From: Michael Betancourt (email suppressed)
Date: Tue Sep 06 2005 - 14:12:56 PDT
I'm beginning to feel frustrated with this "discussion" because its starting to seem pointless to me to even raise these issues since apparently it's falling on deaf ears (or should I write blind eyes since it's e-mail?).
Gregg has restated is a big part of what I'm saying: "Listening to the criticism of gallery and museum based video art and its aesthetic weaknesses relative to avant-garde film confirms my suspicion (and I think Michael's also) that we (avant-garde filmmakers) might still have something major to offer by linking our tradition to digital electronic media. Of course it is not enough to simply say it -the answer has to come from the work itself." Why does it seem like this is so very difficult to understand?
What I'm talking about is more than a question of medium specificity, although it gets treated as only a question of the technology, film, vs other technologies. And the general inability to recognize, or perhaps more correctly, admit to the issues I'm raising suggests that things will only get worse, and deservedly so. The loss of this tradition rests squarely on those artists who close their eyes to the changing situation.
Telling me I'm paranoid (something I said would happen BTW) for saying that film is on the way out is reality. Perhaps museums will continue to show film, perhaps not, but the chemical-based technology is going away. Consider a fact from the world of still photography: Kodak has dropped its support of B&W photography. Ten years ago to even suggest that would be met with the accusation of paranoia.
Film stock and paint have nothing common.
Paints were made long before paint companies existed, and are still made by some artists. Here's a question for the frameworks list.:
Has any filmmaker every manufactured their own film stock entirely from scratch? i.e. not starting with a preexisting base (even if clear leader) or any other already produced film-component such as tape with sprocket holes, and them made a film of any length with that stock? I don't know of a single one, unless you want to go to the very dawn of motion pictures and talk about the original inventors such as the Edison/Lumiere/etc. era when they were inventing everything.
What remains constant in painting is a tradition, not a material, but how the image gets produced, interpreted and exhibited.
ps. Sam, look at pg 45 of your Canyon Cinema catalog from 2000. I am part of the "supply side."
Michael Betancourtwww.cinegraphic.net
the avant-garde film & video blog
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