Thursday, May 16, 2013
Tuesday, April 23, 2013
The Art of the Interview
Over the last ten years, I've interviewed hundreds of people on video for a wide variety of projects - documentaries, art films, personal projects, and corporate video shoots. I don't believe I ever received any instruction on how to interview - as a cameraperson, I simply found myself in the position of conducting interviews again and again.
I suppose it's a skill taught in journalism school, though the aim there is usually primarily informational - to gather data with attribution, to build an argument and support a thesis. But the video interview has the potential to be something else - a portrait of a person in the act of storytelling.
Though we consume the content of interviews all the time - on the tv news, on the radio, in the newspaper, online - in every form of media we come across in our day - I've found that most people consider them essentially mysterious, and more than a little bit scary. Like the apocryphal aboriginal villagers who are scared that their soul will be stolen by a camera, a remarkable percentage of the people I interview initially react with fear - they sense powerful magic, and the possibility that something essential will be taken from them, beyond their control, and it freaks them out.
And in a way, they're right. Something intangible and powerful does happen in a good interview. Often it's experienced in a trancelike state - there is arcane equipment involved, cameras with sparkling lenses and bright lights, and of course the incredibly rare experience of holding the undivided attention of one or two impeccably avid listeners, carefully absorbing your every word. Sometimes it feels more like therapy than anything else.
A bad interview can likewise be traumatic, and it in some cases letting your guard down, being yourself and speaking your truth CAN be decidedly ill-advised. The stakes are high, as is evident with every new iteration of a reality tv show that is edited to twist characters into caricatures of themselves.
Occasionally a filmmaker or journalist gains a reputation for their skill as an interviewer - Errol Morris is the best example of a documentarian artist/interviewer, and of course there's Barbara Walters on tv, and Ira Glass on the radio. But I never hear the act of interviewing itself being discussed as an art form, which I firmly believe it is.
A good interviewer, like a good film director, is mostly invisible in their influence over what happens in front of the camera - but they can be identified by the brilliance that shines through their subjects. I hesitate to take credit for an amazing interview - the content absolutely belongs to the interviewee - but I do feel some authorship, as a medium or a vessel, helping midwife the story into expression.
There's something shamanic and highly ritualized about it, and as Walter Benjamin pointed out, art was born out of spiritual ritual - it only became something separately commodified quite recently in its history.
Of course, interviews are key features in the works of art we call "documentary films" - but except with a filmmaker like Errol Morris, they're usually thought of as raw materials, building blocks of the greater work which is treated as a work of collage and montage. In fact, there's a kind of uneasiness around relying too heavily on interviews, a film that is too reliant on "talking heads" is often derided in cinematic circles, as though it's too close to a work of journalism rather than a work of art. Maybe this uneasiness is directly related to the fact of the interview being co-created with the interviewee, a work of shared authorship - rather than more exclusively under the control of the filmmaker / interviewer.
So, this is something I want to explore further - the interview as freestanding work of art, a shared ritual of empathic storytelling, emotional catharsis and reflective portraiture. The interview has been understood as a skill, a craft, and a trade - what would it mean to treat it as an art unto itself?
I suppose it's a skill taught in journalism school, though the aim there is usually primarily informational - to gather data with attribution, to build an argument and support a thesis. But the video interview has the potential to be something else - a portrait of a person in the act of storytelling.
Though we consume the content of interviews all the time - on the tv news, on the radio, in the newspaper, online - in every form of media we come across in our day - I've found that most people consider them essentially mysterious, and more than a little bit scary. Like the apocryphal aboriginal villagers who are scared that their soul will be stolen by a camera, a remarkable percentage of the people I interview initially react with fear - they sense powerful magic, and the possibility that something essential will be taken from them, beyond their control, and it freaks them out.
And in a way, they're right. Something intangible and powerful does happen in a good interview. Often it's experienced in a trancelike state - there is arcane equipment involved, cameras with sparkling lenses and bright lights, and of course the incredibly rare experience of holding the undivided attention of one or two impeccably avid listeners, carefully absorbing your every word. Sometimes it feels more like therapy than anything else.
A bad interview can likewise be traumatic, and it in some cases letting your guard down, being yourself and speaking your truth CAN be decidedly ill-advised. The stakes are high, as is evident with every new iteration of a reality tv show that is edited to twist characters into caricatures of themselves.
Occasionally a filmmaker or journalist gains a reputation for their skill as an interviewer - Errol Morris is the best example of a documentarian artist/interviewer, and of course there's Barbara Walters on tv, and Ira Glass on the radio. But I never hear the act of interviewing itself being discussed as an art form, which I firmly believe it is.
A good interviewer, like a good film director, is mostly invisible in their influence over what happens in front of the camera - but they can be identified by the brilliance that shines through their subjects. I hesitate to take credit for an amazing interview - the content absolutely belongs to the interviewee - but I do feel some authorship, as a medium or a vessel, helping midwife the story into expression.
There's something shamanic and highly ritualized about it, and as Walter Benjamin pointed out, art was born out of spiritual ritual - it only became something separately commodified quite recently in its history.
Of course, interviews are key features in the works of art we call "documentary films" - but except with a filmmaker like Errol Morris, they're usually thought of as raw materials, building blocks of the greater work which is treated as a work of collage and montage. In fact, there's a kind of uneasiness around relying too heavily on interviews, a film that is too reliant on "talking heads" is often derided in cinematic circles, as though it's too close to a work of journalism rather than a work of art. Maybe this uneasiness is directly related to the fact of the interview being co-created with the interviewee, a work of shared authorship - rather than more exclusively under the control of the filmmaker / interviewer.
So, this is something I want to explore further - the interview as freestanding work of art, a shared ritual of empathic storytelling, emotional catharsis and reflective portraiture. The interview has been understood as a skill, a craft, and a trade - what would it mean to treat it as an art unto itself?
Wednesday, April 17, 2013
Sunday, April 14, 2013
The Archetype of the Obsessed Artist
I am just not a very hard worker.
I'm not being self-deprecating. I feel like that's one of the things you're really not allowed to say, like, "I'm not very smart" or "I'm kind of plain-looking" - like when you say it it's the obligation of whoever's listening to argue with you, to try to convince you that no, you ARE attractive, you ARE brilliant, etc.
So not being a hard worker is kind of taboo, in a competitive, survival-of-the-fittest culture... probably not a good idea to put it on your resumé, your Match.com profile, to say it in a job interview. And it's certainly not safe to advertise in an Art MFA program... only the hyper-productive will survive and thrive in the art world, kid!
But it's true. And maybe it's only due to pretty extreme privilege that I even feel that I can get away with saying it publicly, without (too much) fear that it'll wreck my career prospects. It's NOT OKAY to be lazy in this world. It's NOT OKAY to prefer free time to productive labor. If you do, you're clearly not committed (to your job, to your art form), and the quality of your work must be marginal.
When I traverse the University of Minnesota campus, I see the swarms of students - I believe there are like 50,000 of us just on this campus, at least 100,000 in the statewide system - and I think about how hard everyone is being taught and trained to work, I find it utterly exhausting.
I think it was an inarticulated part of my thought process when I left Los Angeles after graduating from USC, also - this vast city, 8 million strong, these literally dozens of schools churning out thousands of newly minted filmmakers every year... all set to compete tooth and claw with one another for a limited number of jobs, toiling their way up the pyramid of Industry with their heart set on the throne at the top... or is it a sacrificial altar? I digress.
So you have the people who stick with it and rise to the top (Jon Chu's new film opened last weekend and grossed $130 million worldwide, maybe that's why this is on my mind), those who find contentment and relative security somewhere in the middle, and those who exit the churn, gracefully or ungracefully, and find something else to do. The biggest rewards go to the most ardent, the hardest workers, the unceasingly cheerful and optimistic.
And like I said, I am definitely not one of the hardest workers. Not even close.
But what becomes more and more clear to me is that I'm not interested in art that's created obsessively and frenetically. That archetype, of the obsessed artist, has been around for a long time, but it seems like it had a particular resonance with the second half of the 20th century - a resonance which is, I hope, fading. Sure, Stanley Kubrick made brilliant films, and Dostoevsky wrote powerful fiction - but I don't really want to be them, or live in their world. I do not aspire to art as a form of martyrdom, and I think it's dangerous to try to instill this value in our young people.
I'm not being self-deprecating. I feel like that's one of the things you're really not allowed to say, like, "I'm not very smart" or "I'm kind of plain-looking" - like when you say it it's the obligation of whoever's listening to argue with you, to try to convince you that no, you ARE attractive, you ARE brilliant, etc.
So not being a hard worker is kind of taboo, in a competitive, survival-of-the-fittest culture... probably not a good idea to put it on your resumé, your Match.com profile, to say it in a job interview. And it's certainly not safe to advertise in an Art MFA program... only the hyper-productive will survive and thrive in the art world, kid!
But it's true. And maybe it's only due to pretty extreme privilege that I even feel that I can get away with saying it publicly, without (too much) fear that it'll wreck my career prospects. It's NOT OKAY to be lazy in this world. It's NOT OKAY to prefer free time to productive labor. If you do, you're clearly not committed (to your job, to your art form), and the quality of your work must be marginal.
When I traverse the University of Minnesota campus, I see the swarms of students - I believe there are like 50,000 of us just on this campus, at least 100,000 in the statewide system - and I think about how hard everyone is being taught and trained to work, I find it utterly exhausting.
I think it was an inarticulated part of my thought process when I left Los Angeles after graduating from USC, also - this vast city, 8 million strong, these literally dozens of schools churning out thousands of newly minted filmmakers every year... all set to compete tooth and claw with one another for a limited number of jobs, toiling their way up the pyramid of Industry with their heart set on the throne at the top... or is it a sacrificial altar? I digress.
So you have the people who stick with it and rise to the top (Jon Chu's new film opened last weekend and grossed $130 million worldwide, maybe that's why this is on my mind), those who find contentment and relative security somewhere in the middle, and those who exit the churn, gracefully or ungracefully, and find something else to do. The biggest rewards go to the most ardent, the hardest workers, the unceasingly cheerful and optimistic.
And like I said, I am definitely not one of the hardest workers. Not even close.
But what becomes more and more clear to me is that I'm not interested in art that's created obsessively and frenetically. That archetype, of the obsessed artist, has been around for a long time, but it seems like it had a particular resonance with the second half of the 20th century - a resonance which is, I hope, fading. Sure, Stanley Kubrick made brilliant films, and Dostoevsky wrote powerful fiction - but I don't really want to be them, or live in their world. I do not aspire to art as a form of martyrdom, and I think it's dangerous to try to instill this value in our young people.
Monday, April 01, 2013
Monday, March 25, 2013
Space-Aged Processed Food Flavor Technology
Apropos of the Processed Food / Processed Media analogy, I just found this fascinating Salon article about flavor chemistry...
“If you take a fresh strawberry after processing, it’s nothing. It tastes like nothing,” said Wright, as a way of explaining why the food industry is so reliant on the $12 billion global flavoring industry.
Some of the demand for flavoring is related to how plants and animals are grown and raised. Wright urged me to try a taste test at home if I was so inclined. Take three different whole chickens, she said — an average, low-priced frozen one from the supermarket; a mass-produced organic version like Bell and Evans; and what she termed a “happy chicken.” This was a bird that had spent its life outside running around and eating an evolutionary diet of grass, seeds, bugs and worms. Roast them in your kitchen and note the taste. The cheap chicken, she said, will have minimal flavor, thanks to its short life span, lack of sunlight and monotonous diet of corn and soy. The Bell and Evans will have a few “roast notes and fatty notes,” and the happy chicken will be “incomparable,” with a deep, succulent, nutty taste. Wright, as you might imagine, prefers consuming chickens of the happy variety, which her husband, who is also a flavorist (he works from home as a consultant), is generally the one to cook.
Thursday, March 21, 2013
Local Media, Whole Media, Slow Media
PROCESSED FOOD, PROCESSED MEDIA
There are a lot of parallels between late 20th Century food culture and media culture, which become more and more obvious to me as I continue to explore this subject.
With food, it was taken as gospel in the post-war era that better eating was possible with the help of our good friends: Science, Technology and Industry. Amazing advances were made in food technology, particularly in the realm of Processing; maybe your ham originated as a real pig somewhere, once upon a time, but Science, Technology and Industry figured out how to Process that meat to make it (in theory) safer, healthier, tastier, easier to store and transport, and of course, cheaper.
In the 80s and 90s, I grew up eating a lot of science fiction freezer foods, by no real fault of my parents, I think; it was just the zeitgeist of the times. Pizza Rolls, Lunchables, Toaster Struedel... these things tasted good to me, and I wasn't stricken with E.coli or salmonella, and life was good.
It's really a remarkably recent development that anyone looked around and went, "hey, maybe processed food isn't necessarily always a good thing, especially given what we're observing in these diabetic kids, or their parents, who happen to be developing heart disease and mysterious cancers at alarming rates?
My initial awareness of industrial food technology came from reading the early chapters of Fast Food Nation in, I believe, 2001 - I probably only made it through the first 30 pages, because what it revealed about my dear memories of childhood meals at McDonalds was too disturbing to continue. Then Michael Pollan picked up the mantle, writing bestsellers about food culture for popular audiences, considering the (revolutionary!) idea that humans' relationships with the foods we eat are important, and worthy of both scrutiny and contemplation.
Today it's a relatively mainstream idea, at least among American populations of privilege, that where food comes from, and how it's grown and raised, is important to know. This is primarily important for reasons of health and sustainability, though there are ethical and spiritual dimensions to these questions as well. So, the term Local Food entered the lexicon, as did Whole Foods (and of course a massive eponymous corporation), Slow Food, Organic, Macrobiotic, Free-Range, Grass-Fed... A whole vocabulary for talking about where food comes from and how it's raised, grown and prepared has become a part of the conversation alongside nutrition, efficiency and economics.
As far as I know, this conversation has yet to take place on any grand scale about the media we consume. Media culture today, in one sense, is still where food culture was in 1988. A typical media product - a cable television show, for example, or a mainstream cineplex movie - is delivered to the consumer at the end of a supply chain thousands of miles long and several years in duration, incorporating the labors of hundreds of people and millions of dollars. Hollywood is very straightforward about being an Industry, and the product it creates is Industrial in every sense of the word. Though filmmaking is nominally an art form, the mechanism of industrial film production usually involves the work of artists only peripherally.
As with our food systems circa 1988, we have wholeheartedly invested as a culture in the phenomenon of Industrial Media Production without seriously questioning the health implications - mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual - of our consumption of this industrial product. Sure, there are periodic outcries about children watching too much tv, playing too many video games - but it's almost always a quantitative question rather than a qualitative one - where did that television come from? Who made it? How?
When media is processed, just like when food is processed, important elements are taken out, reconstituted, replaced, and reformulated into something resembling the authentic, original reality, but altered in both subtle and unsubtle ways. There's a big difference between eating too many Doritos and eating too many carrots grown in a community garden. We may very well consume too much industrial, processed media - but the idea of Local Media or Whole Media or Slow Media hasn't even really entered the conversation.
We have always had the freedom and the power to make our own media - the technology for this has evolved along with human civilization. Once upon a time, it meant standing on a (literal) soapbox in the town square, pontificating about whatever political or philosophical issue was on your mind. Then of course there were pamphleteers, underground printing presses, mimeograph machines, zines, ham radio operators...
While the technology of digital video and Youtube are certainly exciting and full of potential, the real issue around local media is the sense of empowerment or disempowerment to participate in its creation, and an awareness on the part of the community that it exists, and is in fact valuable and meaningful. Of course "social media" has been discussed ad nauseam already, but that discussion is more about the means of connecting than about the nutritional value and/or origin of the media content itself.
So, finally: what do I mean by Local Media, Whole Media, Slow Media?
LOCAL MEDIA
The conversation about Local Food, as I understand it, posits that food is healthiest when it is consumed near to where it is grown - geographically and temporally. This helps local farmers, cuts down on the use of fossil fuels used in transport, requires less pesticides and genetic modification, and favors biodiversity in crops and nutritional diversity in diet.
Local Media would be produced near to where it is consumed as well, geographically and temporally. It would encourage people to know what's going on in their own neighborhoods and their own regional cultures, both in terms of real events (documentary) and in people's creative lives (fictional narrative, storytelling). This already exists as a value in live art forms such as theatre and dance - it's possible to see someone perform and have a conversation with them afterwards, to watch their artistic growth longitudinally over a period of years or even decades, and to participate as an audience member and even a collaborator in community projects involving the artists to whom one feels drawn.
There's no reason that this sense of a local art ecology couldn't apply to media as well, in more than a series of Facebook posts - we all have the power to make media and share it with the people around us. This sense of local sharing already exists in the photos that people post on Facebook or Instagram, but the majority of the media content I see online is still the re-posting of media from far away. Perhaps what's missing in this equation is a sense of the safety of the local - people are reluctant to share their own creative output when it means they lose control and authorship of that content on a global scale.
I believe that part of the question, also, is this sense of empowerment to create meaningful media - the willingness to share more than snapshots, the idea that local media is actually an important and valuable source of content, rather than snapshots and ironic quotes. The format of Facebook seems to discourage geographic specificity and the development of community identity - which is perhaps a subject for another post.
WHOLE MEDIA
Whole Media, Like Whole Food, could be described as the opposite of Processed Media - A distinction similar to the distinction between the produce department and the frozen foods department. Most of what you see on television and in the movie theater is intensively processed - if it's fictional, it was probably written by a team of screenwriters (3-7 of them is standard) in collaboration with the director and the producer, and vetted by a number of studio executives. Then, each line in the script is performed in a number of takes from a number of different angles, carefully lit by a lighting team, and re-assembled in an editing studio by 1-3 editors, again in collaboration with the director and the producer, again vetted by studio executives, then handed off for color adjustment and enhancement, sound editing and mixing, music, and special effects - in short, manipulated by a professional team not all that different than the team of scientists and food engineers who determine the exact color and texture of microwaveable Pizza Roll filling substance.
Whole Media, like fresh, organic produce, is manipulated as little as possible between the "harvest" (if it's video, where it's shot) and the consumer. In practice this means minimally edited and altered, to present something that's ultimately less mediated - or at least, mediated by fewer people and less equipment and technology. I'm not talking about a militant pretense of "purity" or objective reality - all media, like all art, involves the influence, perspective and creativity of at least one individual - but I do believe that it's possible to preserve much more of the original taste, texture and flavor of the raw footage in the experience of the viewer than in most of the industrial media product that is widely available today.
SLOW MEDIA
Slow Food, as I understand it, is presented as an alternative to Fast Food - it is an approach to cooking and eating that requires a great deal of time, energy, knowledge and care, and its inefficiency is treated as a core value, rather than an obstacle to getting food into the stomachs of eaters.
Movies and television require a lot of time and energy to make - thus, the process of making them, on any scale, is usually subjected to the extreme rigors of technological efficiency. Faster is always better, cheaper is always better, and any new technology that helps to streamline the process is celebrated as a modern marvel. This effort has been in overdrive since the 1990s, when digital, nonlinear editing became the norm. Then, in rapid succession, came digital video, HD quality, and of course streaming video online, each of which has been hailed as a revolutionary step in hyperefficient modern cinema.
All of these are valuable tools, and I have a deep appreciation for them - but I also hear regular reports about the pernicious effects of this cheerleading for efficiency within the film industry. When we consume a product that is churned out in the most efficient, cost-effective manner possible, it affects our health, our values, and the rhythms of our lives. We have learned that the most efficient farming techniques do not usually produce the best vegetables and meats, and we know that the finest restaurants don't advertise the speed with which your dinner reaches your table. Why would our movies and television be any different?
Certainly, just because a movie takes a long time to make doesn't necessarily make it a good movie, and something brilliant can be produced in an afternoon - I'm not advocating that making media always needs to be a slow and laborious process - but generally speaking, I believe that art shouldn't be efficient or rushed, and that quantity of output is never a substitute for quality of output. Why even bother to make art, or to share meaningful media, unless you can give it the time and energy that it deserves?
INDUSTRIAL MEDIA vs. MEANINGFUL MEDIA
I don't claim to have invented any of these ideas, or to be the first to express a preference for these ways of making meaningful media - but as far as I know this discussion isn't taking place anywhere else, and I think that it should be. If it's happening elsewhere and I'm missing it, please let me know.
As far as I can tell, all three of these themes - Local Media, Whole Media, Slow Media - are contrary to the conventional wisdom about mainstream media. I'm not terribly optimistic that this will change in the near future, or in my lifetime for that matter - but I think that at the very least, it would be useful and productive to introduce these ideas and this terminology into the discussion about media. It wasn't that long ago that terms like Macrobiotic or Locavore were bandied about only by the bizarrest of fringe hippies.
Personally, I'm already trying to make film and video based on these values, some of which you can find on this blog. Figuring out how to share the ideas and write about them coherently is an ongoing process for me. Mainly, I want for this to be a part of the conversation - and I would love to have your help with that. Feel free to use what you find here freely, and if you're willing, include links to this short essay, for the full context. And thanks.
Wednesday, March 06, 2013
Slow Down and Open Up
I intend to write more about "Unfolding Space and Enfolding Time" soon.
But in the meantime, I think I've figured out an even simpler formulation.
The conversation about media today often focuses on access to more, faster... more information, more content, more input. Personally, I find that this dynamic overwhelms me and causes me to close myself off and shut down in self defense, and I think I'm not alone in this - many or most of us have experienced the numbing effect on the emotions, and in fact, on the soul, of hours spent in front of glowing screens.
In my media art practice, I've found myself deeply uninterested in participating in this overwhelm, because I know that more and faster causes me to shut down and close off.
What I propose, and attempt, is to use media as an instrument to manifest a slowing down and opening up - by focusing on small things, quiet moments, the private and intimate; that which nurtures a sense of connectedness. I've found that media can actually be an incredible tool for gentle opening, in the right hands - but it's a powerful tool that can easily be used to do violence.
So while a lot of the media stream is about More Faster and leads to Shut Down and Close Off, I'm attempting to use media as a humanist instrument, to encourage a Slow Down and Open Up.
Does that make sense?
But in the meantime, I think I've figured out an even simpler formulation.
The conversation about media today often focuses on access to more, faster... more information, more content, more input. Personally, I find that this dynamic overwhelms me and causes me to close myself off and shut down in self defense, and I think I'm not alone in this - many or most of us have experienced the numbing effect on the emotions, and in fact, on the soul, of hours spent in front of glowing screens.
In my media art practice, I've found myself deeply uninterested in participating in this overwhelm, because I know that more and faster causes me to shut down and close off.
What I propose, and attempt, is to use media as an instrument to manifest a slowing down and opening up - by focusing on small things, quiet moments, the private and intimate; that which nurtures a sense of connectedness. I've found that media can actually be an incredible tool for gentle opening, in the right hands - but it's a powerful tool that can easily be used to do violence.
So while a lot of the media stream is about More Faster and leads to Shut Down and Close Off, I'm attempting to use media as a humanist instrument, to encourage a Slow Down and Open Up.
Does that make sense?
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