My friend Don Yanacito, who is an instructor in the film department at the University of Colorado gave me this feedback on my video, “Light”:
John,
I took a look. It puts me in an interesting conundrum. I’m in awe of your ability to figure out how to make all of these special effects happen. It truly surprises me given the small amount I know about these programs. And I very much like the basic image of light that you are working with. It is abstract, inspirational, and it points to something etherial. However, all of that being said, I find the multiple layers or windows competing with each other and canceling each other out. I lose the awe and find myself fighting to find the synthesis of the various layers. In the end it seemed too much about the various layers, windows, manipulated puzzle pieces and not enough respect for the beautiful image you had to begin with.
Hope this is of use.
Further comments of the video sketch, “Light” by jgyoungmd
This simple initial 15 second cellphone video, was aleatorically (chance) rendered, symmetrically selected and arranged and rearranged in Final Cut Pro. The piece was then extended to fit the music, which is rhythmic world music rather than naturalistic or romantic. Images suggestive of Stan Brakhage’s natural light studies, the shimmering water reflection, are set against the mechanical design of the object in which the water-light moves. Yet despite the aleatoric creation of images, the video retains classic symmetry in the shifting shapes. The images of light within individual parts are asymmetrical yet the superimpositions are symmetrical.
The flickering light is the positive image against a darker background that is the negative space. In the middle of the video, this is changed, and the negative black spaces become two vertical rectangles, i.e., positive spaces against the surrounding light. The modern becomes postmodern.
A deconstructive [i.e.,“does not assert or impose meaning, but marks out places where the function of the text works against its apparent meaning, or against the history of its interpretation”[1]] reading of the video, then, shows this piece is more postmodern than modern. It begins with “continuity, narrative, and difference within continuity [modern], but then moves on to counter-strategies and discursive gap”[2][postmodern]. Though it begins as a classic naturalistic image, it changes over time and becomes more postmodern. The image as a whole becomes fragmented. Distortion and dislocation are implied as well as actual. The blue color in the background fragments against the beige mechanical objects. The hand-held cellphone images bounce. As the image repeats, the Final Cut changes further destabilize the identity of the images. Self-reference is displayed in the vertical reflections. The plastic container jars against the etherial light. The video lasts less than three minutes, perhaps part of the “Three Minute Culture,” i.e. the attention span of most people shaped by advertising and zapping.
My wife, Diane, reacted very negatively towards this video piece, much more so than my other work. I was struck by the intensity of her reaction. I think it was this new, anarchic sense that was so disturbing to her. I was employing that postmodern paradigm of “inventing new rules and changing the game” that she was used to. It becomes postmodern as “incredulity toward meta-narratives”[Lyotard] familiar to her of the naturalistic light as image. Postmodernism “offers micro-narratives [in this case less than three minutes] which don’t necessarily add up but are woven together in a jumble of forms and styles.” The postmodern narrative refuses to choose between competing stories, in this case the modern and the postmodern, eschewing a one-sided interpretation. The postmodern attracts or repels precisely because it cannot be controlled or possessed. In this case, it repelled her.
Not yet mentioned is the rhythmic music and the tendency is to lose oneself in the music; ‘to feel the beat.’ The psychological swing toward the Dionysian tendency during the cultural flourish of the 1960’s found its enduring embodiment in Rock music. World music rhythms are similar.
In this video, light reflection and movement is removed from its natural context creating a new sense of space and time, not reducible to clear linear history or sense of origin. De-realization, i.e., an alteration in perception leading to the feeling that the reality of the world has been changed or lost, affects both the subject and the objects of experience, such that their sense of identity, constancy, and substance is upset or dissolved, which maybe why Diane reacted so negatively.
Aylesworth states that in the postmodern a temporal effect is also accomplished through the collapse of the difference between humans and things, where “humans are becoming more similar to things, and equally, the inorganic world, thanks to electronic technology, seems to be taking over the human role in the perception [and creation—my parenthesis] of events.”[3] I find that working with digital art, new media, the software available creates new ways or thinking and working, calling for experimentation with counter-strategies and functional structures. The postmodern narrative is textured, nuanced, multifaceted, and transgressive and even subversive to the modernist status quo.
Where the expert modernist filmmaker knows what he knows and what he doesn’t know about good films, the postmodern artist/philosopher in me knows neither, but poses questions, implied.
Aylesworth states, “But where modern art presents the unpresentable as a missing content within a beautiful form, as in Marcel Proust, postmodern art, exemplified by James Joyce, puts forward the unpresentable by forgoing beautiful form itself, thus denying what Kant would call the consensus of taste. Where Kant emphasizes the feeling of the beautiful as a harmonious interaction between imagination and understanding, Lyotard stresses the mode in which faculties (imagination and reason,) are in disharmony, i.e. the feeling of the sublime. For Kant, the sublime occurs when our faculties of sensible presentation are overwhelmed by impressions of absolute power and magnitude, and reason is thrown back upon its own power to conceive Ideas (such as the moral law) which surpass the sensible world.”[4]
For Lyotard, however, “the postmodern sublime occurs when we are affected by a multitude of unpresentables without reference to reason as their unifying origin.”[5] My friend, Don, takes the Kantian modernist viewpoint and likes the initial phase of the video; but whether the later postmodern section is sublime in the Lyotardian viewpoint, you have to judge.
Perhaps the video was an unconscious parody of Brakhage. The postmodern is also political, opposing the “one mode fits all” theory of everything. There was no Kantian “pleasure in reflection,” but instead a “drunken revelry” of Final Cut alterations of the initial image. The Apollonian becomes Dionysian. Whether there was rapture or not to the audience, I felt some in the creation of the effects, the Action video maker, not the Contemplator.
Some might say it is bad art because it is not postmodernist enough. There is symmetry in the second part which is more modernist, despite the postmodern attack. Does art have to fit within one tradition or the other? Whether it is uncanny [Freud] i.e., familiar, yet strange or just bad art, you have to judge.
Foucault says, “I seek to know how and to what extent it might be possible to think differently, instead of legitimating what is already known.”[6]
Whether the video is sublime, uncanny or just a sketch that got lost is up to you.
References
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Lawlor, Leonard, “Jacques Derrida”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2011 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.)
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Aylesworth, Gary, “Postmodernism”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2012 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.)
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Ibid.
- Ibid.
- Ibid.
- Foucault, Michel, 1985, The Use of Pleasure: The History of Sexuality, Volume Two, Robert Hurley (trans.), New York: Random House.