User:Aitantv/blog2023

10.08.23 - 11.08.23

Amsterdam, MACA, Grey overcast

Scoring the Long Shot

'Scoring the Long Shot' is a participatory workshop which is concerned with the contemporary components of the cinematic image: sound and time. Cinema is a time-based medium and "the most important thing in film" according to the Belgian auteur Chantal Akerman. An admirer of Andy Warhol's mundane observational films - such as 'Empire'(1965), a monumental 8-hour static long shot of the Empire State building - Akerman later came to document the Chelsea Hotel in NYC in all its bare unflattering former glory. In Deleuze's 'Cinema 2: The Time-Image' he describes the transition of cinema from 'the movement image' which is concerned with action, kinetics, animation, to 'the time image' which prefers to dwell, pull-focus on quotidian architectures and the simple gestures of actors. Deleuze also describes the shift from the 'silent-film' - with intertitles and live orchestral scores that function as separate textual elements - to 'talkies' where dialogue is finally in sync with the picture. With the advent of the talkie a single sound continuum is created where sound is no longer an additional element of cinema, but it is rather a componenet of the visual image. Sound and image become intertwined, fused, an inseparable alliance which redefines the borders and language of cinema. Sound can dwell in the unknown, the 'out-of-field' and the 'visual not-seen'. It goes beyond the tight cropped borders of the cinematic frame. However wide, scoped, or anamorphic the cinematic frame is sound recording is a superior technology for capturing the spatial qualities of the field.

After guiding a group game of 'seeing as camera' - where I gave prompts such as "focus on a subject", "zoom in", "slide left", "tilt up", "dolly in"- I gave a brief introduction to 'Transcendental Style', a film essay and theoretical cartography created by film critic and writer-director Paul Schrader, who rose to fame as the screenwriter of Scorsese's 'Taxi Driver'. At the very center of Schrader's TS diagram is N. The NARRATIVE NUCLEUS encompasses the entirety of blockbuster entertainment cinema - Marvel Movies, Barbie, Oppenheimer, Jurassic Park, Jaws... Indeed Spielberg is responsible for calcifying the narrative nucleus as what we call 'movies'. THE TARKOVSKY RING is the outer limits of what most audiences deem acceptable in a theatrical context. As we migrate away from N (and beyond THE TARKOVSKY RING) the waters get murky.

[insert transcendental style diagram]

At the top of the Schrader's TS diagram is THE SURVEILLANCE CAM, spearheaded by Chinese documentarian Wang Bing, known for his rigiorously observational documentaries, such as 'Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks' (2002) a nine-hour epic filmed between 1999 and 2001 which details the slow decline of Shenyang's industrial Tiexi district. In the bottom left is THE ART GALLERY where you'll find avant-garde film artists such as the structuralist Michael Snow who questioned the apparatus of film itself or experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage who explores the material of celluloid to investigate a range of subjects. Finally in the bottom right corner resides the MANDALA whose contemporary darling is Apichatpong Weerasethakul, the Thai auteur known for his meditative long shots. Weerasethakul dwells in the 'out-of-field' or the 'visual not-seen' in 'Memoria' (2023) a sci-fi-fantasy-drama where Tilda Swinton plays Jessica, a melancholic Scottish expat in Colombia who goes in search of the cause or source of a distorted BOOM she can't get out of her head.

For Schrader, what unifies the artists and filmmakers that fall under the umbrella of Transcendental Style is a preoccupation with the spiritual dimensions of cinema. Transcendental Style is foreshadowed by mid-century masters Ozu and Bresson, who chose stasis over dynamics, who dared to dwell in the quotidian in order to subtly reach a point of rupture, disjunction, and transcendence which uses the unreal, the imaginary. "The abundant must not overwhelm (too much religiousness in a film) nor be too sparse (not enough narrative); a film should set the viewer in motion by the end, asking them to enter the image, enter into the Transcendent" (Schrader 1972 p179). It felt important to imprint the spiritual lineage of the long shot on the workshop participants of 'Scoring the Long Shot' before diving into practical filmmaking.

[film still projection screen]

The setting of the workshop during Resonant Bodies was a 4:3 wooden-framed cotton projection screen situated in the front garden of Arteli Racha. Benches on a mound in front of the screen created an ampi-theatre. The intended aim of the workshop was to collectively score a long shot. The dramaturgy prompt: "The show starts in 10 days. The residents must prepare the backstage area for the show." Participants were encouraged to be 'models' (not actors), to commit to actions and tasks to prepare the backstage area. Preparing the backstage area might include moving a haystack from one area to another; erecting and organising some plastic tubing; taking a long-deserved coffee break; measuring the floor plan; and so on. The tasks were devised and selected by participants. I divided the workshop participants in two: filmmakers and audience. The filmmakers should produce and perform a score for the audience with the prompt in mind. The audience should pay active attention and prepare to offer constructive feedback. Once this round was finished, the two groups would switch. This swithching of roles was intended to break the dichotomy between audience/filmmaker. Participants could experience both the responsibility that filmmaking requires as well as the attentiveness that being an active audience member requires. As an audience member it's difficult to become a lethargic recipient when you're up next.

I think participants enjoyed this role playing exercise. How would we fair once the camera was swithced on? Now we were all filmmaker-models. We were all making a long shot together. I encouraged us (filmmaker-models) to dwell in the 'out of field' and the unseen. We had a stereo omni-directional audio recording setup. I wanted to collectively score a wide field of sound with a broad range of happenings, accidents, textures, incidents. The cinematic frame, in contrast, was a tight 4:3 image focusing on the projection screen with some spill into the space around it. The frame is always a crop/fragment/chip/flick/flake of an infinitely larger and chaotic whole. Sound recording is better equipped to deal with the spatio-temporal qualities of the field. The omni-directional stereo recording was designed to enhance this disparity. The omni-mics were live. The visual frame was locked. The camera's red record button was pressed. The boom microphone was activated and synced with the static camera. The score began scoring.

As the cinematographer (and workshop host) I could sense participant's awareness of the camera. Now time counts for something. The camera is the ticking bomb Hitchcock implemented in his plots. A casual gesture seems intentional. Every action must be pre-figured. Not free and loosed but somehow pre-ordained scripted. Not so natural anymore. Rigid, exposed, raw. Raw footage picturing raw souls frame after frame. We try to keep the camera out of sight, out of mind. But it somehow burns a hole through the moment, like a lazer beam cutting through the 'isness' of reality. We dealt with the insistence of the camera well; it's demanding protocols. We improvised. we subtly scored the sequence. Randomness and play allowed a sense of joy to enter the frame. K wrapped himself in a white sheet like Moses and tilled the soiled; N donned a tight black onesie and bewilderly stumbled from one side of the frame to the other; M sported a blue bucket on her head; L erected a tubular structure in the backstage area, maybe a semi-permanent prop for the show. When to end the shot? When the score has scored. All models have vacated the frame. Beyond the frame, several syncopated bangs on a piece of wood. The cinematographer yells 'cut'.

Two days later I projected the resulting single-shot film 'Making the Show' on the screen we had filmed, in the front garden of Arteli Racha. The projection beam lit a path of misty rain. We sat like a tiny isolated village and watched ourselves performing to ourselves. We laughed and sighed, tried to pay attention, and mostly enjoyed sitting in this bizarre meta theatre projecting a mirror of our own efforts. Before the screening N amplified an album by Caretaker which attempts to translate the experience of dementia, the inevitable cognitive and psycho-spiritual decay of its victims. This set in motion the emotional texture of my next workshop and film project.

SCHOOL

• a filmmaker makes spectators of the audience. an artist makes participants.
• do you want to look at an image or be inside an image? there's is not a discussion between flat and VR cinema. This is a levelling up of IRL over virtual.
• lets prioritise being over representation, get over the festish of objectification
• many people are comfortably atomised in non-participatory consumptive entertainment habits, i.e. VOD, social media, TV, entertainment cinema, holiday resorts, casinos, leisure centers, spas, eateries, etc. The challenge is to engage, illicit participation, turn spectators into participants. In the global north many of us have becoe too lazy and complicit in our own zombified half-baked waking life.
• the camera is an interceptor of relationships. It cuts between people. Some Kabbalists believe that the camera can see into the soul. Every frame you take extracts a piece of the soul. The camera is a soul snatcher. Do you want to steal someone's soul? Is your film worth that much?
• experiences instead of films. design experiences which may or may not be filmed. The camera (if used) must be acknowledged as an interceptor (a parasite) not an instigator of connection - not a facilitator of meaning - but an extractive technology for containing reality and interpersonal relationships.
• the cinematic frame - however wide and scoped and desqueezed or anamorphic - is always a crop/fragment/chip/flick/flake of an infinitely larger and chaotic whole. Sound as a recording system is far better equipped to deal with the temporal-spatial qualities of reality. The omnidirectional stereo recording setup is a superior method for recording a field. The cropped cinematic frame is a granular crumb of this detailed hi-fidelity sonic and spatial stereo omni-directional recording. Sound can dwell in the unknown, the 'out-of-field' and the 'visual not-seen' (Deleuze 'Time Image') and must always be acknowledged as a component of the visual image which substantiates the 'isness' of the cinematic frame with the feeling of beyondness.

- Workshop description (what we did, why and how) - Used methods - expected outcome - real outcome (failures, problems, group influence, reflection)

08.08.23

Amsterdam, Home, Turquiose-Grey overcast

I tell J about visiting Oni synagogue after having confronted an antisemitic rupture only minutes early. Jews = gold: Jews control capital: Jews control the world: Jews are money and power: Jews are the parasites that find ever more inventive way of extracting profits from the world. Jews are self-victimizing. They can't take a joke. 'Why can't I make a Jew joke? It's part of the humor, aint it? I make Jew-money jokes with my friends." For some Jews it's okay - these confirmations of semitic tropes through self-deprecating humor. Self-deprecating humor as a currency of the clown, the comic, the wandering Jew. 'If my nose is too big and hairy, if I reak of anxiety and post-holocaust trauma, at least I can tell a good one-liner, at least I can be the diplomatic bridge between perfect strangers, I can be the butt of everyone's joke, the Jew, the great equalizer, "the Jews hate the muslims, the muslim hate the christians, but everyone hates the Jews"'.

Victim:benefactor :: Host:Parasite. These positions are always oscillating, changeable, fluctuating. Who is more intelligent? Who is cashing in really? Jews as userers because they couldn't buy land. 'Why are Jews so private? Enclosed? Separatist?' It's because in medieval europe (and more recently too) they were forced to live in these ghettos, yes ghetto from Italian derives from the segregation of Jews in the inner-city of Venice into slum-like quarters. In Amsterdam the Jewish quarter - forced segregation - makes for easier round-up get them on the cattle train. 'Why get all sensitive about the holocaust now? It's like not even mid-century.' It's hard to forget when there are mundane vernacular quotidian reminders of your misplace on a daily basis. Antisemitism not lurking in the woodwork, just right there sitting on your plate, like a shmeer of dijon during maincourse, just petit discreet antisemitism as a satsifying garnish to daily life. Culinary metaphors are useful vehicles to consider the distain for a globally scattered people who have too much in common and yet everything separating us.

Jews are shape-shifting throughout history: host, guest, parasite. There categories are volatile, oscillating. To recapitulate the status of Jews is forever being negotiated. That unsettled symbolic condition (complicated by the very real Jewish and Evangelical settlers in Palestine) creates negative space, noise, where confusion, blame, scapegoating can catch and spread. There's something sticky about antisemitism, it has a pleasurable salty sass. It's dark and mischievous but still palattable. It's like almagnac as a nightcap with a belly full of beer, it upsets the balance by such an insignifant margin that it goes unnoticed.

I can't explain away the disgruntled sensation that comes from a racist encounter. Your own 'liberal', 'open-minded', intersectional, queer, poly-hyphenate comrades looking you lovingly in the eye as the bazooka your heart. It tears a gulf between good people. Antisemitism's evolved to successfully dehumanize. Using it as post-woke humor doesn't eradicate the original purpose of the form. The medium is the message. The message of antisemitism is that Jews are less than human. As long as that is the case, the jury is out on who else might be considered an alien by the native species of our neoliberal hyper-pop global utopia: white folk.

07.08.23

Amsterdam, Home, Sunny with clouds

First day back to work, to the cycle, the hamster wheel, the assembly line batch production. My priority is to be productive with my time rather than remain dormant at a computer screen for the alloted labour time. I allocate myself phases of focused artistic labour/research to complete given tasks. I embrace morphological time; unlike chronological time according to the clock, this is a perception of time based on task. It's the how long is a piece of string mindset? "I'll meet you on the corner in the time it takes me to walk the breadth of the city". This changeability of time was an important feature of RB. Dinner preparation might take 4.5 hours. But every moment counted. & it may have felt like half the amount of time it took to get through a cicling session where we were encouraged to listen to one another's immediate thoughts and feelings. I'm still grasping for intimacy and community in my daily life. People are busy. Friends have prior arrangements. Society runs like clock-work, chronopolis. Time is measured by hours, minutes, seconds. Time is not relative. Time is measurable. I incorporate a more personal perception of time, that is relative and loose. 'Slow, slow, but steady' I focus on the task at hand.

The shot takes as long as it needs to elapse. The beginning and end of a gesture mark the moments of a cut. The static camera is a powerful tool to allow the audience to surrender to simple gestures and the pleasure of watching humans model. In 'Scoring the Long Shot' I hosted participants and gave them a brief introduction to slow cinema and Transcendental Style, two cinematic movements that fetishize the static frame. Together as performer-filmmakers we generated a broad soundscape that transcended a simple static frame of a projection screen located in the garden of Arteli Racha. A live foley soundscape was scored by the performer-filmmakers. The cinematic frame became a mere cropped referrent to this wide omni-directional stereo recording filled with rustling footsteps in the grass and performers tinkering with found metalic or plastic objects in the exterior. The output of this workshop was 'Making the Show' a one shot short film documenting the process, where performer-filmmakers were given the prompt: "the show is in 10 days and it's time to prepare the backstage for the audience". In self-referential social-realist style, the show was indeed 10 days away, and I considered the residency at Arteli Racha our private backstage.

But how was it recieved? 'Making the Show' was under the spotlight as we gathered in Kororti - a communal open studio space in Tblisi - for the event that we prepared as the public vinissage. I naively introduced the film as if it was a succinct narrative short worthy of the audience's full attention. Our visitors were forced to sit through eighteen minutes of ordinary people walking back and forth with a smattering of random actions and gestures. They were probably better off eating the aggressively delicious food prepared by the hostile chef with a mischievous moustache N.

06.08.23

Amsterdam, Home, Grey overcast

I have returned from Georgia. Landing on my feet. I'm grasping for community and searching for it in the living rooms of millenial friends close by. The Netherlands is a cool grey steely geometric orderly rigid up-tight planned governed sort of place. I feel a sense of homesickness setting in as I look back on Georgia. A magentic pull from my body towards that geography, some sort of genetic map attempts to superimpose itself on that landscape; a negative layer looking for its postive, an etching finding its relief (wikipedia.etching).

I found a sense of home amongst the RB residents in Racha. This temporary community quickly formalized a schedule for domestic chores; a morning meditation and movement routine to create space for spontaneous creativity and emotional releases. Circling - the group act of attentive listening where we shared our immediate thoughts and feelings - was a tedious and challenging process. To sit with the concerns, grief, and complexities of others was a draining process. My body would be fully activated and ready to plough the day, but after circle it felt heavy, tired, and sore. These interpersonal emotions are weighty. The physical manifestation of heaviness equates with the gravity of the human experience.

I want to re-create (a slither) of this group field. My perception became a field of possibilities rather than channeled towards a specific point. Drawings became broad and almost fish-eye; film shots became mere crops of a wide omni-directional foley stereo soundscape; feasts were scattered with berries, salts, nuts, seeds, and oils, making a maximal taste mouthful of every bite. A de-centered approach to living, where the I was no longer so autonomous, produced a becomingness where process had a greater value than output.

I low-key mourn for my Georgian friends. Long-lost sisters, ex-wives, distant cousins, long-distance pen pals, a forgotten university colleague. They each occupied a position of familiarity from the very first encounter. I circle back to the body, and where the body finds its restplace. Is it climactic, cultural, social, cinematic, political, textural? Is it about colors, hairy, beauty, textiles? Is it to do with culinary tastes and satiating a void within with edible harmony? A sense of homeness in a foreign land. An uncanny belonging and being-with in the carriage of a Metro from Dezerter Bizaar to the micro-district of Gldani. Every grandma had a sparkle of Bibi with a soft comic gaze, a moth-scented wiry wool cardigan, badly-dyed hair, over-plucked eyebrows, and powdery doughy palms. Where do I go from here? Can I stay here in the cold steely grey grindhouse? Can I tolerate this clinical tepid womb?