From: Michael Betancourt (email suppressed)
Date: Tue Sep 06 2005 - 04:53:52 PDT
I see my point being made for me. We've been tallking about avant-garde film as a tradition for making motion pictures, not as just a medium (or at least I have been saying this), but sooner or later somone chimes in with BUT ITS FILM!!!!! and the same things get said over and over again. This the source of the problem.
As for FILM, face it, the days for film as a technology are numbered, and it doesn't make a difference how many artists want to work in the medium, can afford to work in the medium, etc. When the stock houses decide to end their production of the final film stock, that's it. And that day isn't as far away as we'd like to imagine.
So the choice isn't between one medium and another, but between one way or working and making and criticisimg and another--which has already supplaned ag film in a lot of ways, and continues to do so because ag film and the people who promote it promote an utterly narrow view that is a losing game in the long term.
And I agree the "future of film is in the hands of filmmakers." What I'm saying is the choice is being made by more people than just filmmakers, and it looks to me like "filmmakers" are specifically turning their backs on the future....
Menchaca's discussion of the two fields is poignantly clear about the situation: video art is incoherent and much of its discourse serves to mystify and make the work seem more important that it may actually be; the mode of address is completely different and it doesn't serve any carefully conceived work well to be shown as video art is shown. But the dominance of the video art approach to showing media means that film work (like the Warhol and Richter work mentioned) or any work from that tradition gets shown as video installations.
Now, I have a question about the Richte --and I'm glad to hear Richter will be shown on film. Will it be in a gallery, or with seats in a theater? Showing it in a gallery where people have to stand to watch it means it's being shown as if its video art, even if a 16mm looper and print are used for the show.
The issue that I am concerned with is how the work is seen by the audience: given the presentation of video art, seeing work from the ag film tradition in that way seems far more destructive and bad for the movie shown that showing it on film or video because it changes the audience relation to the work, how much of it they see and what they understand. Video art is essentially motion wallpaper, varieties of suclpture, etc. rather than a construction that an audience watches the way they watch an ag film otr any other movie.
Michael Betancourt
www.cinegraphic.net
the avant-garde film & video blog
__________________________________________________________________
For info on FrameWorks, contact Pip Chodorov at <email suppressed>.