Arnold Conquers the Fourth Dimension

Alone. Life Wastes Andy Hardy is a vehicle for experimental filmmaker Martin Arnold to make a couple statements. A quick search on Google turns up this quote by the artist:

"The cinema of Hollywood is a cinema of exclusion, reduction and denial, a cinema of repression. There is always something behind that which is being represented, which was not represented. And it is exactly that that is most interesting to consider."

So Martin sets about exposing the hypocrisy in the "wholesome" work of Andy Hardy. Is there really a Freudian/Oedipal subtext in these movies? If so, was it the actors who snuck it in or was it explicitly directed by a bored Andy Hardy? Who knows.

What's intriguing about Life Wastes is not so much the overt accusations that Arnold makes about these films but his method. With one hand glued to the jog shuttle, he turns Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland into his slaves, his puppets, his marionettes. Arnold is able to manipulate his playthings into new gyrations, extend a fleeting glance or gesture into a minute-long expose, turning a whispered, hidden emotion into one shouted from the rooftops for our amusement.

We the audience are his puppets, too, as we are forced to watch this or that bit of the original sample over and over, long past our standard tolerance for the stuttering, nauseating motion. It made me more aware of how my attention is manipulated and directed (a la Vertov's Kino-Eye) in all film, although I am usually too entertained to actively resent or resist it.

Ultimately, Arnold has conquered the fourth dimension. For fifteen diabolical minutes, Arnold flaunts his newfound power like a child who has just learned how to disrupt an ant colony. Throughout our lives, we are slaves to the constant march of time, never able to pause it or stop or reverse or loop it to our own ends. When given the opportunity, who could resist the giddy feeling of turning the tables and becoming master of time, shaking it around, holding it upside down, bullying it for lunch money.

It's a bit juvenile, but it was pretty funny in a couple spots.

Art that Denies Narrative is Doomed to Failure

Lev Manovich's discussion of narrative and database is both well explored and clearly articulated. He defines the relationship between narrative and database as an adverserial one, and he purposely narrows the definition of narrative to exclude one's personal, necessarily linear experience of an interactive work, but I take issue with this.

Manovich notes that what he calls narrative (what I would qualify as directed narrative) is becoming less prevalent in new art but acknowledges that it is by no means becoming extinct. He likens this to the overlapping existence of various art movements, but he hints that this is not an apt comparison, and that narrative will never go away entirely - I have to agree, based on my own observation that narrative is tightly bound to our perception of the world as a linear sequence of events.

Our sequential personal experience of time is this very essence of narrative. Time, for us, progresses forward relentlessly and - try as we might - we cannot escape this reality. We live from one moment to the next, remember the past as a series of rooms and spaces where we were physically present, a long train of boxcars that contain the things that were said, tasted, heard, seen, etc.

We each have our own personal narrative, and without that basic reference point we could not even conceive of or contemplate another narrative. Our shared experiences are essential frames of reference and are vital to our ability to communicate. Our shared perception of time is central to our ability to vicariously experience and therefore come to a shared understanding of a story or experience, whether expressed in words or in art or in film.

Personal narrative is a basic human lens through which we interpret art, constantly picking out or creating a storyline which strings together our experience of the art in a hopefully meaningful way, whether or not it matches the artist's plan.

Manovich tracks the progression of the database from its roots in reference material into its new milieu, interactive media (by which he mainly means art, despite some tangential observations about video games). Our experience of a website, according to Manovich, lacks the single directed narrative that exists in a book or film. The existence of multiple (potentially infinitely many) paths through a database of media presents a challenge to the artist to find new ways to communicate with her audience.

Communication via narrative is easy, almost too easy. In interactive media, the artist can "direct" the experience with the careful application of constraints on the interface, but still the artist risks widening the chasm between the audience's model of the experience and the artist's conception of the experience. If you as the artist have nothing specific to communicate, this is fine. If your motivation as an artist is simply to provoke a reaction (any reaction, the more varied the better) in your audience, then interactive media is perfect.

Manovich celebrates Vertov's accomplishments in Man With a Movie Camera as ahead of its time. He regards the film at once as a database of special effects and as a database of film clips. He seems to suggest that there is value in art that rejects the traditional narrative form.

I'm not so sure. Art that denies narrative completely denies a basic part of our experience. To reject the core part of our algorithm (to borrow Manovich's term) for understanding is to close off the primary channel for the communication of ideas. I feel that art which fails to effect communication of ideas from the artist to the art's audience is doomed to obscurity, celebrated only briefly for its novelty and ultimately fated to be forgotten. Art without narrative can simply not establish itself as relevant to the human experience.

Man With a Movie Camera, then, to the extent that it denies narrative, is relevant only as an example of how in so doing you will fail to make a connection to your audience (unless your audience is cinemaphiles, in which case for them the film does possess a narrative and the argument still holds).

I'm not condemning all interactive media to irrelevance -- most of this art (at any rate, the examples that I'm aware of), still have a strong element of narrative. Though they don't contain the 100% directed narrative that Manovich is talking about, the works by their very presentation or interface design simply begin to share responsibility with the audience for forming that narrative.

Remain Quiet and Still in the Subterranean Apocalypse

As the credits roll, the "film" La Jetée is presented as a
"photo-roman," french for a "photo-novel." A novel in photos. What
elements were missing? There is no dialog, only narrative. And in
the place of moving images there are only still shots in sequence,
save for a single 10-second clip. The "photo-novel" still retained some of the core
elements of films, with the director very much in control of what the
audience is seeing and hearing and controlling how long we spend
gazing on a particular image.

The experience of watching the photo-novel was not altogether
different from watching a standard film. It often felt less a
sequence of stills and more like the director simply instructed
his actors to remain quiet and still in each shot.

The decision to use a clip in that one part of the film was lost on
me, although there must have been some reason for it. It is preceded
by several shots of the same subject, the woman in bed with her eyes
closed but seemingly not asleep, and the suggestion of post-coital
giddiness seems to be intended. The stills are cut closer and closer
together, and several stills are used of the same subject where a
single still would be used in other parts of the film, and suddenly
the woman's eyes flutter open and the audience realizes that we have
shifted into a real moving image.

I suppose the timing of this sequence coincides with the main
character's increasing ability to exist and function in this "memory"
time, travelling into the past with greater and greater permanence,
and just as the moving image of the woman seems more real than the
snapshots, it helps us feel how these moments in the past are becoming
more and more real for the main character.

Still, I felt like there was another point being made by this that I
was missing.

It was striking, seeing this for the second time (I rented it a decade
ago after watching the 1995 Terry Gilliam film 12 Monkeys), and noting
this time how much the Wachowski Brothers borrowed for their 1999 film
The Matrix. In particular, the shots of the character lying prone in
a cot with electrodes attached to him, being sent from a glum
apocalyptic subterranean future to another time and place -- an almost
exact prototype for the mode of astral travel that is presented in The
Matrix.

Which brings me to another observation -- this obsession with humanity
being driven underground. We have tunnel dwellers in H. G. Wells'
Time Machine, underground workers in Metropolis, post-apocalyptic
underground civilization in la Jetée, underground Zion in The Matrix.
Why is it that we are to be denied the light of the sun in all of
these imagined futures? Are some of these stories paying homage to
other ones or have all these creative types come up with this
subterranean fate for humanity independently?

The sun, the giver of light, the very reflection of which is crucial
to the capture of images and moving images, is that which we
apparently most fear to lose.

Realize the Full Potential of the Kino-Eye!

Dziga Vertov's 1929 Man with a Movie Camera is unlike any film I've ever seen. What sensation is Vertov trying to evoke in his audience with the unrelenting, rapid-fire cross-cutting? Uninterrupted shots range in length from an average of one to two seconds down to a frantic barrage of intermixed scenes lasting maybe a frame or two each. The film left me mentally exhausted and physically queasy.

Vertov's shot choices and editing techniques must have seemed pioneering and experimental at the time. I had the feeling more than once during the screening that I was part of the experiment, a lab rat being presented with stimuli simply to see how I would react.

Most films aim to immerse their audience in a story or subject, and great effort is made not to disrupt the experience. What sets this film apart is that its aim is quite the opposite. Creative shots are cross-cut with shots of the cameraman filming that shot, cross-cut again with footage of the editing room where a woman is hard at work cutting together the film. No doubt she is cursing Vertov for making a film with literally thousands more cuts than a typical feature.

A whole segment of the movie is devoted to the strips of film themselves, as Vertov delights in pummeling us with self-reference. Our focus is turned and turned and turned again, pulled in briefly to consider subject after subject and given little time to fit storyline to subject.

This is perhaps because the real subject of Man with a Movie Camera is filmmaking itself. All other content is secondary and fleeting, and present only for its value as example of this or that technique. The dramatic shot of an oncoming train is sandwiched by footage showing how the shot was set up, and footage of the crew packing up and heading away. The "transportation" and "industrialization" theme suggested by the train is overshadowed by the story of "hey, look what we can do with these cameras!"

STRUCTURE

The film lacked the cohesive storyline that we have come to expect, even from documentaries. Having said that, Man with a Movie Camera did contain an awkward structure. After the campy cinema house intro, the first hour or so has a documentary flavor, presenting a day in the life of a city (St. Petersburg?). We see the abandoned city streets in the early morning, and we return to the same intersections and places throughout the day to see the squares flush with people, cars, trams, buses, horse-drawn chariots, hustle and bustle. Finally, we are treated to a montage of workers cleaning up, wiping down, and turning off their industrial assembly line machines. One of the longest shots of the film, a gentle 10-second (which by then seems an eternity, after being subjected to frantic cut after cut) calming view of a dim sky which presumably is conveying dusk, sets the stage for the city to go back to sleep.

Abruptly, a new chapter begins at the beach. The man with the movie camera, having documented humans at work, now turns the lens on humans at play. Beach play transitions to sport, and again we are made to focus less on the putative subject (humans at play) and more on the techniques used in filming them: slow motion, innovative camera angles.

THEMES

Several subjects seem to get enough attention cumulatively to eventually allow the audience to string together their individual stories.

While Vertov obsesses with avant-garde camera work and creative editing, his fictional filmmaker addresses various issues with a heavy hand. He makes us consider:

• life and death, juxtaposing a funeral procession with the birth of a child.
• industrialization, cross-cutting assembly line workers with machines.
• city-as-machine, packing people into trams and buses and shuffling them around with great efficiency through intersections with motorized precision.
• glorification of the worker (he may have had to include this theme to get the film past the censors) - from the steel worker to the miner, the seamstress to the cashier, the cigarette packager to the phone exchange operator, and don't forget the woman toiling away in the cutting room! Workers of the world unite!

REACTION SUMMARY

The film overall suffered from Vertov's obsession with cross-cutting. His demonstration of other techniques was I think hampered by the constant flitting from subject to subject. The film-within-a-film lacked cohesion as a result, but was distracting enough that it obscured and diluted what I suspect was Vertov's message: realize the full potential of the Kino-Eye!