the works and days of hands

A short, hand-processed super-8 film commissioned by Skewed Visions.

Film Garden

At the Handmade Film Institute workshop in Jamaica in March, we hung our recently-developed negative and film prints up to dry from clotheslines strung between tropical trees... and, for posterity, I decided to use my Bolex and a half a roll of my remaining footage to capture the ethereal effect of our harvest of images as they dripped dry, reflecting late-afternoon sun, and drifting in the breeze...

My co-workshopees dubbed it the "Film Garden" footage.

Old Musty Cheese

"Society is commonly too cheap. We meet at very short intervals, not having had time to acquire any new value for each other. We meet at meals three times a-day, and give each other a new taste of that old musty cheese that we are. We have had to agree on a certain set of rules, called etiquette and politeness, to make this frequent meeting tolerable and that we need not come to open war. We meet every night; we live thick and are in each other's way, and stumble over one another, and I think that we thus lose some respect for one another. Certainly less frequency would suffice for all important and hearty communications."

- Henry David Thoreau, Walden

The Gate to the Enclosure, Revisited

I finally put together a page on my website dedicated to the gallery installation I created at the Weisman Art Museum last summer, which includes all eight of the vignettes featured in the installation, plus one self-reflexive bonus episode - a four-camera treatment of the gallery itself.

Obviously, these web videos don't convey the full experience of encountering the four, nine foot-wide screens in three dimensional space... but I think that the super-panoramic (1280x180 pixels) quicktime movies offer another sort of experience, which is pleasing in its own way.

Pretty Toys

"As with our colleges, so with a hundred 'modern improvements:' there is an illusion about them; there is not always a positive advance. The devil goes on exacting compound interest to the last for his early share and numerous succeeding investments in them. Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end, an end which it was already but too easy to arrive at – as railroads lead to Boston or New York. We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate."

-Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Joe and Molly Getting Married

As a wedding present, I offered to shoot footage of Joe and Molly's wedding in late 2008 with my super-8 camera. The space was pretty dimly lit so the whole night I was worried about whether anything would show up on the film at all...

Finally, after getting the film processed and transferred, I discovered to my relief that, though much of the film was too dark to be salvageable, there were some really beautiful (visible!) moments as well.

One thing I love about shooting this way is that unlike videography, where you can see what you're getting all the time on the LCD screen, there's an element of improvisation, guesswork and faith in shooting film. And, the end result, rather than being a dutiful record of basically every moment of the night, consists of impressionistic flashes of imagery - to me it feels more authentic in a way, in that it behaves as memory does.

When I think about an important event in my life, my brain doesn't have a perfect, chronological record of everything that happened - your memory may be different, but mine is full of dense shadows and occasional, haunting, glorious moments of lucidity.

Slow Film Minneapolis

Just developed some new 16mm footage, the first time I've done it on my own, in buckets, in the basement.

The negative looks good, and it'll be transferred in a week or so - I'm excited to see it and share it.

The Slow Film Movement

I recently returned from a week in Jamaica with Robert Schaller of The Handmade Film Institute in Colorado. A group of 6 of us shot B&W 16mm film with Bolexes and pinhole cameras, then we developed the footage in buckets of chemicals in a cave near the beach, made contact prints with a modified sync-block and an LED, and projected the finished product on a sheet suspended over a tide pool between two rock outcroppings.

Besides the obvious exotic appeal of developing film in a cave, the experience caused me to question my relationship with my chosen creative medium (or media, I guess) in a profound way.

Over the years, I've often heard old-timers talk about how digital video will never really replace film. And, I've heard the young turks (such as myself) retort that digital video was changing everything, finally democratizing the means of film production and distribution, and making the world a better place.

Digital media is accessible, efficient, convenient and abundant - so the argument goes. For the few thousand dollars that it would cost to shoot a short film on 16mm, you can buy a camera, a computer and software - everything that you might need to make an infinite number of films. The choice is clear, right?

For the most part I agree. I shoot tons of video, and the fact that these days anyone can pick up a camera and make a movie is pretty remarkable.

But what's been on my mind lately is the question of process. In our society it usually passes without question that more for less is better - that greater economy and greater efficiency equate to greater good. For the most part, these assumptions carry over into the arts, whether or not the comparison is valid. If my film crew costs $3200 per day, for example, it's better to make my movie in 18 days than in 36... at least as far as the producers are concerned.

BUT, I believe that there is at least some element of art that is by nature irreduceable - that there's no clear equation linking quality and quantity. An argument to the contrary quickly grows surreal, I think - the idea, for instance, that two paintings are worth twice as much as one painting, regardless of what's on the canvas.

This intangible variable of quality, which doesn't fit neatly into any equation by which value is determined, has something to do with experience, with inspiration, and with process. Neither the life experience of the artist nor his or her source of inspiration are likely to be adversely affected by the choice of medium - a brilliant filmmaker can make brilliant films with a cell phone camera, no doubt.

But process... process is a factor in the value of a piece of art. Process can be intangible - one doesn't automatically know, walking around a gallery, which paintings took 8 years to make, and which took 8 minutes. But, the artist arrives at a finished piece of work by means of a specific process, that encapsulates, in a certain sense, their experience, their training, and their inspiration for making the piece in the first place.

We did learn about process in film school, but mostly in the administrative sense of making a movie as efficiently and economically as possible, from start to finish. Our process was ultimately product-oriented; it was about getting the film done competently, and as painlessly as possible.

With digital cameras and nonlinear editing systems, it's possible to be incredibly efficient - a movie can be shot and edited in the same day; it's not at all uncommon for films, short and long, to be made in a matter of hours; the 48-hour film festival is just one highly visible example of this ethic of efficiency.

What gets lost in this utopian vision of accessibility, economy and efficiency is the whole idea of process - the idea that any step could, and perhaps should, require an irreduceable amount of time.
Sculpting in marble takes time. No matter how quickly the artist arrives at their vision of exactly what the piece should finally look like, there are still many, many hours yet to spend with chisels, hammers and sandpaper. And, the nature of this process - the steady chipping away, day after day, lends a certain unique quality to the finished work.

I'm not making the case that sculpting in marble is better than sculpting in clay, or that oil painting is better than watercolor. But each form, over time, evolves a process that reflects the values of that form.

Filmmaking used to be a relatively slow process - every step took a fairly consistent amount of time, from loading the camera with film to checking the exposure, to developing, printing, syncing, editing, color timing...

Video, as a separate medium, will no doubt develop its own processes and rhythms over time - but currently, it seems to me that this new, powerful technology is being used basically to mimic film processes, only more cheaply and more quickly.

And, that's a problem - because when you cut the process out of the filmmaking process, without replacing it with another process suited to the new media, practitioners of the new media are robbed of something essential. Economy and efficiency are no substitute for process. You can't shortcut around process to get to product faster and expect the quality to be unaffected.

So what's my point?

There is intangible, irreduceable value to sitting in the dark with a bucket of chemicals. When the practice of one artistic process requires more time and energy than another artistic process, that additional time and energy isn't necessarily wasted - maybe, in fact, it's that time spent in process where the invisible part of the creative work is actually taking place. More, faster, cheaper, doesn't necessarily mean better, where art is concerned.

I'm not advocating that video be abandoned by any means. But the creative process around video is still evolving, and we do it and ourselves a disservice by ignoring it, or pretending that it's something it's not. Maybe it's watercolor, maybe it's jazz - but if we treat it as a null, as a means to an end, as a cheap way to move pixels around - it will only ever be beautiful by accident.

Sustainable Cinema

I was approached to write an article about independent filmmaking for the February edition of Minnesota Playlist, a local web publication that's primarily for the performing arts, and it seemed like a perfect opportunity to take a topic that I've been stewing on for years, and try to put my thoughts about it into coherent form.

It doesn't really come out in the article, but much of my thinking on the subject has been informed by the work of Naomi Klein, who, in her book "No Logo," discusses outsourcing, sweatshops, and how the business of ideas and marketing replaced the business of actually making things in America.

True.

 "If you want to know what's really going on in a society or ideology, follow the money. If money is flowing to advertising instead of to musicians, journalists, and artists, then a society is more concerned with manipulation than with truth or beauty. If content is worthless, then people will start to become empty-headed and content-less. The combination of hive mind and advertising has resulted in a new kind of social contract. The basic idea of this contract is that authors, journalists, musicians and artists are encouraged to treat the fruits of their intellects and imaginations as fragments to be given without pay to the hive mind. Reciprocity takes the form of self-promotion. Culture is to become precisely nothing but advertising."

- Jaron Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto

... and yes, I'm aware of the potential irony/hypocrisy of posting this on a blog. I encourage you to go out and buy the whole book, at a real bookstore, like I did.