JUST WHAT IS IT
THAT MAKES TODAY'S VIDEOS
SO BEAUTIFUL, SO EXCITING?
Richard Philpott
Zooid Pictures
First of all, there is the reassuring predictability of the form.
Secondly there is the comforting familiarity of the content.
Without wasting time on well-know technological arguments (something from the structuralist seventies), there is an undoubted relationship between technology and form of 'expression'.
The structuralist fimmakers of the seventies in London collapsed the two in what came to be called structuralist materialism Strangely, when we look today at the work produced during that famous ideological fight against narrative, we now see beautiful films pregnant with meaning and comprehension. On the other hand, and equally curiously, in the nineties, the "marvellous" overabundance of (materials) technical means to (structure) expression in video edit suites appears to have produced wealth in inarticulate attempts to reiterate the familiar in the guise of having something worthwhile, even new or important to communicate.
To what extent is this due to the lack of that technological retrain which imposes itself so much more throughly on filmmakers. Is the very proliferation of the technology, the inexpensive availability of the camcorder, the cause of so much predictability and familiarity in video art? Or are we rather passing through the juvenile phase of the medium in which the son emulates the father, as film once served theatre? Or is it simply that the son is condemned to repeat the mistakes of the father and have his genuine successes condemned as imitations? Must he wait for maturity to speak with his own voice? Critical appreciation often tends to ignore the question and invest much importance in the value of a piece simply by virtue of it being in a medium which is often alien to the critic. Does it achieve a kind of Exoticism which blinds the critic to its intellectual value? Is a triptych on the theme of birth/life/death by Bill Viola critically elevated above the banal simply by virtue of it being projected video?
These questions neglect the value banal. Much of the value of independent audio-visual productions lies in its exploration of the banal. Domestic disasters recorded on home videos are producing television's most popular programmes throughout the world. The more critically-at-tuned middle class or intellectual viewer is being presented with video diaries, a kind of televisual confessional which permits us to enter lives alien to our own experience. This form of amateur independent production, although sponsored by broadcast television also lies very close to the heart of independent experimental film and video. Independent form, or even divorced from the seduction bare and we encounter video and film art as therapy.
The therapeutic and confessional function often releases. The artist from the tyranny of the medium's seductive exoticism. But it is not a function gladly adopted by the creator. It represents more frequently by recognisable and acceptable interpreters that such as narrative, symbol, myth etc. Thus what is more new and urgent in the mind of the filmmaker must frequently be presented in terms more ancient and undemanding. Similarly, the visual novelty or abstraction of a work may frequently be underpinned by an aural track which remains familiar and concrete. The filmmaker can rarely escapee the real psychological and thus aesthetic need to impose order. Frequently in experimental film and video it is the richness, diversity and invention of the image track which carries much of abstraction whilst the sound track carries the concrete. Above all, it is speech which, unsurprisingly, most often provides that which imposes order.
In the arena of the confessional, this search for order frequently reverts itself to the film/video maker as having mythic proportions consequent upon the exploration of depths, the overcoming of resistance's and the attempt to utter the unspokable. The seduction of the mythic, even in its classical form, is extremely potent and, therefore, unsurprisingly common in modern film/video.