From: Brook Hinton (email suppressed)
Date: Sun Jul 20 2008 - 18:29:53 PDT
"Why attack just student films? Because it's easy?"
Well we could do a thread on common avant garde film cliches that
won't die, but I'm not sure what would be left of the list.
One person's cliche is another person's treasured obsession. I can't
wait to see the the recent Bela Tarr film, but someone else will moan
at yet another European auteur showing off their single take
choreography and obsession with despair. How many people still find
magic in hand-processed filmmaking, and how many others cringe at the
thought of ever seeing that form's now-familiar artifacts again? How
do you feel about flicker? About extreme slow motion, why you know
there's a whole film festival devoted to that now! How about split
screens, triptychs, projected images facing each other? A brooding
person staring out of a window or sitting in the middle of an empty
room?
Everything is a cliche and most still haven't been cinematically
unlocked. The whole "Lumiere Video" movement reveals how much depth
there is still to be mined and how much innovation can occur from
working with what some number of people will call cliche.
But I'll still submit my #2 to the list:
Depictions of a masked or makeup-altered figure, usually the
filmmaker, scaling something (actually or metaphorically), with lots
of plasticky goo involved.
Brook, in a cynical tired mood which means he should not be responding
on a publicly readable list.
_______________________________________________________
Brook Hinton
film/video/audio art
www.brookhinton.com
studio vlog/blog: www.brookhinton.com/temporalab
__________________________________________________________________
For info on FrameWorks, contact Pip Chodorov at <email suppressed>.