From: Michael Betancourt (email suppressed)
Date: Tue Sep 06 2005 - 21:48:51 PDT
Earlier I said this:
>>The comparison you mentioned between professional and amateur film production
>> is a red herring. Both works assumed a theatrical type presentation with an
>> audience that watched through from beginning to end. That is not the case with
>> gallery video and the ag film tradition, an argument about appropriate style
>> is not the same as a fundamental question about how to screen and watch the
>> work.
To which James Kreul replied:
>Well, um, no. Actually a lot of the performance-based stuff coming out of
>the Greenwich Village scene did not actually have that assumption, nor did
>the early installation stuff coming out of that same scene. A lot of the
>disagreement had to do with professionalism of presentation, not just film
>style as such.
Thanks for the correction.
That's very interesting, since what you're describing is (maybe?) the art world gallery persentational version emerging, and being recognized at the time for the dangers it posed to the ag film tradition. 40 years later, we can see the results. I would like to see that discussion, too.
Now then, I have no objection to video art. Some is good, some is better than others, but as we noted at the start of this disucssion, the rewards paid to the top tier of video art are (much) higher than to the top tier of avant-garde film. The differences in exhibition, etc. are only a symptom of this situation, and it is a broader series of issues that we need to focus on than whether a work is on film, video or something else--which has been my point throughout this talk. I feel like a discussion about where a path through the forest might lie has turned into an argument about what kinds of trees are growing in that forest, and which trees are approved trees and which aren't. [Thus my frustration.]
on an aside,
Perhaps the future for film stock is a tiny niche market like any other art supply. That would be great !but I have my doubts. Either way, the viablity for that market is based in two suppositions that I don't want to debate the particulars of--I'm pointing them out to make a broader point about this situation. These may or may not be true: that stocks can be manufactured for such a market at a cost that renders it economically viable, and, in the long term this is much more significant whether there will be enough demand for such a product. I'm not talking about 5 or 10 years from now, but 25 years after the stock houses have stopped making it entirely. (I imagine it will be like the buggywhip market is today, very specialized and extremely limited.) I'm somewhat interested in archaic technologies; perhaps I'll look up the fundamental patents for film stocks and related technologies. That might make an interesting collection of materials for the die-hard film people (and no, I'm serious. Please contact me o
ff list if you would be interested. I've been collecting film patents for some time now with projects of this type in mind.)
p.s. Sam--I've always been partial to what the Cheshire Cat said to Alice: "We're all mad here." ...
Michael Betancourt
www.cinegraphic.net
the avant-garde film & video blog
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