video art and agitation
This is the first exercise I made at film school earlier this year, dedicated to my dear little H. I kinda made it for his birthday, but then I gave him a fishing rod, which will no doubt give him more pleasure than this film ;{) I just finished the second short, which I’ll be launching at the Suzanne Grae and the Katies gig coming up at Headquarters soon, and posting up shortly after that.
When I heard about Tina Turner starring in Mad Max: Beyond the Thunderdome as a kid, I imagined the Thunderdome as a gigantic rock stadium, filled with futuristic, potentially robotic, bikers shooting rocket grenades at each other, while Tina (wearing hair metal hair) sang rock ballads and fireworks went off. Somehow I managed not to see any of the Mad Max trilogy until recently, at film school. When I got to number three, I was sadly disillusioned (except for Tina’s hairdo). The Thunderdome isn’t particularly thunderous at all, it is a fairly rudimentary bucky-dome in the desert, in which blokes swing about in an ungainly fashion on bungy ropes trying to hit each other. Though Mad Max is an 80s high concept film, it is Australian after all, and I suppose they would not have achieved such high profit to outlay ratios on the production of these films, had they not had the homegrown touch (which is part of their b-gradey charm).
Anyway, there’s probably been more than enough written about Mad Max by film critics in Australia and beyond, so I’m unlikely to enlighten anyone, but here are a few thoughts on how much Mad Max owes to the Western. I found writing this essay interesting, more than the films themselves, as it reminded me of the films and documentaries I watched and remixed for Spoole’s live audiovisual Glitch Western show - especially as that performance was also examining the Western in the context of the Australian landscape.
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As the movie begins, we hear the sound of the wind blowing, like a lonely wail across the plains. We almost expect to see a tumbleweed blow across the bottom of the screen – but as the picture fades up from black we see a lone figure on the horizon, silhouetted against a big sky. Up to this point we could be watching a Western. This lone figure could be about to mount his trusty steed and ride into town but instead as the camera draws closer we see this is a man dressed in a much more modern costume of torn leathers, emerging from a cloud of whirling smoke. This is just the first few seconds of the opening scene of the second film in George Miller’s Mad Max cycle, and already the audience is receiving clear signs indicating conventions (which can be found in all three Mad Max films) of the popular movie genre, the Western. However we also begin to glimpse elements that are prominent in other film genres, including elements distinctive of the post-apocalypse film, a genre that can itself be seen as a sub-genre of both the Western and the Sci-Fi.
Daniel is an artist in residence at the VCA, who spoke to us about his work recently for our Centre for Ideas class. He had lots of interesting things to show, in particular I loved the photographs of a cat he had taken while hiking with friends (which are available on the artist’s website, along with documentation of his other work).
“On December 31 I walked with three friends up a hill in Tuhringen, near Ilmenau. We found a dead cat lying on its back. Her position seemed as if death caught her by surprise in a moment of joy and play. In the night, we lightened firecrackers. It started snowing. Next day, January 1, we decided to walk up the hill again.”
I found these pictures to be very moving, if somewhat confronting. I showed these photos to M, who found them to be offensive in an exploitative Damien Hirst-esque way, which I understand. It’s a strange thing for an artist to encounter something sad and beautiful, a small observation in the context of the wider world, but the momentous and final events in the existence of this particular cat, and then exhibit this in a way that doesn’t necessarily show full respect to this being. But how do we show this respect, and why? The cat is dead, after all.
To me, anthropomorphising the appropriate way to mark the death of an animal (wild, or perhaps feral, abandoned, or simply and sadly lost) seems odd also. I wonder if bringing the domesticated cat into our human society as pets affects the ethical dimensions of how we treat these creatures in death. For me this work asks all of these questions, without taking a sledge-hammer to moral codes (which themselves are often hypocritical given the common brutality of the way animals are treated by humans industrially and environmentally), as other more confronting works regarding animals and death may have.
What do I find so affecting about these images? Firstly it is the playful pose the poor cat (surely small enough to still be a kitten) assumes in death. One wonders how and why it has met its untimely end. The second picture shows the same frame, but almost magically filled with snow, which is somehow already amazing, to see this volume of whiteness occupy the space around the cat. The cat buried in snow is a ghostly image, and a very soft and gentle image of death, and imminent decay. A helpless furry kitten paws gently at the surface of a soft blanket of snow, its last gesture towards life. It is also a gentle presentation of the cat’s dire situation, I am not overwhelmed by the deliberate pathos of the image, but can appreciate its tragedy without feeling overly manipulated.
The other main object of interest to me in Daniel’s talk was the power of revealing something through the imagination, by obscuring it. He showed various examples of this:
murder scene of a child – obscured by big white cinema-screen like sheets, which were part of a privacy screen constructed by police, which left a surface to project our own horrific imaginings onto, more powerful than what might have been revealed
Jed’s Other Poem (Beautiful Ground) from Stewdio on Vimeo.
so nice. so sad. so glad they programmed it rather than just animating it.
There’s more info about the creation of this video on the Apple ][+ on Stewart Smith’s Stewdio website. It explains he initially produced this video unsolicited, for the band Grandaddy, who later wrote him a retroactive contract for it. You can download the code for the program he wrote for it there too…
2005. I release the Jed source code making this the first open-source music video. Maybe.