Old VS. New Video

Hmm. Well this entry ought to be interesting! First off I'd like to talk about the old videos we saw today. I saw many of them last semester so it was nice to be paying attention to more detail this time around instead of trying to follow the meaning behind it like last time. One video I thought I'd hate but I actually ended up finding interesting was Lisa Steele's Birthday Suit. I liked it because it told a story, unlike most of the films we had seen so far. It wasn't out of focus, it wasn't random images, and even though she was nude she was frank and easy with her nakedness, not sexual at all in any of her movements. I liked hearing about each of her scars and it made me think of my own. I still don't know that I'd consider that film "art", however. Just like Vito Acconi's Theme Song. I can see the thought process and I can appreciate that he was trying to break the barrier of the screen, to allow us viewers into his space...but I couldn't watch it very long because I found him dirty and unnecessarily crude. I found his face and disturbing eyes much worse to watch than Lisa's naked body. I don't like being seduced by a creepy smoking dirty eyed so called artist. How is this artistic? Yes he improvised well, and I like his thought process, but there my interest dies.

I watched a few videos on YouTube and I found that they were not as artistic as the ones we saw in class today. Although old video and new video still have the same home movie feel, the older videos with their grainy footage and out of focus closeups add to the medium, making you feel close to the actors. I also like the grainy footage because like film with its flashing frames, it catches your eyes and keeps you attention. But these new YouTube videos, even though they have the same feel, were less personal in medium even though just as personal in feel. It seemed like an odd contrast to me, and one that did not work. It made me appreciate what we saw in class much more. For instance, I will compare two videos that I saw.

The old video is Sadie Benning's If Every Girl Had a Diary, and the new video is here: http://cogcollective.blogspot.com/2006/12/screen-dump-videos.html Click on the third one, "SadEyedAnimeGrl".

These videos were very similar, just two girls telling us a little about themselves. The old version was a pixelvision camera, and it was slightly blurry and details were washed out of the girl's face. She did closeups of her eyes and hands, and made her hand in strong black and white contrast, do random but every day movements. Even though we've seen them before, in black and white we saw them in a new way. In the new video however, Anime Girl was still artistic, but in a whole new way. The video she used was better quality but the lighting had the same high contrast as Sadie's, so her face's details were also lost. Her image was obviously doctored with special effects, which I felt was not a bad thing but made it more about the technology than the relationship of actor to viewer. This filmmaker made the video to be funny, as evidenced by her language and her use of special effects like fake glasses and random bursts of funky music. Just because it is comedy does not make it any less artistic, but I didn't feel any real connection to the actor like I did with Sadie's piece. Hers was almost haunting and it drew you in and explored new ways to look at the face and hands. Anime Girl's was an exploration of humor and color and special effects. I felt it was a great way to show how far we've come in video. Video can still be what Acconi said, if it is done correctly. But in our age and with all the technology out there, the images are far less grainy and the feeling that Acconci was going for is lost on the new era of video. Vicconci said his video should be about the idea more than the medium. Now I think with the rise of special effects we could say this focus could change from idea back to medium. Now that we can do so much with video there are more avenues to explore and more variety in results. I also think the personal one on one aspect of video can be dropped for a more artistic, perhaps abstract form. No, it isn't my preference, but video as a medium is so broad now and can be doctored so many ways that to not explore more of these avenues would be to cut short advancement and creativity. I personally think that not enough people have used these doctoring methods in video.