Nouveau and Improved
1995; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 23; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1543-3404
Autores Tópico(s)Cinema and Media Studies
ResumoThe Montreal International Festival of Film, Video and New Technologies tends to get lost in shadow of larger Montreal World Film Festival that each year takes place two months later. That is a shame because its selection of work provides an exceptional opportunity to glimpse ways that makers are challenging media arts conventions. This year's festival, noted as the oldest (and yet youngest) festival in Canada, was organized by Claude Chamberlain. Chamberlain's programming, true to search for genuinely nouveau forms of video, film and new technologies, ran gamut from conventional narrative films to experimental film and video, to emerging technologies like CD-ROM. The quality of work in festival's large program varied widely, of course, but such variety is testimony to vitality of field. American independent film and video has always had a significant presence in festival by virtue of both number of entries in program and wide recognition that such work has subsequently enjoyed. Although press release notes that the festival provides a launching pad for commercial release of Quebec, Canadian and films at a time of year that is generally reserved for American blockbusters, there were still many films and tapes from just south of border. In addition to big-name art house movies such as Crumb (1994, by Terry Zwigoff), much work was by relatively unknown Americans who stretched media definitions to provide a glimpse into contemporary media art concerns. Several American videos, for instance, focused on changing landscape of Eastern Europe. That fall of Communist bloc holds such interest for U.S. artists seems to stem from gradual but partial westernization that region has undergone as a result of capitalism. The former bloc is now stuck in an odd in-between state: it is neither as exotic nor as foreign as it once was, partially due to McDonalds on every corner; yet very awkwardness of that presence hints at a remaining otherness to which these videomakers seem to be attracted. Lyrical documentation of wandering through an Eastern Europe on cusp of capitalism was focus of both Jem Cohen's Buried In Light (1994), and Ken Kobland's Moscow X (1993). Cohen's video was shot mostly on super-8 and has a characteristically grainy, dreamy look, integrating excerpts from language phrase books in an attempt to express widespread alienation produced by this transition. Cohen traveled far and wide, from Dresden to Prague, and ruminates not only on fate of communism but continuing impact of World War II (there is a poignant sequence shot in Auschwitz). Despite comic relief provided by phrase book, video is extremely melancholy, painting East in drab, dark colors and showing everything in terms of decay. Kobland's film has a similar feel to it, and indeed was shot during same period as Cohen's (although Kobland confined his traveling to Moscow). There is much footage of demonstrations, and Kobland focuses on apparition of faces-in-the-crowd. In this way Moscow X feels more intimate than Buried in Light, getting closer to people of Eastern Europe. Both works are structured as diaries, though Cohen is less prone to grandiose philosophizing than Kobland, whose informal musings are closer to diary form. Breaking out of this angst over spread of capitalism - a view of East that frames it in specifically Western terms - was Mira Reym Binford's deeply moving video Diamonds in Snow (1994). In video, Binford returns to a small Polish town whose Jewish population was nearly decimated by Nazis in order to document people who helped to hide her. The video reveals, however, that patriarch of family who saved Binford was also cruel and abusive, and Binford's efforts to understand ambiguity of her memories form crux of work. …
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