Harun Farocki Institut

As my time at the residency draws to a close, my energy is drawn towards preparing for events in the coming weeks. Partly for my own benefit, here is a chronological listing:

“Critique, Protest, Activism and the Video Essay”
Essay Film Festival, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London
Thursday March 30 2017, 8:45-11:00pm
with guest filmmaker Chloé Galibert-Laîné

Full listing here and here.

I will also be hosting a conversation with director Deborah Stratman following the screening of The Illinois Parables at the Essay Film Festival on March 28, 2017.

On April 6 at 8pm I will give a talk at the Werkleitz in Halle (Salle), Germany. The Videorama will screen Transformers: The Premake every evening in April in its storefront display.

On April 14 I will participate in the Visual Practices symposium at the University of California at Davis. Professor Kriss Ravetto and I will present our research on Bill Viola’s Martyrs exhibited at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, produced for the 2016 Indefinite Visions workshop in London.

From May 11-14 I will attend the Oberhausen Short Film Festival, providing social media coverage for Sight & Sound as a way to engage with the festival’s theme program, Social Media Before the Internet.

On May 16 I will present a program of video essays at the Gallery for Contemporary Art (GfzK) in Leipzig, as part of the series “Temporal Disorder”, in the context of the current exhibition “The Present Order.”

On the week of May 29 I will give a talk “The Video Essay: A Ten Year Personal History” at the Merz Akademie in Stuttgart.

I concluded the entry reviewing my video essay activity of 2015 by expressing an increased frustration with exploring the flat, two-dimensional parameters of screens. I was (and still am) seeking new ways to provoke a more palpable awareness of engaging with screens as not just a visual, but a physical activity.

The 2016 International Film Festival Rotterdam presented an opportunity to explore these concerns when they became the first film festival to commission me to produce an original video essay. The festival’s Critics Choice program, organized by Dana Linssen and Jan-Pieter Ekker, is a selection of films where critics introduce the works prior to their screening. This program spotlights the role of the critic in mediating the relationship between film and audience. Typically this is realized through the critic writing a review or program notes on the film. But when the critic produces a video essay in the film, and that video essay plays on a big screen in front of the audience right before they get to encounter the film for themselves, this mediating role becomes much more pronounced and loaded with a burden of responsibility bordering on an ethical dilemma. If I am showing footage of the film and explaining it to an audience, to what extent am I pre-empting or ruining their experience?

I faced this challenge when I made a video to introduce the festival’s screenings of Hong Sang-soo’s newest film Right Now, Wrong Then. I opted to make two video essays. The first one would be a side-by-side comparison of two similar scenes with running analysis in text windows. The second would be a written anecdote of my personal experiences with Hong Sang-soo and his films. These videos play simultaneously on the top and bottom halves of the screen, and the viewer is instructed to hold their hand up to block part of the screen so that they can focus on the rest. The viewer is thus given a choice to control what information they want to receive about the film. It also makes the act of viewing more explicitly physical by prompting viewers to use their hands to control their field of vision.

The video screened to a full house at the 900-seat Luxor Theater in Rotterdam. I gave the audience instructions to use their hands prior to the screening. It was fascinating to see different viewers obey and disobey these instructions. Continue reading “Video Essays from 2016 – Emerging from Screens Big and Small” →

If the blog has been relatively quiet for the past several days, it’s due to recent activities involving travel (talks at the École normale superieure in Paris and the University of California at Davis) and groundwork for future engagements beyond the Farocki Residency. It’s sad to think that this special three-month residency period is now in its final week. I cherish what I was able to do in this window of time that was unlike anything else I’ve experienced, even if it amounted to just a portion of what I hoped to do.

Among the things that occupy me at present are answering interview requests, one of which will be published on the website of the Institute for Contemporary Art in London in advance of my presentation there on March 30, as part of the Essay Film Festival. For efficacy’s sake, I referenced past interviews to see if I’d already answered some of the questions. In doing so I retrieved answers to interview questions emailed to me by Tilman Baumgärtel for an article published in Die Tageszeitung on April 15, 2015.  As it turns out, little of the interview was quoted for the article, so I post it here as the answers still speak for me, and reviewing them lets me reflect on how to carry forward with my work (one of the major objectives I’ve had for this residency).

Continue reading “A Still Useful Interview” →

With the previous entry on 2014, I commented on the extent to which video essays had by that point yielded a vast and growing range of techniques to explore film and media. At the same time, I was becoming more interested in exploring the space outside the screen:

That was from a presentation I gave in graduate school in the fall of 2014. (The full presentation can be viewed here.) This was near the start of a period when, following the release of Transformers: The Premake, I began to receive invitations to give talks at film festivals, schools and other venues. Here’s one on video essays from the Boston Independent Film Festival in April 2015, and one on desktop documentary from March 17, 2015 at University of Sussex.

But the most performative and experimental presentation I gave was at the 2015 Society of Cinema and Media Studies annual meeting. Continue reading “Video Essays from 2015 – Struggling with the Screen” →

On Feburary 20 the Internet Movie Database shut down its Message Boards, which had been a mainstay for online discussion of films for 16 years. As it was covered by most media, the shut down was attributed to the boards being overrun by abusive interactions by online trolls. Though IMDb never stated this as a reason for shutting down the boards, tough its statement alludes to the boards “no longer providing a positive, useful experience.” I can’t deny the pervasive negative impact that trolls have on online and social media culture, which these days can even be found amongst the most influential world leaders. But I do want to acknowledge that there was a time when the IMDb Message Boards were pretty much the center of my existence, where I devoted an obsessive amount of activity for the sake of nurturing my relationship to films.

Continue reading “A Moment to Remember the IMDb Message Boards” →