubescent issues. These are follies de jeunesse, distinguished by a complete lack of style, voice, historical perspective or the humility to acknowledge that only the slow, painful and difficult processes inherent in developing cinematic vision are the sine-qua-non of making moving images.
My acknowledgedly limited and personal definition of Dancefilm is one which features performances by highly trained and experienced professional dancers - rather than "performers" for whom choreographic training and a working knowledge of diverse dance forms is understood as merely tedious, archaic, elitist and unnecessary.
Filmed using the highest quality of cinematographic means, rather than somewhat wobbly outings on video (hi-def or not)located in cliche-ridden graffitti-strewn urban wastelands.
Film which insists on utilising a traditional agglomeration of cinematic skillsets as a pre-requisite for the production of relevant and meaningful content and high production values.
The audience for the quality dancefilm I describe and other outings which are likely to focus on the glories of high-culture is in the main, caucasian, middle-class, usually educated up to or beyond Higher ED level, professionally employed and tax-paying. An audience with sufficient aesthetic standards to be affronted at being continually required to watch people grow up on their time.
Here I am afraid I part company with the recieved policy of most of the government backed quangos in charge of doling out finacial support to "The Arts".
This audience for artfilm and particularly dancefilm, represents a HUGE market gap. It is absolutely the elephant in the room, being neither commercial mainstream white, nor particularly relevant to the immigrant and ethnically diverse populations.
Thus it is simply ignored as an inconvenient reality which can be satisfied neither by commercial interests nor nor the artificially enlightened wisdom which creates convenient politically correct reverse-apartheid-based creative funding systems and the organisations with engraved, wall-mounted positive-action policies feeding them.
The Indie Circuit is dominated by film makers who are predominantly making shorts as calling cards as their 'Look at Me" entree in the mainstream which anyway, we will agree is the not the place for artfilm of any description.
If one refers to "the usual suspects" for funding in the "dance" or "moving image" sectors, such as The Arts Council, or the impenetrable and alarmingly mysterious Portland Green Cultural Projectsof that ilk, well-defined and high-quality ideas inevitably get knocked back.
This is precisely because these are "seen" to feature erroneously and pejoratively described "elitist" dance forms which are not easily defined within the catch-all labels of "Moving Image" , "Video Dance". Or they fail to conform to being part of the fantastically well-funded self-promoting academically oriented experimental genres. Or the projects simply fail to push the ethnic/sexual/handicap diversity buttons with sufficient fervour.
The commercial film sector is now run almost exclusively by star-struck corporate raiders, gamblers and bankers who know the cost of everything, have a very sketchy interest, regard or even grasp on the value of anything and are entirely disinterested unless the return on their investment can be exactly measured and preferrably copper-bottomed.
What remains of "culture" on television has been completely marginalised, has no money and where commissioning editors can envisage the merest whiff of public interest or advertising colateral claw-back, without exception is immediately assigned to the nearest safe pair of hands to bring it on home.
This inevitably means Alan Yentob, Melvyn Bragg (both of whom coincidentally own their own commercial production companies who then get the commission to both produce AND present) or some well heeled Comedian whose powerful agent has decided to fluff-up (usually) his Cultural street-cred.
In genuine creative terms, all of them Non-Combatants who at best mock and point-score and at worst, simply skate straight across the surface and back into the bar at Soho House without even touching the sides.
You will perhaps get a small measure of mine and countless others' unutterable frustration when we encounter missives from yours and other august Government-funded organisations in which it is patently clear that despite your offer of free fivers, clearly no-one has bothered to get up early enough in the morning to fill out your forms, send them back to you or come and collect the loot.
You must forgive a sense that the process of cutting the slack for the lame and the lazy merely amplifies a sense that deadlines and other creative disciplines are irrelevant because the gravy train will always call again tomorrow.
It really does matter that we should require clearer definitions of the various degrees and shades of cultural activity.
It is esential as film makers, that we hold you accountable for complete transparency over the ways and means chosen to define shades of nuance and criteria for interest in specific areas of the culture over which organisations such as Film London have fiscal jurisdiction.
Is is crucial that you are seen to exist to help develop culture by, with and for every part of our society.
Particularly and despite being a rabid anti-racist, I am free to argue, the vast majority of the society in the United Kingdom consists predominantly of white tax-payers, without whom the funding and creative support organisations such as yours simply would not exist.
For myself, as one of many UK Creative Industry citizens, who cannot beg or borrow the money or support to make good films which inevitably fall slap bang down the middle of all of the various categories or funding criteria currently defined as being within the remit of the government funded Arts Administrations, I must express and reiterate my requirement as a tax-payer with a professional interest in this area, that my tithes be demonstrably apportioned with far greater discernment, finesse and effectiveness.
Further, that we must have a much more open, albeit less comfortable relationship and clearly defined opportunities to debate with those who have assumed the right to make these decisions, on the qualitative criteria they might use to make their judgements.
If not, why not?
I look forward to an opportunity to continue and widen this debate.
Kind Regards
Sandy Strallen
editors note:
Neither Rebekah Polding nor Film London have to date, been available for comment.
26 Mar 2009
ONE FLAT THING and A series of rounded rhetorical questions
"The main focus of Synchronous Objects is to develop a set of data visualization tools for capturing, analyzing and presenting the underlying choreographic structures and components of Forsythe's "One Flat Thing, reproduced" (OFTr), which premiered in 2003. These visualizations in the form of information graphics, 2D and 3D animations and visual dance scores will provide audiences, students and researchers with new approaches to thinking about and studying Forsythe's intricate, counter-point work."
Doug Fox - Great Dance
NOWHERE NEAR THE EDGES, SOMEWHAT REPEATED
A view of Synchronous Objects - One Flat Thing
On the basis what’s good for Albert should be good for us, it is instructive that the great Einstein died while still exploring and failing to ratify his unified field theory.
He had rather hoped that one day he would discover how to make the whole Universe comprehensible as more than the sum of its parts, rather than less.
This surely at a stretch, might be one of the key indicators of anything approaching coherent outcomes for the rather more mundane but nonetheless important artistic impulse.
I have to ask if Statistical analysis of spatial dynamics, or the investigation of how moving bodies can organise themselves - whether synchronously or within de-reified fields of order and organisation, or whether the chance arrangements of geometric patterns of moving human forms can help organise new ways of understanding the dynamic processes in design for the assembling of inanimate lumps of glass, steel and breeze-block architecture, can provide very much more than a very good pretext for countless imitative versions of the same thing somewhat repeated?
One of the problems with deconstructing the choreographic process, from a spatial, atomic, dynamic, visual or merely abstract aesthetic, is that the sum of parts will nevitably become less than the whole.
What is the philosphical, philological , spatial, contextual, emotional or semiotic motivator unique and central to the process?
In the breathless hype and total absence of informed critical appraisal of the S.O launch, this member of audience begins to wonder is whether there has any decision been taken as to exactly what this progenitor might be.
My feeling is that there is not one key motivator.
Thus what ensues is yet another monumental work of making and meaning in which there is no centre. What the gestaltists might call, lacking either a clear figure or a clear ground.
Is this yet another of those fantastically erudite exercises in the careful and mutually respectful allowing, of at least ten different sets of fingers to take hold of at best, different parts of, and at worst, the same part of the wings of a single butterfly and pulling sufficiently hard - to discover that the wings have come off?
All with the single and express purpose of examining, from at least ten different points of view, exactly how it, the butterfly, actually fails to continue to be able to fly.
If there is a value in pulling the wings off butterflies, at the very least a conclusion can be drawn, a carefully constructed set of reasons as to exactly why the dewinging of a butterfly should be taking place.
Perhaps even a a beautifully inscribed equation for all those involved in either the pulling or the observation of such.
One to be splashed upon lecture-room whiteboards the length and breadth of Academia:
Butterfly - Wings = General Lack of Flight - discuss
Further brilliant observations and outcomes following the exhaustive and minutely documented de-winging process, might be:
1 A certain amount of surprise and consternation that this butterfly is not looking as good as it did.
and
2 The entire exercise boiling down to not a great deal more than a final published series of findings with the general heading;
"How we, er, well…we um, probably killed a butterfly."
What is even more surprising is that despite ever more sophisticated and fantastical exercises in synchronous objectification of the atomic affects no-one seems to be questioning whether flying was something that the butterfly was ever intended to do.
In fact the only consequence of that kind of skewed and heretically unscientific thinking, is that it might lead to the entirely uncomfortable conclusion that flying and butterfly might even have a non-human imperative.
Worse even still, there may be a far more instructive and deductive poetry at work, which describes the whole of a butterfly in ways that do not even mention the bits that make it work.
And thus, with the noisy clattering of pot lids, launching of web-sites and general over-excited PR driven hype, we have Synchronous Objects.
Unquestioningly presented as a Major Creative Event, but which in fact resembles not much more than a large, multi-coloured, formless, disintegrated and more or less inert mass.
One, which may or may not have resembled something approximating a notion which might or might not, with all respect to the interdisciplinary sensibilities of the disparate and self-actualising interests of the various participatory groups, have been a thing which once accorded with the notion of butterflyness, or choreography, or creative endeavour.
Where I am confused about the "S.O." exercise and would greatly appreciate someone clarifying the why and the what for me, is in precisely what outcome might be measured as a result of the synchronous objectification of what to many is a dense and to most, an almost impenetrable piece of uniquely personal modern dance-making.
Secondarily, why there should be made such an uniquely uncritical din about its launch?
What I think Synchronous Objects would like to have been, when the notion started as that oh so riveting dinner party conversation all that time ago, is a series of possible outcomes which might or might not occur as a process of bringing together an interdisplinary team of variously post-hoc areas of research and design disciplines in the broadest sense.
One which has clearly been resourced to the eyeballs in order to exhaustively research the possiblity of Spatiality being a synchronous process involving the potential for the inconnectedness of things in general, which in certain contexts might or might not be recognised as something we might later refer to as: choreography-ness.
No chance that Synchronous Objects is an ok, if somewhat windy April Fool joke is there?
Here is Pacific NorthWest Ballet forcing "One Flat Thing" on their public for a second time.
Clearly attempting to brazen out the notion that alienating their audience, by feeding it the angst ridden internal monologues of this weeks Dance Genius, currently engaged in deep psychotherapeutic interventions, should be seen as essentially a positive step. I assume, on the basis that Stravinsky got away with it....
I wonder if anyone who suffers from the current chronic creative hubris so resplendent in its over-subsidised compounds, ever stops for long enough to wonder if any of this outcrop of "groundbreaking" avant-gardisms will really stand the test of time over the next five years, let alone the next 50 or even 100.
Perhaps we should pause to reflect that all of what has lasted was without exception deeply rooted in the notion that previous creative geniuses knew the rules REALLY well prior to finding themselves in a position whereby breaking some of them might be considered either advisable or relevant.
Now we seem to have constant examples of bathroom windows being thrown wide open accompanied by the often violent and always noisy jettisoning of baby, bathwater and seemingly, most of the plumbing equipment. All of this behaviour inevitably accompanied by the loud braying of self-congratulation and PR/media hype of white-noise intensity, including PNB's "LOOK, SEE!! We TOLD you, you were ALL too Phillistine to get it, so you are all to stay in after school and watch it again!"
Make of the piece below what you will, but listen especially carefully to the sofa-punditry which accompanies it. Notional value, positive attempt to explore the boundaries of modernism for its own sake - but "choreographic value"?, hmmm............
Mr Boal, you are one of the many brilliant, committed and passionate people all over the world, professionally involved in keeping the art of dancing on stage for the entertainment pleasure and occasional enlightenment of paying audiences. Your repertoire is brave, visionary and occasionally as in the case of One Flat Thing, wait for it....Post-Modern.
To continue in both breadth and depth, you have occasionally to be up to the task of becoming that thing you are likely most to despise - a critic. In the case of explaining repertoire choices, both erudite and profound, will you rise to the task or merely hide behind the fig-leaf of "if you don't get it, then you are clearly thick".
22 Mar 2009
Glimpses - by Greta Schoenberg and Ben Estabrook
Motion Pictures SF is the San Francisco based Dancefilm initiative run by Greta Schoenberg.
Click on the title above to take you to the site
Click on the title above to take you to the site
12 Mar 2009
MARVIN
MARVIN- In memoriam
The Blog-shot is of the late lamented, Marvin The Marvel.
He opted to temporarily brighten this vale of tears as a cat.
A simply astounding little creature who immeasurably enriched every life in to which he stalked, head and tail held high, vocalising unrelentingly, whenever he was not snoozing on a radiator or purring louder than a road-drill.
He is much missed by all who had the pleasure of meeting him.
"All things considered, I'd rather be in Philadelphia." W.C. Fields
The Blog-shot is of the late lamented, Marvin The Marvel.
He opted to temporarily brighten this vale of tears as a cat.
A simply astounding little creature who immeasurably enriched every life in to which he stalked, head and tail held high, vocalising unrelentingly, whenever he was not snoozing on a radiator or purring louder than a road-drill.
He is much missed by all who had the pleasure of meeting him.
"All things considered, I'd rather be in Philadelphia." W.C. Fields
11 Mar 2009
Jiri Kylian - Learning to love the choreographic designer.
There is a constant ongoing debate in dance and film circles, whether "classical" or "neo-classical" choreography lends itself to "dancefilm".
Certainly in the talking-shops there seems to be a tension between those who regard the world of recorded moving image divisible into specific areas of definable interest, and those who see dance and film as a series of inviting and fruitful grey areas of creative exploration and experimentation, ripe for collaboration between moving-image makers of all persuasions.
One of the more contentious issues is whether classical dance as a moving-image language, is only useful, assimilable or available as a plastic communicative vehicle in creatively limited and anachronistic forms?
A type which can be captured at best, as more or less well-crafted filmic records of stage or inherently "theatrical" performances.
From a limited point of view, the argument could be put forward, that formal neo-classical choreographic vocabulary and histrionic presentation, is in the nature of its embodied technical requirements, not suitable for informing on or sustaining interest in any relevant way on cinematographical moving-image.
In some senses classical dance vocabulary has not developed or matured into much more than what is essentially a 2 dimensional theatrical spectacle.
The body-forms described and the available skill-set on offer by classically trained bodies may not be best presented in any other form than viewed straight from the front in a live context.
In the grand operatic mimetic pantomime stories of old, and to their shame, some of those of the more recent offerings, remain essentially archaic, often staid, occasionally ludicrous and less acccessible to generations brought up on method rather than metaphor. Assigned as simple, spectacular, stupor-fodder for the overfed Christmas afternoon TV viewing slot.
In fact much of it anathema to those whom assume the capacity and inventive scope for close-up and occasionally discomforting views of the internal world of psychology and personal meaning as expressed through movement, is literally unlimited.
On the other hand, if one sets aside the message and preconceptions about what it may or may not contain, and concentrates on the medium, what we discover is human bodies. Machines of infinite possibility, great skill and potential invention, which when harnessed with sufficient finesse, delicacy and expertise, become capable of speaking the most subtle of emotive and semiotic languages.
At this level, the only limitations inherent in making the classical vernacular as meaningful as any other kineographic messaging "system", is the skill and sophistication of the cinematographic direction and the ability to rise above banality or gratuitous theatricality by the makers of movement. Most importantly for both to find common ground if indeed they are seperate entities.
In my experience as a choreographer for films, videos and stage, part of the "problem" is that choreographers have a highly developed and sophisticated skill-set and competencies which by definition engender the same levels of authorative 'control" as the directors who, if they are not one and the same person, are in nomine in charge. This mostly subliminal status issue, becomes all too often an inevitable human/ego-tussle between auteurs, in which the "director" has to be seen to "win".
One senses this often with the moving-image auteurs who are by training and background cinematographers rather than choreographers. Time and again I hear well-known moving image makers pontificate on and unconsciously downplay the role of choreography in dancefilm.
This is attributable more to an inherent and little sensed loss of control of their "project" than any genuine belief that a well founded choreographic design is irrelevant or useless to them.
This might account for the current predilection, some might say, aggressive promotion for "anti" or "post"-choreographic projects and random movement generation, favoured by many of the current crop of moving-image makers and their sources of support and authority.
Without a formal movement design and comprehensible language, moving image becomes what we too often see. A series of disjointed, visually maladroit moving violations on a flicker-screen. Fine, if that is exactly what the auteur intends, but taken at a stretch this can make for very long, dull viewing experiences.
One might posit that if highly stylised movement languages are a bar to entry, then we must also discount every choreographer with an original voice of every movement discipline. Bar anyone, then you bar them all.
Selection is merely personal prejudice dressed as fashion statement
What I think the three excerpts below more than amply demonstrate, is that in the hands of Jiri Kylian, a master of the modern neo-classical dance form, meaning, internal dialogue, metaphysics all can be made to work at any level from abstract and metaphorical right through to the achingly sensual and overtly realistic, if albeit highly-stylised movement language.
All elements of the choreographic design, undeniably complimented by an amplification through skillful, understated cinematic version and vision.
While still essentially filmed "performance", the material below, using the subtlest of camera work, reveals a world of seamless and expert synthesis between formal choreography and brilliantly simple and effective cinematography.
Creating for all practical purposes a new form which is neither merely filmed performance nor dance for the camera.
We are approaching an unique hybrid in and of itself, with much to give to choreographers who are wary of the camera, with their own important message to impart about the human condition, using the human form.
This "style" also opens a whole new world of possibilities in choreographic design, and has much to share with film makers who find "dance" intimidating, limiting or irrelevant to their sense of making meaning through movement.
Certainly in the talking-shops there seems to be a tension between those who regard the world of recorded moving image divisible into specific areas of definable interest, and those who see dance and film as a series of inviting and fruitful grey areas of creative exploration and experimentation, ripe for collaboration between moving-image makers of all persuasions.
One of the more contentious issues is whether classical dance as a moving-image language, is only useful, assimilable or available as a plastic communicative vehicle in creatively limited and anachronistic forms?
A type which can be captured at best, as more or less well-crafted filmic records of stage or inherently "theatrical" performances.
From a limited point of view, the argument could be put forward, that formal neo-classical choreographic vocabulary and histrionic presentation, is in the nature of its embodied technical requirements, not suitable for informing on or sustaining interest in any relevant way on cinematographical moving-image.
In some senses classical dance vocabulary has not developed or matured into much more than what is essentially a 2 dimensional theatrical spectacle.
The body-forms described and the available skill-set on offer by classically trained bodies may not be best presented in any other form than viewed straight from the front in a live context.
In the grand operatic mimetic pantomime stories of old, and to their shame, some of those of the more recent offerings, remain essentially archaic, often staid, occasionally ludicrous and less acccessible to generations brought up on method rather than metaphor. Assigned as simple, spectacular, stupor-fodder for the overfed Christmas afternoon TV viewing slot.
In fact much of it anathema to those whom assume the capacity and inventive scope for close-up and occasionally discomforting views of the internal world of psychology and personal meaning as expressed through movement, is literally unlimited.
On the other hand, if one sets aside the message and preconceptions about what it may or may not contain, and concentrates on the medium, what we discover is human bodies. Machines of infinite possibility, great skill and potential invention, which when harnessed with sufficient finesse, delicacy and expertise, become capable of speaking the most subtle of emotive and semiotic languages.
At this level, the only limitations inherent in making the classical vernacular as meaningful as any other kineographic messaging "system", is the skill and sophistication of the cinematographic direction and the ability to rise above banality or gratuitous theatricality by the makers of movement. Most importantly for both to find common ground if indeed they are seperate entities.
In my experience as a choreographer for films, videos and stage, part of the "problem" is that choreographers have a highly developed and sophisticated skill-set and competencies which by definition engender the same levels of authorative 'control" as the directors who, if they are not one and the same person, are in nomine in charge. This mostly subliminal status issue, becomes all too often an inevitable human/ego-tussle between auteurs, in which the "director" has to be seen to "win".
One senses this often with the moving-image auteurs who are by training and background cinematographers rather than choreographers. Time and again I hear well-known moving image makers pontificate on and unconsciously downplay the role of choreography in dancefilm.
This is attributable more to an inherent and little sensed loss of control of their "project" than any genuine belief that a well founded choreographic design is irrelevant or useless to them.
This might account for the current predilection, some might say, aggressive promotion for "anti" or "post"-choreographic projects and random movement generation, favoured by many of the current crop of moving-image makers and their sources of support and authority.
Without a formal movement design and comprehensible language, moving image becomes what we too often see. A series of disjointed, visually maladroit moving violations on a flicker-screen. Fine, if that is exactly what the auteur intends, but taken at a stretch this can make for very long, dull viewing experiences.
One might posit that if highly stylised movement languages are a bar to entry, then we must also discount every choreographer with an original voice of every movement discipline. Bar anyone, then you bar them all.
Selection is merely personal prejudice dressed as fashion statement
What I think the three excerpts below more than amply demonstrate, is that in the hands of Jiri Kylian, a master of the modern neo-classical dance form, meaning, internal dialogue, metaphysics all can be made to work at any level from abstract and metaphorical right through to the achingly sensual and overtly realistic, if albeit highly-stylised movement language.
All elements of the choreographic design, undeniably complimented by an amplification through skillful, understated cinematic version and vision.
While still essentially filmed "performance", the material below, using the subtlest of camera work, reveals a world of seamless and expert synthesis between formal choreography and brilliantly simple and effective cinematography.
Creating for all practical purposes a new form which is neither merely filmed performance nor dance for the camera.
We are approaching an unique hybrid in and of itself, with much to give to choreographers who are wary of the camera, with their own important message to impart about the human condition, using the human form.
This "style" also opens a whole new world of possibilities in choreographic design, and has much to share with film makers who find "dance" intimidating, limiting or irrelevant to their sense of making meaning through movement.
DV8 - The poetry movement in camera
Excerpt 1 from:
The Cost of Living - Lloyd Newson - Commissioned by Channel 4 Television, UK
Excerpt 2 from:
The Cost of Living - Lloyd Newson - Commissioned by Channel 4 Television, UK
The Cost of Living - Lloyd Newson - Commissioned by Channel 4 Television, UK
Excerpt 2 from:
The Cost of Living - Lloyd Newson - Commissioned by Channel 4 Television, UK
10 Mar 2009
No Ranting today
“If you tell me, I will forget, if you show me I will remember, but if you let me
do it, I will learn.”
do it, I will learn.”
New Jeannette Ginslov films
JULIA's STORY by Jeannette Ginslov
JG wrote:"....Julia's Story: loss, sadness and nostalgia explored in dance video. emotions are amplified by Craig Armstrong's piano work".
Beautifully executed in so many ways. A simple, single-pointed narrative focus, delimited by a breadth of emotion amplified with carefully considered, understated and appropriate gesture.
Was struck by the capacity for communicative value in both the director's camera choices and Julia Mcghee's almost brutal emotional transparency. Not an easy performance to replicate, so nice to see the mise-en-scene choices were kept simple and minimal, so that performance and integrity did not fall inevitable victim to Hi-concept fiddling and over-"technicalising" the process.
SANCTUM 1 by Jeannette Ginslov
JG wrote:"...Sanctum I amplifies the kinaesthetic and emotional struggle of silenced yet complicit women bound by the cultural practice of FGM - female genital mutilation. It attempts to elicit empathetic responses from the viewer by revealing the power of the moving image as experiential and embodied."
Another fine example of less being more in dance-film/moving image.
Even without the overt-socio-gender-political statement and the human rights angle, Jeannette Ginslov has communicated with brevity and power an important, little discussed and even less understood subject.
Whether she actually sheds light on the female circumcision issue is moot. The piece is a little weighed down by overall and less specific notions of bondage and restrictive ambience. Without an accompanying credit-roll narrative the audience may not necessarily get the authors specifically articulated "point".
Too often film makers can make the assumption that the medium is resilient enough subliminally to carry an "embodied" message. Furthermore, that the "experience" of the intention is sufficient. This is rarely the case - indicative perhaps of why so many initially promising choreo-kino intentions go so swiftly awry in their final execution.
Perhaps we might have some thoughts posted from JG on where and how she might take either or both of the above short pieces further, were budget, time or resources no object.
It would be further enlightening to see additional postings from other points of view of both the pieces above.
JG wrote:"....Julia's Story: loss, sadness and nostalgia explored in dance video. emotions are amplified by Craig Armstrong's piano work".
Beautifully executed in so many ways. A simple, single-pointed narrative focus, delimited by a breadth of emotion amplified with carefully considered, understated and appropriate gesture.
Was struck by the capacity for communicative value in both the director's camera choices and Julia Mcghee's almost brutal emotional transparency. Not an easy performance to replicate, so nice to see the mise-en-scene choices were kept simple and minimal, so that performance and integrity did not fall inevitable victim to Hi-concept fiddling and over-"technicalising" the process.
SANCTUM 1 by Jeannette Ginslov
JG wrote:"...Sanctum I amplifies the kinaesthetic and emotional struggle of silenced yet complicit women bound by the cultural practice of FGM - female genital mutilation. It attempts to elicit empathetic responses from the viewer by revealing the power of the moving image as experiential and embodied."
Another fine example of less being more in dance-film/moving image.
Even without the overt-socio-gender-political statement and the human rights angle, Jeannette Ginslov has communicated with brevity and power an important, little discussed and even less understood subject.
Whether she actually sheds light on the female circumcision issue is moot. The piece is a little weighed down by overall and less specific notions of bondage and restrictive ambience. Without an accompanying credit-roll narrative the audience may not necessarily get the authors specifically articulated "point".
Too often film makers can make the assumption that the medium is resilient enough subliminally to carry an "embodied" message. Furthermore, that the "experience" of the intention is sufficient. This is rarely the case - indicative perhaps of why so many initially promising choreo-kino intentions go so swiftly awry in their final execution.
Perhaps we might have some thoughts posted from JG on where and how she might take either or both of the above short pieces further, were budget, time or resources no object.
It would be further enlightening to see additional postings from other points of view of both the pieces above.
8 Mar 2009
BLINKX.COM - Dancefilm Videowall
Click on any of the screens to be taken to a new page where the video will play in its entirety. The random nature of where and how these films are archived, allows for a most enjoyable and occasionally enlightening magical mystery tour.
Play with it.
Many thanks to www.blinkx.com for their stupendous work in clairvoyant archive search technologies.
Play with it.
Many thanks to www.blinkx.com for their stupendous work in clairvoyant archive search technologies.
4 Mar 2009
SOME RANDOM CRITICAL THOUGHTS ON RECENT DANCEFILMS
Choreography: Charles - Cre-Ange Danse Contemporaine
Clarity of intention, intensity, claustrophobia, a sense of expectancy and real choreographic breadth of movement are not easy elements to synthesize satisfactorily in a frame as tight as the film maker has chosen here.
Four well-thought through creative decisions, are the absence of any camera movement, the speed with which the action moves in and out of the viewfinder, the dancer's focus on the window about which we as viewers become persuaded to be increasingly interested and the quality of the backlight.
To make so few and such simple mise-en-scene resources so resonantly "about" something important, takes some skill and homework, which is abundantly evident in this piece.
A great choice of vista within a frame when the window finally opens and a soundtrack that adds to the sense of angst of our human moth, without being obtrusive makes this a very satisfying experience. Oh, and by the way, I think it is about dying - any other theories?
Windows sponsored by WD40
THE RAIN - CHOREO/DIRECTOR - PONTUS LIDBERG - SWEDEN - 28 MINS
Pontus Lidberg's beautiful, haunting feature length Dancefilm from Sweden.
Jury special mention at the Gothenburg Film Festival 2007. UK premiere - Dec 2nd, 2007, BEST FILM - The London International Dancefilm Festival, Riverside Studios, London.
ROSE D'OR NOMINEE 2008.
Lidberg is currently raising funds for his next piece, Labyrinth Within which promises to be even more powerful.
Contact him at his site if you can contribute.
http://www.lidberg.se/therain
TWINS BERNARD - by the "TWINS" BERNARD.
OK I have to admit a predilection for well-trained dancing and although not an absolutely essential element of "dancefilm" per-se, in circumstances such as this, an absence of really strong fine movement would have made this another exercise in cinematic futility.
As a personal choice of metaphor, I explored the notion that this piece is about personality fragmentation. Certainly if one was looking for a cinematic technique to personify this notion, the opening running manege in time -lapse and the lightning dissolve in the final shot were brilliant choices. Timing is always key, particularly in non-verbal art where you can't use linguistic smoke and mirrors to hide a weak idea.
We get displaced from one place to entirely another without the film maker changing either the protagonists in the frame, a time shift or change of location. Quite a feat. Great momentum in the tiny choreographic body-language shifts gives us a clear idea of exactly what their relationship is likely to be and the resulting choices in spacing between the two characters then delivers on an anticipated internal narrative. The developing of the nature of this relationship in which we are automatically interested and cleverly persuaded to stay with, is neatly complimented by subtle variations of repeat choreographic patterns. In this case a deliberate choice I think, rather than because the choreographic ideas have run out and there's time and space to fill which is what can happen all too often.
Sepia choice for the colour temperature and and the shape of the space all contribute layers of meaning, an appropriate dance space and unobtrusive environmental design. Nice work.
THE TOUR - VIDEODANCE 2004 - ATHENS COLLECTIVE
Wit, inventiveness, animation, pastiche, camera angles, and a clear narrative idea with finally, hurrah!, a beginning, middle and what passes for some kind of resolution in the end.
The environment in which the film was made has been intelligently and inventively plumbed for opportunities to add meaning, creative depth and amusement for the viewer.
Poor Theatre techniques, popular, accessible and well composed images and a facility for investing the everyday with a greater meaning in a quick and dirty way, thereby colaterally adding value to both, denotes both intellect and an interest in sources outside cliches.
MATS EK - SMOKE with NIKLAS EK & SYLVIE GUILLEM
I am still trying to come to terms with a narrative and choreographic thread which is so limpid, lyrical, languidly intense and yet spare of all vanity or body fetishism. All of which contribute, in association with one of Arvo Part's most minimal yet searing of compositions, to creating a fine example of where a distinctive cinematic vision, choreographic focus and appropriate musicality, come together in an uniquely satisfying synthesis.
Always intrigues me that as far as audiences go, there is a virtually unanimous vote of approval for dancefilm in which superb choreographic design and technical brilliance of execution feature heavily.
While audience approval is neither the alpha nor omega, it can offer instructive pointers as to how far the intention and the making of the vehicle for the message have effectively penetrated the sub-conscious
Clarity of intention, intensity, claustrophobia, a sense of expectancy and real choreographic breadth of movement are not easy elements to synthesize satisfactorily in a frame as tight as the film maker has chosen here.
Four well-thought through creative decisions, are the absence of any camera movement, the speed with which the action moves in and out of the viewfinder, the dancer's focus on the window about which we as viewers become persuaded to be increasingly interested and the quality of the backlight.
To make so few and such simple mise-en-scene resources so resonantly "about" something important, takes some skill and homework, which is abundantly evident in this piece.
A great choice of vista within a frame when the window finally opens and a soundtrack that adds to the sense of angst of our human moth, without being obtrusive makes this a very satisfying experience. Oh, and by the way, I think it is about dying - any other theories?
Windows sponsored by WD40
THE RAIN - CHOREO/DIRECTOR - PONTUS LIDBERG - SWEDEN - 28 MINS
Pontus Lidberg's beautiful, haunting feature length Dancefilm from Sweden.
Jury special mention at the Gothenburg Film Festival 2007. UK premiere - Dec 2nd, 2007, BEST FILM - The London International Dancefilm Festival, Riverside Studios, London.
ROSE D'OR NOMINEE 2008.
Lidberg is currently raising funds for his next piece, Labyrinth Within which promises to be even more powerful.
Contact him at his site if you can contribute.
http://www.lidberg.se/therain
TWINS BERNARD - by the "TWINS" BERNARD.
OK I have to admit a predilection for well-trained dancing and although not an absolutely essential element of "dancefilm" per-se, in circumstances such as this, an absence of really strong fine movement would have made this another exercise in cinematic futility.
As a personal choice of metaphor, I explored the notion that this piece is about personality fragmentation. Certainly if one was looking for a cinematic technique to personify this notion, the opening running manege in time -lapse and the lightning dissolve in the final shot were brilliant choices. Timing is always key, particularly in non-verbal art where you can't use linguistic smoke and mirrors to hide a weak idea.
We get displaced from one place to entirely another without the film maker changing either the protagonists in the frame, a time shift or change of location. Quite a feat. Great momentum in the tiny choreographic body-language shifts gives us a clear idea of exactly what their relationship is likely to be and the resulting choices in spacing between the two characters then delivers on an anticipated internal narrative. The developing of the nature of this relationship in which we are automatically interested and cleverly persuaded to stay with, is neatly complimented by subtle variations of repeat choreographic patterns. In this case a deliberate choice I think, rather than because the choreographic ideas have run out and there's time and space to fill which is what can happen all too often.
Sepia choice for the colour temperature and and the shape of the space all contribute layers of meaning, an appropriate dance space and unobtrusive environmental design. Nice work.
THE TOUR - VIDEODANCE 2004 - ATHENS COLLECTIVE
Wit, inventiveness, animation, pastiche, camera angles, and a clear narrative idea with finally, hurrah!, a beginning, middle and what passes for some kind of resolution in the end.
The environment in which the film was made has been intelligently and inventively plumbed for opportunities to add meaning, creative depth and amusement for the viewer.
Poor Theatre techniques, popular, accessible and well composed images and a facility for investing the everyday with a greater meaning in a quick and dirty way, thereby colaterally adding value to both, denotes both intellect and an interest in sources outside cliches.
MATS EK - SMOKE with NIKLAS EK & SYLVIE GUILLEM
I am still trying to come to terms with a narrative and choreographic thread which is so limpid, lyrical, languidly intense and yet spare of all vanity or body fetishism. All of which contribute, in association with one of Arvo Part's most minimal yet searing of compositions, to creating a fine example of where a distinctive cinematic vision, choreographic focus and appropriate musicality, come together in an uniquely satisfying synthesis.
Always intrigues me that as far as audiences go, there is a virtually unanimous vote of approval for dancefilm in which superb choreographic design and technical brilliance of execution feature heavily.
While audience approval is neither the alpha nor omega, it can offer instructive pointers as to how far the intention and the making of the vehicle for the message have effectively penetrated the sub-conscious
28 Feb 2009
AFTER EFFECTS - IT'S A SHOCKER!
http://www.lumottulapsi.net/ENG/a0.html
http://www.lumottulapsi.net/trailers/LumottuTRAILERI_high.mov
The above example demonstrates a passable job in understanding how to integrate story telling and effects, with dance.
What is not quite so successful is shooting the dance to make it serve the whole idea.
A lack of talent in effective choreographic synthesis contributes to a distancing from the subject for the audience rather than effectively including them in the process.
It is sometimes interesting to feel that a moving image project started with the narrative and choreographic wealth inherent in the dance ideas.
This process can so often mine these ideas for all of their poetic, metaphorical and iconoclastic potential and imbue them within the context and disciplines of all of the other essential elements, informing them all of eachother and providing a purposeful integration or "voice".
Once the proverbial lily has been produced, then can the creative processes be directed towards a set of directorial decisions on the extent to which gilt need be applied.
Often we encounter the ad hoc shoehorning of dance ideas into a series of After Effects driven storyboard designs. Too often these sophisticated additions obscure, ignore or merely downgrade the crucial place of clear choreographic narrative design and intention, be it ever so abstract.
The results are, at best an alienating ambience to the work and a sense to the audience, even those members less informed of the techniques behind the work, that perhaps this was not a deliberate choice by the film makers.
In fact the more elegant the effects, the more the weaknesses in the seamless continuum between choreographic and cinematographic ideas become highlighted.
The above clip demonstrates above average production values, a good sense of scale and a clearly strong metaphorical line, which come as part and parcel of the source material in this case " L´ENFANT ET LES SORTILEGES". (See below).
At any point in a "remaking" process, it is incumbent on the creative direction to establish new ways of seeing which must inherently or overtly, contribute to enriching the source idea.
From Wikipedia
" L´ENFANT ET LES SORTILEGES"
Background
During World War I, the Opéra de Paris director Jacques Rouché asked Colette to provide the text for a fairy ballet. Colette originally wrote the story under the title Divertissements pour ma fille. After Colette chose Ravel to set the text to music, a copy was sent to him during the time he was serving in the war in 1916; however, the mailed script was lost. In 1917, Ravel finally had received a copy and agreed to complete the score, humorously replying to Collette, "I would like to compose this, but I have no daughter." Due to contractual obligations, Ravel finally was compelled to complete the work by 1924. Colette, believing that the work would never be complete, later expressed her extreme pleasure that the work was done, believing that her modest writing had been raised beyond its initial scope. Now officially under the title of L'enfant et les sortilèges, the first performance took place March 21, 1925 in Monte Carlo as conducted byVictor de Sabata with ballet sequences choreographed by George Balanchine. Ravel said of the premiere production:
"Our work required an extraordinary production: the roles are numerous, and the phantasmagoria is constant. Following the principles of American operetta, dancing is continually and intimately intermingled with the action [...and] the Monte Carlo Opera possesses a wonderful troupe of Russian dancers, marvelously directed by a prodigious ballet master, M. Balanchine. And let’s not forget an essential element, the orchestra
1 Feb 2009
OBSERVATIONS ON ROTHKO AT TATE MODERN
The apparent oddities in Rothko’s juxtaposition of esthetic forms, sucking out of colour and perspective, the reduction ad absurdam to two dimensions, is as if he tries to preclude the possibility of reinterpreation of what is already deliberately an avoidance of “message”, “context” or “reference”.
The absolute removal of comfort in any internal dialogue, is the silence of monotonal and epic space. The viewer is disallowed the simple defense of remaining outside the image.
Painting becomes one darkly tolling bell of message and medium coming together at a point, way outside the usual points of visual reference.
Form, content and meaning become indivisible in a resonant totality requiring the participant to exchange the usual looking at for the far greater comittment required of looking in.
Multi-variants of the same blocks of browns and greys express eloquent nothingness. Training the eye to places where the smallest imperceptible shifts in the focal point denote layers of meaning which transcend the mundane. All the while avoiding allowing the viewer to displace these virtually physical discomforts with any solace of notions of the spiritual. Rothko's monotony goes beyond either of these polarities.
A skyline becomes a back wall becomes a doorway becomes an event horizon.
Each perceptual shift, amplifying, complimenting, subverting any possible sense of ease with where we might be allowed to bring our awareness to rest.
Every atonal approach in pastel, brown and grey, charting the line, providing a narrative with imperceptible shifts of emphasis, intimations of fear, places of distance intimated through ineffably veiled layers of colour.
Utterly the thing itself, unsigned, unannealed, promising nothing but that your gaze and possibly your sense of identity might be drawn down into the event horizon of what is essentially mere description, yet somehow manages both to represent and yet be more than merely approximation.
A distillation of vulnerability, as if saying: “So, if beyond this, then what?”
Huge swathes of black, nothingness delineated by the lightest touch of form.
Capturing the paradox of darkness illuminated by the yet darker still. Capturing the moments between seeing and not seeing.
Darker and darker tones providing an unbearable tension between the uproar of existence and a quietus of elsewhere.
Uncoloured, unformed points in space, past levity and twitch, huge pre-ironic salutes to nihilism, avoiding edge, boundary or limit. Bounded here and there by the prosaic application of badly applied masking tape arbitrarily overpainted.
As if in some crystaline and despairing objection to any notion of the finite, meeting the final restrictions of temporal existence in a frenzy of mute fury.
And in the face of this profundity, in the final analysis confronted by the paradox that these universes will ultimately be bounded by the edge of his canvas eternities ending where the magnolia gallery wall begins again.
It is within just such a paradox lies Rothko's infuriatingly exciting visual abstractions.
At times the visceral tension created between background and foreground, metaphor and making so acute, that Gestaltists would have trouble distinguishing thither and yon.
Somehow these frozen moments cannot rise above the tittle tattle, the peering prurient randyness for fact, figure, date, technique, form and all of the thousand other mundane trivialities we use to fool ourselves that somehow we exercise control by choosing how to view - and what we have received and perceived within that process of viewing.
Frames, into the corner of which will constantly edge the live and kicking.
Ambling past these monumental artefacts, we can offer delirium, tedium, a cure for OCD or a genuinely interactive Alpha wave meditative environment, at any point and occasionally all at once.
Or merely, a milky and indifferent smile from the sleepy depths of a pushchair, driven by pairs of idling, chattering humans.
The Moments of Happiness.
We had the experience but missed the meaning.
And approach to the meaning restores the experience in a different form.
Beyond any meaning we can assign to happiness, the past experience not of one life only, but of many generations.
Not forgetting something that is probably quite, ineffable. After TS Eliot
30 Jan 2009
Credit Cruncher Joke of The Day
Q:
What are the fundamental differences in the parlous state of the finances of Iceland and Ireland?
A:
One letter and about six months.
What are the fundamental differences in the parlous state of the finances of Iceland and Ireland?
A:
One letter and about six months.
29 Jan 2009
REALLY dirrrrrrrty gurrrls!!!
*** This email has been sent from the MEDIA ARTS AND DANCE email forum. To respond to all subscribers email MEDIA-ARTS-AND-DANCE@JISCMAIL.AC.UK. ***
Dear All
We are happy to announce that burlesque theatre practitioner and academic,
Gwendoline Lamour will be presenting the second keynote at this year's
postgraduate conference 'Journeys Across Media' (University of Reading). Her
paper will be on 'Romanticizing the Female Form'. More information on Ms
Lamour's performances can be found at: www.gwendolinelamour.com/
For more information on the conference (17 April 2009) feel free to visit
the University's website at:
http://www.reading.ac.uk/ftt/pg-research/ftt-pgrjam.asp
Kindest regards
Tim Vermeulen, Harper Ray and Reina-Marie Loader
"Miss Soapy T*t-Wa*k gets an Ology"
Far from "Romanticing the Female Form" - Burlesque always was and to the best of my knowledge in its 21st century Lap-Dancing incarnation, still is an amateur divertissement "entertainment" provided by whores for johns visiting knocking shops while they decided which sex slave to schtup.
I am not entirely sure which part of their "Form", 13 and 14 year old Victorian and latterly, often under-aged eastern European and Oriental prostitutes, will find quite so "Romantic" as they are being pawed by dishevelled and occasionally drunken eighteen stone men smelling of yesterday's kebab and week-old underwear.
Perhaps they will get to enlighten us when they attend the above brilliantly thought-through Conference. If they ask nicely enough, their pimps will probably be entirely happy to sponsor their attendance, in order to give us their view on the subject.
Maybe Gwendoline Tushylush and her silken ilk will bring us back their breathless and death-defying reports from the field?
Burlesque in its current form, is a dressing-up hobby, a lacy-veiled pretext for wobbly and untrained Trustafarian Fionas and Arabellas to stumble around in fans and fetish pumps, getting their tits and bits out for grinning City Boys in artfully designed retro-bordellos from Hoxton to Ladbroke Grove.
Let's face it, only these types and furtive c-list TV presentas can afford the entry and bar prices in these monumentally misguided forays into infantile degeneracy. Colour, movement, fur coats and no-knickers, - the perfect antidote for ex- junk-bond salesmen, week-end fetishists and the terminally spoilt wall-eyed children of Rock Stars and Advertising tycoons.
In isolation, what the spawn of Sodom and Gomorrah do of a night-time really could not matter less.
However, notwithstanding a terrifying lack of associative thinking, dignifiying Burlesque with publically funded academic legitimacy of any description, borders on the morally bankcrupt.
For Burlesque proudly to be presented as a pukka extension of Performance Art,pace Gogol Bordello, Shunt et al - whilst demonstrating no shortage of chutzpah, betrays the level of ingenuousness and lack of intellectual rigour usually accorded people who become musicians because they think there is money in it or those who enter politics in the belief they can change things.
There is something not quite nice about being invited to attend a scholarly dissertation on "Burlyscew" be it ever so post-modern and ironic, while thousands of women a day are continuing to be impregnated by HIV positive partners and millions more starve in Africa.
Perhaps it might be a fun and far more spontaneous alternative to just cut to the chase and actually get to live the Experience of Burlesque by running around the conference hall knocking over chairs, spilling vodka and chanting - Get Yer Charlies Out Darlin!
17 Jan 2009
Art - v-mammon - the debate rages
The prevalent evaluation and co-option of the arts as predominantly a series of commercial considerations is probably the single most debilitating influence on genuine creativity in the UK, actually throughout the world at the moment.
Certainly it cannot have failed to escape the notice of anyone with a nodding acquaintance with the history of art that wealth, patronage and the Fine-Arts-to-Order market have usually gone hand in hand. There's nothing like a Divine-Royal Charter
The fundamental difference was that the Medicis, the Borghias et al were still believers in, or at least occasionally intimidated by, a hazy notion of "God".
They supported artists with vision, years of training discipline, an ongoing drive to continually develop their talents and a sense of investment in the temporal to the greater glory of the spiritual, as a means by which they might help get their Patrons around Christ's severe admonishment concerning, rich men, eyes of needles, ease, camels and getting into heaven.
One could ask whether the faux-spiritual was a better motivation than the current predominantly dreadful Art the Super-rich now patronise as a hedge investment against the day their usual incomes from Girls, Guns, Drugs and dodgy Siberian resource pipelines dry up. Not much has changed since the Doge's day.
The question is whether patronage inspires great art, or whether great art, as an extension of the idea of the Divine, inspires the necessary patronage to support its creation?
In fact neither matters, as long as the common denominator is great art, rather than the ongoing and relentlessly overhyped High Value Fast Moving Consumer Goods which currently pass for meaningful and important in a Serotaesque sort of a way.
Charles Saatchi is an advertising man. His stock-in-trade is edgy, conceptual, tax-deductible throwaway storyboards and design resources for client pitch purposes. Much of what he now passes off as art has been hithertofore used in the flogging of oven-chips, mars bars, sanitary towels and the other useless consumptive detritus that his dreadful little business is engaged in forcing on us Droolers, Toilers and Couch-surfers of the world.
Using his high-priced help in marketing black-arts for perceptual infiltration and manipulation, artifically to inflate the inherent values of this mostly inconsequential conceptual "stuff" to the status of importance and value by giving it a name "Young British Art". By further sticking it on pedestals in galleries shows chutzpah and a remarkable gift for stealing the product of cess-pits and selling it back as soap.
Art's funding equations will never balance. Making good art is not easy. It can't be, by definition.
Perhaps, however, once we claw our way out of the looming depression, there will result in a far more positive Artistic legacy than we ever imagined. Less market and more ideas driven.
One in which only the committed and truly inspired will survive.
In the final analysis, and with a nod to Mr Darwin's bi-centennial, on the basis of natural selection this might be good for "the arts" of every genetic strain and disposition.
Certainly it cannot have failed to escape the notice of anyone with a nodding acquaintance with the history of art that wealth, patronage and the Fine-Arts-to-Order market have usually gone hand in hand. There's nothing like a Divine-Royal Charter
The fundamental difference was that the Medicis, the Borghias et al were still believers in, or at least occasionally intimidated by, a hazy notion of "God".
They supported artists with vision, years of training discipline, an ongoing drive to continually develop their talents and a sense of investment in the temporal to the greater glory of the spiritual, as a means by which they might help get their Patrons around Christ's severe admonishment concerning, rich men, eyes of needles, ease, camels and getting into heaven.
One could ask whether the faux-spiritual was a better motivation than the current predominantly dreadful Art the Super-rich now patronise as a hedge investment against the day their usual incomes from Girls, Guns, Drugs and dodgy Siberian resource pipelines dry up. Not much has changed since the Doge's day.
The question is whether patronage inspires great art, or whether great art, as an extension of the idea of the Divine, inspires the necessary patronage to support its creation?
In fact neither matters, as long as the common denominator is great art, rather than the ongoing and relentlessly overhyped High Value Fast Moving Consumer Goods which currently pass for meaningful and important in a Serotaesque sort of a way.
Charles Saatchi is an advertising man. His stock-in-trade is edgy, conceptual, tax-deductible throwaway storyboards and design resources for client pitch purposes. Much of what he now passes off as art has been hithertofore used in the flogging of oven-chips, mars bars, sanitary towels and the other useless consumptive detritus that his dreadful little business is engaged in forcing on us Droolers, Toilers and Couch-surfers of the world.
Using his high-priced help in marketing black-arts for perceptual infiltration and manipulation, artifically to inflate the inherent values of this mostly inconsequential conceptual "stuff" to the status of importance and value by giving it a name "Young British Art". By further sticking it on pedestals in galleries shows chutzpah and a remarkable gift for stealing the product of cess-pits and selling it back as soap.
Art's funding equations will never balance. Making good art is not easy. It can't be, by definition.
Perhaps, however, once we claw our way out of the looming depression, there will result in a far more positive Artistic legacy than we ever imagined. Less market and more ideas driven.
One in which only the committed and truly inspired will survive.
In the final analysis, and with a nod to Mr Darwin's bi-centennial, on the basis of natural selection this might be good for "the arts" of every genetic strain and disposition.
15 Jan 2009
PEE PEE DUCKIE, POO-POO daahhhling and the REALLY DIRRRRRTY GIRRRRLS- THE PEE-PEE, POO-POO CLUB GOES MAINSTREAM
http://www.duckie.co.uk/
Just wanted to draw the attention to the Arts Council England logo in the bottom right hand corner.
The Amateurs nite programme (FLIER as above) funded by this august organisation is marvellous darling, simply marvellous, but WAIT til you catch the real professionals' performances.
I think the highlight may be the woman who shoves a plastic funnel into her anus and gives herself an enema as the finale of her show, but no, come to think of it the stripping Person of Diminished Stature comes close, or maybe.....no I've got it!! The Trann, er Person of Indeterminate Gender, whose entire act consists of punching holes in a door with a hammer and then pissing onto the audience through the holes.
Brilliant, and we all thought the Arts were dying..........
Check out the video on their site (ADDRESS ABOVE) and admire the contemporary dance sections. Now that's what we call inclusivity.
There is a whisper that the Royal Ballet Company is thinking of lending a couple of artists for forthcoming shows since they and DUCKIE share quite a number of patrons within their audience constituency.
Rather than funding this farrago ( we have actually been to one of their Burlesque nights and got sprayed by someone whose act consisted of absorbing the contents of a washing up bowl of soapy water and blowing them over the audience from her vagina - and that one of the less hard-core acts) would it have not made more sense for the ACE to provide further, broader, performance opportunities for the flower of British contemporary dance in some kind of context relevant to the development of dance and dance audiences in the UK - rather than the moist gratification of a coterie of scatologically infantile degenerates clearly all suffering from chronically ineffective toilet training habits.
It would seem that choreographers are now being forced to throw their lot in with amateur nite at the Pee Pee, Poo-Poo Club in their desperation to get their work seen.
Unless we are all VERY careful, it is going to become increasingly difficult to distinguish between any of the creative output of UKplc.
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