Unedited Classmate Critiques on Video Art Project 2

The piece may be seen here

The following are notes that I jotted down as my teacher and classmates critiqued the piece.  Each empty line marks somebody else commenting.

Teacher comments:

Many genres – 70’s movies in lighting and color, many genres specific to art.

Similar to artists: Bruce Nauman, Douglas Norman(? Gordon?)

Wall cutout becomes strangely significant in frame – why?

Evokes thoughts of people going crazy – Pink Floyd's Comfortably Numb, end of Apocalypse Now –smiling at end – crazy but funny at the same time.

Where does the piece lie?

Discomfort – frightening feelings, feelings of getting cut.  Visceral experience, bodily experience.

Sound element – bigger picture – filmed within urban environment, police helicopters in background.  Greater world feeding into what he’s doing.

Goes all these places, cringing while watching it.

Was concerned about cigarette and glasses during planning, but “it had to be this way.”

Questions – Why smoker?  Era of clothing?  Why is he not in a bathroom?

Reminded of Monty Python animation – Terry Gilliam shaving animation

Elements of drag – everything becomes costume, everything becomes performance.  Male to male drag, female to female drag, gradients of gender and absurdity.  This man is performing a male character type that is difficult to articulate – absurd, exaggerated, all-out.  Nighttime scene, garish colors, lighting.

Costume perfect – did you remove the blades?

Questioned authenticity of razor.

Good casting – seems mostly fake with hair and glasses.  Every aspect seems unreal in a good way.

Absurdity of scene is pretty intelligent – art can be selfish in its demands to be interpreted or held to a specific theme.  In focusing on aesthetics, didn’t go this way.  Art can be about personal reasons.  Piece mocks art in a good way.

Polanski and Polanski's Films

[This was written for my Criticism class, and is intended to simulate a post on an established blog, considering the relevancy of Roman Polanski's legal issues in assessing his films.]

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            Neither Pawel Edelman, Didier Lavergne, nor Wolfram Krabiell are Roman Polanski.  Neither are Christian Ehlert, Jean-Marie Blondel, or Patrick Kuttner.  They and dozens of others worked, presumably quite hard, to make “The Ghost Writer,” which Roman Polanski recently directed.  None of them, presumably, raped a thirteen year old girl and lived out the life of a high profile international exile, nor is the film a story of a controversial director that did just that. 

But apparently none of that is of any consequence, because for all the chatter, Polanski might as well have been cryogenically frozen since fleeing to France; “The Piano” came out a long time ago, and the talk surrounding his recent arrest in Switzerland gives little room for any subject taking place since his relocation.  Have we become so drunk with celebrity culture that we need an individual authorship to affix to every movie we see?  The idea that the director carries to term the conception and birth of a film single-handedly is romantic, but then you couldn’t really call the job “directing.” While there’s an auteurist case to be made for a unifying vision, I don’t see how a decades old act of sexual violation, as thoroughly repulsive as it is, has anything to do with Polanski’s directorial attitudes towards a political thriller, or any of the movies he’s made in exile, for that matter.  I think that somebody could make the case that an interest in a real life act of monstrosity is more important than Ewan McGregor and Pierce Brosnan looking compellingly serious, but that still doesn’t change the fact that it isn’t relevant in considering his most recent film.

In the Middle Ages, artistic inspiration was considered a blessing of God in a very real and direct way.  The idea that creativity was a human achievement was unheard of, and artists would create their works anonymously, so as not to distract from the glory of God.  They considered themselves artisans, skilled craftsmen, and when cinema came into being directors were regarded in the same capacity until the Auteur Theory inseminated the zeitgeist of the art.  The implications of that moment are far too numerous to really tackle here, but it must be said that the inclusion of directors to the celebrity culture and the star system that helped spawn it are amongst them.

Perhaps the Internet is to blame.  Films feel more self contained in a theater, bathed in shadows and light and walled off from the harsh brightness just outside, but now that we’ve taken to streaming our brains out, the film going culture has changed in ways that won’t truly be understood until a generation or two grows up.  At the very least, those changes involve pausing, portability, and the ability to open up an Internet tab and look up whatever, about whomever.  We’ve enshrined user autonomy at the cost of the “experience” of a film.  How can we be drawn into a world that freezes with the flick of a finger or the whiff of a whim?  Surely it must break down the diegesis that breathes life into the imagined realities of the screen.  It brings films closer to the real world and narrows the distance required to think of the personal scandals of a picture’s makers.

But even all of that is beside the point.  Film shouldn’t be an authoritative experience, and people should interact with the medium as they choose.  But critical assessors of a film lack that luxury, and to evaluate a film on anything other than its own content is to do a disservice to the small army of hardworking individuals that make it with their sweat and blood, and didn’t rape any children along the way.