The following is text
compiled for the DVD liner notes, for a disc referred to as
6 films prepared
by a mr. gibbs chapman.
Well, since you asked,
I’ll try to remember what I was thinking, between November 1995 and June 2004.
At the beginning of the period, I had finished a feature drama and was becoming
aware of a certain kind of paralysis that arises from making a longer film with
no money, the guilt that accompanies a lot of favor-cashing, and the malaise
from realizations that despite labors of love and hate, I came to filmmaking 75
years too late. I needn’t here describe the certain bad way in which I found myself, for at least the
remainder of the century - it could’ve been a sort of mid-life era, or a lonely
time, a time in which I assumed (because I think poetry is found in despair
rather than elation) should lead to a creative period, for lack of a better
expression but…
…I can’t say if this fell
short of potential or not;
I assume so. How’s that
for a run on?
Anyway, my German side
wanted to keep working, and we all were reaching the end of a particular aspect
of the celluloid era, that of the final disposition of the century’s collection
of educational and industrial media, stored in the warehouses of school
districts, fetishist’s closets and finally, dumpsters. I couldn’t help notice
that if one was (as a number of friends and associates had been doing) to make
“derivative” works, or as Mr. Baldwin is fond of saying, recycling detritus in
a process known as re-contextualization, one could avoid the bulk of the
production section of filmmaking, skipping straight to post-production. As a
control freak, an only child and a bit of a jerk of all trades, I prefer this
aspect of media work, because ‘others’ need not be recruited nearly as often as
in production. So friends and I did a significant amount of re-viewing all
sorts of films whose producer’s might have marveled should they have known of
our interest, but with an eye to have our way with them. A perverted task I grant you, but I was actually
only slightly surprised to see in this meander through the 20th Century, that a
lot of material was truly odd already.
So this, “working with
found footage” as the gate-keepers may to refer to this approach: I found it to
be a particularly aimless thing to do, that is, rather than ‘writing’ a movie,
constructing an arc, looking for an inciting incident, graveling for
singularities, or whatever film school drivel for which you go in, one just searches random, aesthetic and topical
works, like a scavenger at the landfill. Mostly these items were conceived as
commodities, communication platforms, produced to diffuse the tedium of the school
lecture or the corporate presentation, or at least provide an opportunity for
the instructor/projectionist to sneak out for a smoke. In this point, I may
delude myself, that I know what to do when I sit down to write but…
• the intellectual and
your tax dollars at work
So then I constructed the
intellectual, and your tax
dollars at work, pretty much on a
pair of afternoons, after enduring some “experimental” film show the night
before and finding myself unable the resist the arrogant sentiment: I can make
a better film than that… …in an afternoon. the intellectual is merely the combination a barely re-edited
British navy industrial, about properly inspecting ballast chambers in the
hulls of seagoing vessels, and a few lines of narration I wrote in an hour, how
autobiographical, I couldn’t say. I still subscribe to the theory that the
intellect, if a gift, is one with two sharp edges and that the human mind
appears to operate much like a prison cell designed for one with two
incongruous and inflexible inhabitants. As the narration insists, “a creature in
transition,” places many generations on an evolutionary timeline, and with one
foot on the “no step” fragility of an airplane wing and the other in the filth
and violence of our ancestors. I can’t report having seen any evolution, any
evidence to the contrary since the intellectual was made, way back in the last century.
Your tax dollars at
work is more a blatant
manipulation. I think one of the dangers of working with “found materials,” is
that there is a fine line between celebration and mockery. The poor souls
discovered in the dumpster may have been trying their best, but this media
record has amplified the difficulty in understanding how one will appear in the
future. The producers of and the participants in the materials that somehow
have become available in this discarded way, likely would have no way to
predict this re-use, despite our collective experience of laughing at photos of
our parents in high school. YTD@W, a single sequence of shots from an
educational on the workings of (I think) the Massachusetts legislature,
contains probably less than 20 A/V edits with my fingerprints on them. The
effect of injecting an adolescent cynicism is clear enough, but the work’s
meaning is in relation to the changing nature of evidence. Editing technology
emerging in the 90s was transforming the “art” of the touchup, and if anything,
this piece stands as a pointer to the future of evidence, with ramifications in
justice systems. If you can make people say things they didn’t say, we have
come some distance from Richard Nixon’s 20-minute tape erasure. It was easy
enough to conclude the film by slapping on a shot of the Nevada test range or
whatever; I have made a few films in a lazy, impulsive way, and I refer to them
loosely as throwaway. Naturally, these are among the most appreciated.
• for “Swell” and for
“Turbine”
The two works, for
“Swell” and for “Turbine’s
Russian Scissors” are essentially
music videos, pieces that I was asked by ‘others’ to make. I wouldn’t dare
photograph guys jumping around with guitars, so I take on such things only in
the spirit of do whatever you want.
The former, for “Swell” was
made for an English record label whose response was something like “We don’t
know what the hell this is about but the record skip is fucking brilliant.” There
are two aspects about this work that may be worth mentioning. One is that I was
interested in fooling with something I call associated media era, that is, particular media capture technologies
are locked to their dates of invention and extinction. For example, most people
would associate a black and white film in which each second is divided into 16
frames, with the period between roughly 1895 and 1920. This type of association
occurs in more subtle ways for other aspects of media material, the contrast and
lack of detail in shadow of a color film material can suggest a particular
point in time, as might a particular color palette, etc. I extended my interest
in re-contextualization, by using older type materials to modify
“found–footage” sequences that somehow interested me, trying to ‘match’ two
material’s aesthetic attributes. For example: a woman turns from a man in a
uniform, walks to cover the camera lens in mid-century movie Journey to the
7th Planet, and then a friend of
mine walks from my camera lens to another friend of mine (who looks a fair
amount like a kid who appears elsewhere in the piece, struggling to read in a
library) and drapes a cloth over his head. One might ask why I had made this
construction, why that shot of old led me to the re-use, and fair enough; I
could only say that I was drawn to use fragments, either from found materials
or generated by me, photography that didn’t necessarily contain overt meaning -
but gestures, all of which, in combination with music and lyric whose conceptual
meaning I deliberately remained ignorant of, combined to illustrate a bumbling
sadness. I can report that even now I don’t know what the song or the movie are
about and undoubtedly it doesn’t matter.
For “Turbine’s Russian
Scissors” is the only work on this
disc which doesn’t contain any ‘found’ material - except to the extent that the
majority of the shots were camera tests, whereby I needed to see that a camera
repair or lens adjustment had gone well, or that an old roll of film still had
any life in it. These types of things have a tendency to accumulate in a box,
until one day Turbine asked me to make something for them. The only guideline
was that the piece somehow be a document of the neighborhood in which we lived
during a period, some time ago. The box of camera tests, shot in the
neighborhood and some time ago by default, seemed like an obvious choice, and
in its way a box of found materials. With a few cheats and a money shot, you
see the resultant ‘neighborhood symphony.’ Most of the subjects, the garbage,
the birds, the houses, the condoms, the mold, my cat on her deathbed below my
friend’s painting of a coffin – somehow were just there for the camera. It’s a
documentary I suppose.
• an examination of
exhibits A(1) – E(5)
During this period, I
became interested in mystique, a phenomenon wherein one’s attention is drawn to
that which is not clear. Some things seem obvious – most creatures have an
inherent interest in being perceptive, obviously the survival mechanism is
involved. There are other cognitive ‘modules’ which seem to be involved, and I
began to search for the modern applications of primitive cognitive function -
what are the biological origins of certain human behavior which seem rather odd
or self-defeating, like curiosity for example. And how (as the intellectual describes) a creature of instinct and intellect
negotiates ancient mental mechanisms in light of modern experience; if survival
can become essentially guaranteed, how are we to apply the remnants of the
survival mechanism. These questions led me to other query into human behavior,
and I went on to make a mysterious film about mystery and the human
insistence on order from chaos, as
the one-liner says, an examination of exhibits A(1) – E(5).
I wanted also to collapse
a number of pieces of human experience together to create a definition for the
mal-content, of an insatiability, born of ennui, a sort of spiritual vacancy
derived from the idle survival mechanism. I wanted to talk of poetry as a
sullen record, an expression of a certain profound dissatisfaction with life,
as the track says: Why does it seem like there are greener pastures? And as we
live with our ancient tools, we hope to make sound decisions. We may pursue
mysterious women until we know them well or we may imagine how a fragmental
line from Sappho might conclude, hoping that it wouldn’t be banal. We pay to
jump from an airplane or watch projected images of limbs cut off and spilling
blood so that we might feel ‘excited.’ A soundtrack professor asks: What is going
on here? And I ask: Why is it that not having enough information about things
and people makes them inherently more interesting?
• push button: a history
of idleness and ignorance
It took me some years of
using computers (something my father had encouraged me to do since the 70s,
without much success) before I could construct an opinion about their influence
on society and further on the nature of human work. In 2003 I was engaged to
make a short subject film about work, the ‘user interface’, and by extension
the future of the race. I wanted to continue with my major themes of course,
alienation, spiritual vacancy, to continue bashing techno-euphorics, to tear
down righteousness and to spit on the blight of advertising.
So I couldn’t help but
come at the subject with some tangents.
There are obvious targets
when setting out to demonstrate the absurdity and dysfunctional nature of
operating the world via remote control, like killing people in Afghanistan from
a bunker in Nevada. But I also wanted to show continuity in human history, and
analogies between human and animal behavior, and between human behavior and
that of water and electricity for that matter. It was also important that the
work touch on the idea that with the ancient mental inheritance discussed in an
examination, there is probably a
connection between human work that involves physical activity, like hands and
dirt for example, and general mental health. And as Matthew B. Crawford
recently noted, concerning a mind-numbing job he had for a time: “Trafficking
in abstraction is not the same as thinking”, I wanted to discuss the modern
tragedy that is the conspiracy to reduce human work to the operation of
un-repairable devices whose intricacies and designs are unknowable. I was
however willing to admit that despite the depth of my judgment, I live in a
time and place and will forever be locked there with my opinions as to a just life,
that tools are just tools, and that there is no reason that the products of
evolution would ever be able to relate to each other. And I should be
indifferent to this. In a hypothetical meeting of Sapien and Erectus, the
generation gap might likely be unbridgeable. And to extend the thought, in the
future meeting between Sapien and whatever we may become in the distance
(should we avoid annihilation), with future brains of multiple
MIT-Intel-Halliburton-built modification, we shall likely demonstrate the
logarithmic expansion of this generation gap. To this I can be reconciled; my
god is only those forces of nature that heal, albeit as violent as volcanoes,
and I’ve faith in the earth to recover from whatever future monsters it is to
face.
gibbs chapman, February
2010