minimovies.org

Minimovies is a site dedicated to showcasing a selection of bizarre episodic documentaries produced by the good folks at Submarine Channel, which handily can be viewed on a variety of platforms. The documentaries produced to date have been superb – here’s a few highlights to give you an idea…

Grillz or ‘Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is’, an extraordinary glimpse into the popularity of mouth jewellery amongst Hip Hop communities; Ig Nobel Prizes, charming interviews with scientists whose findings, such as homosexual necrophilia in the mallard duck, have won them the award for ‘research that makes people laugh and then think’; and I Love Alaska, a touching story made from the search queries of one AOL user that were accidentally leaked onto the internet, created by artists Sander Plug and Lernert Engelberts.

Linear, Dryden Goodwin

Londoners traveling from Southwark and London Bridge tube stations may well be familiar with the images above. As part of TfL’s Art on the Underground initiative artist Dryden Goodwin has been commissioned to draw sixty portraits of individuals working in various roles on the Jubilee line.

Rendered in multiple layers of delicate pencil strokes and scribbles, the blown-up portraits are presented outside the stations on big billboards and on poster sites across the underground network. For a real sense of the project however, you are encouraged to go online where the intimate portraits come alive. Each image is presented as a short animated film that documents the accelerated progression of the drawings, accompanied by fragments of conversation between the artist and sitter that reveal a multitude of personal exchanges and stories. Together the animations and dialogues form an intimate and diverse social portrait of this community of workers.

Linear will be online until February 2011.

The Five Obstructions, Lars von Trier and Jorgen Leth

“This is therapy, not a film competition with yourself. You’ve made the best film, I assume the best was the first. We are using it to go back in time, to see where we can go and examine it.” Lars von Trier, The Five Obstructions

Filmmakers: how brave are you? How pure is your quest? How true is your art? I wonder how many of us would be strong enough to stand up to the challenges of Lars von Trier, as Jorgen Leth does in The Five Obstructions.

In 1967, Leth made a short film called The Perfect Human. In 2003, Von Trier challenged him to remake the film five times, each time under certain restrictions. What ensued was an intellectual game between two very strong-willed filmmakers.

It seems at times that Von Trier is simply playing with Leth for his own amusement:  he wants to push him, to trip him up. He seems intent even upon breaking him. Leth manages to produce a beautiful and interesting film, no matter how tough the restrictions. But even though Von Trier seems impressed by the quality of Leth’s remakes he is unsatisfied, making comments such as: “I don’t think you were true to what really matters to me”. Let us ask, what does matter to Von Trier? What would satisfy him?

The Five Obstructions is, beyond anything else, a film about the creative process. A key part of the process is dealing with creative control. Filmmaking is always a battle between control and chaos; most often an attempt to impose some kind of order over chaotic elements such as money, people, weather, locations and so forth. We see in many of Von Trier’s films an apparent embrace of chaos. At the very least, it is allowed to run amok inside carefully placed boundaries. Von Trier finds a way to make it work according to the needs of the film. Control is also a personal issue for Trier who suffers from various phobias and obsessive compulsions. He seems engaged in a constant battle to gain control over himself and the world around him. His way of dealing with this within filmmaking is, “to set up limitations like we did with Dogme. By removing some options in certain areas, you’re able to focus fully on other areas and rethink how you go about things.”

Interestingly, Von Trier is attempting to get Leth to relinquish his control. But Leth, in his cool emotional detachment, is clearly a man very much in control. Von Trier sees that there is something that he has lost by taking this stance. He wants something raw and accidental to come through: something human and emotional.  He wants the experience to leave a mark on him. He says to Leth after the first ‘obstruction’: “There is a degree of perversion in maintaining a distance… I want you to move on from there, to make you empathise.”

The final ‘obstruction’ has Leth doing nothing but reading a letter that Von Trier has composed, over footage from the previous Obstructions edited by Von Trier. This is the ultimate submission to the game that is being played. It is not for the sake of amusement that Von Trier is taking this mature filmmaker and asking him to revisit a film of his youth. Von Trier has maintained something youthful in his approach to his work. Leth, much to Von Trier’s disappointment, seems to have lost something.

The film is not an exercise in how films are made. It is a lesson in the importance of breaking out of habits, of constantly keeping oneself in check and of becoming critical of oneself. It teaches that what really matters in art is the viewpoint of the artist, but that this is no easy proposition: to be true to oneself demands constant work. Creativity, to put it simply, is the discovery of new ideas. To find new ideas one must maintain something of youth – an openness that leads one to take risks and not fall into habits. Maybe Leth’s weakness as a filmmaker is his reluctance to take any real risks. This is a trait I admire in Von Trier: his constant experimentation and reinvention is what makes him such an important director. His work goes beyond mere ‘taste’ and ‘style’; instead, it is about searches, explorations, leaps of faith, self-awareness. He uses film as a tool for studying and trying to understand ourselves and all the worlds in which we live.

So: filmmakers, how brave are you? How pure is your quest? How true is your art? Will you take up the challenge constantly to experiment and to seek out new ideas – and find the strength to bring back what you discover?

“Look at your habits … are they the product of innumerable little cowardice’s and laziness or of your courage and inventive reason?” Nietzsche

About the Author: Daniel Fawcett, Writer/Director and founder of One + One, The Filmmakers Journal.

Indepencia, Raya Martin

Filipino filmmaker Raya Martin has established himself in recent years with a complex body of work that employs a reflective use of media in order to explore the colonial past and fraught national history of the Philippines. His sixth feature film Independencia,  premiered in Un Certain Regard section at the Cannes Film Festival, is the second part of a proposed trilogy following his debut A Short Film About the Indio Nacional (or, The Prolonged Sorrow of Filipinos) (2005). Each film in the trilogy will be set during in a distinct period in Philippine history related to Spanish, America or Japanese occupation and each will adapt a cinematic aesthetic of that period. Indio Nacional was a made in the style of a silent film and Indepedencia, which is set prior to the second world war carefully reconstructs the style and techniques of this early sound cinema made in the Philippines, a film history which survives in only a few fragments and articles.

When I met Raya Martin during the International Film Festival Rotterdam I asked what drew him to recreate this period in Filipino history and how he developed a style and narrative that would work in that context yet also have currency today and allow a fresh understanding of Filipino history and the American occupation in the 1940s?

Well first I started thinking of scenes, generalised scenes from today that can be situated before in the past, like someone going to sleep or travelling, walking around alone, basic things like that but put in a different context and the history of before. Independencia naturally had to be narrative because of the demands of the films of that period, if it is a studio film it had to have a story. I was interested in Satyajit Ray during that time, not really reading up on his work and not really watching the films but reading up on the synopsis of all of his films. I thought that he was one of the most plot-full of all the filmmakers. So I just travelled along that idea and built this mother and son tale around the idea that during that time people moved out from cities and villages into the jungle. I wanted to move away from the coverage of the battlefield, so it was literally moving out of the centre. So you have the mother and son in the jungle and then the appearance of the girl who operates as an outside element that disturbs the situation. Developing the story was also about dealing with the whole basis of the project which was about history in cinema, and how the narrative could be influenced by that history and vice versa.

In that sense the historical style of the studio set is really crucial both in terms of re-creating that period aesthetic, but also the set allows you to create a micro-climate within which this drama takes place?

Yes, on a superficial level the idea was to create a specific environment for real people. The way I cast is also part of the concept. Here I really wanted actors from cinema and television because their tradition of acting is very flamboyant and showy and it fits in with the style. At the same time I was really interested in how dioramas work in the museum and how if you stay in one spot and just stare long enough things come alive. Also there is the concept of the box, in terms of cinema during that time where literally everything was done inside a box, inside a studio and also metaphorically it is inside the system that was built by Hollywood.

Film history exists through material in archives but just as importantly in the way it is recounted and retold. Can you tell me how you approached Filipino film history for this project and what sources you drew upon?

Well it’s corny for an artist to say ‘I just want to trusted my gut’ but in a way it was kind of like that, most of it is based on imagination. Imagination of course has a lot of bases and you take references to build it up, for me most of it comes from photography which is or could be the basis of cinema but also it is a universe away from cinema. At the same time I relied on the history of the American studio films of that period which has also influenced me in a way in making this film. It’s tricky because when you are trying to rebuild a national cinema, a film from your country which doesn’t exist anymore can only be done with a heavy hand, as it’s also going to bring back the colonial ghosts even though we are trying to move away from them. We need their help again to order move away from them, that is the irony of it.

It seems that Independencia is as much about films which might have been made, or which you wish would have been made, as those films that actually existed?

Exactly, which is why I would be scared if a real film from that period suddenly came out of some archive and people could say, ‘This is what it really looked like.’  Which could be totally different from what I did. The same time as historically it is not trying to be accurate, factually or aesthetically, it would be bad if it were totally invented. It’s really dealing with what we have now or what I have now and sharing it with people.

What draws you to appropriate distinct forms both from the history of cinema or other media in your work, from the use of early sound film aesthetics in Independencia to the recreated home movies that make up much of Now Showing (2008)?

I don’t know if it’s still correct but I really believe that the medium is still the message and especially in filmmaking. At least for me I start with what material I am going to work with and it’s often brought about by economics. Okay I have this certain budget, can I use 16mm or do I only have to borrow a camera from this person, and which type of camera, if it is digital or analogue. If it’s analogue okay, things will definitely look old because it is all about perception and so then we have to make the story about that. So if it looks like its from the nineties or eighties then it’s set during that time. The urgency of creation really is based on economics.

That’s an interesting way of dealing with those restrictions and the economic conditions that surround filmmaking.

They even become the starting point of an idea, yeah. It’s all in the process. For me it really doesn’t matter what the film would look like or where it was screened and what people would think, it’s really more about the process. Especially now in the Philippines there are a lot of people making films, I guess also in the rest of the world, who just pick up a camera and just do their own thing. In a way creation has become instant. I don’t have anything against that, instant art is also very beautiful. There is also a danger of romanticising the way people can spend years and years to create just one thing, maybe something as little as this or something as huge as this building. I’m against the idea of art as hard work but investment in artists adds to the soul of the work or spirit. On a superficial level when you work on a larger scale everyone has fun and there is more work for more people ­­– again it’s economics.

Can you tell me how the middle section developed in Independencia? Where did the idea for this fake newsreel footage came from?

Well you know how they used to screen films in the past, at the end of part one they had a short intermission and they showed newsreels commissioned by Pathe and the like which were essentially propaganda films. The films often talked about the heroism of American soldiers in the Philippines, so that was the idea for the film in the intermission. It’s a true story, there was an American journalist who said that this event was the greatest atrocity ever done by the Americans during the war, which is basically the story in the newsreel. In the scene a soldier just kills a boy who was  playing around with an egg. They also had this policy in the past to kill anyone who commits a crime under three years old as then it would be easier to manage and educate the rest of the population. So this scene is also about the population control during that time but centred around this dramatic incident. Also you have the boy who is in the fiction part and then the boy in the fake newsreel, but it’s a fiction based on a real story, so there’s this whole play with fictionalisation too.

The propaganda material makes explicit the issue that history is told from the perspective of dominant powers, and that puts the story of these marginal people removed from the cities and removed from the centre into a different opposition position.

I was also unsure about this initially because there are some obvious techniques used ­– like the newsreel – but also that it’s a melodrama and it’s in a studio, but I don’t think there is any other way. History, at least our history was built on that so you really have to take it and retell how it is but in a different framework. Have you seen John Gianvito’s the new film Vapour Trail?  There is the idea in the film that obviously history has always been written by the ones who have the voice and the ones who could inscribe it. Everyone has a history, but history is really about people who have a means to express it.

I’m interested in your relationship to visual arts and how you think about your work in relation to that area?

From the onset I really based myself in cinema. When I made this film called Auto Historia, which is ninety minutes long, but there is only ten or eleven shots in it, a lot of people said that it could be shown in a gallery as an installation. Of course I see exhibits and installations and I’m aware of it and aware of the dynamics of creating visual art pieces. But my understanding of creation is really based in the cinema. With my films, I insist on showing in theatres because the responses are really different and the experience is different. Cinema really, in the romantic sense, is sitting in a box of darkness with a projection and not leaving until the end. I think because cinema is about commitment. I believe in committing ninety minutes or ten hours of yourself to a work. Whereas in a gallery you just come back and forth, so the perception is totally different.

There are these great moments of humour in the film despite the seriousness of the historical period it is depicting. How do you balance these elements?

It really annoys me when people say that the film is so serious. I find parts of it really funny. Filipinos really have a strong sense of humour with other Filipinos, but when it comes to artistic expression everyone is so serious. When you see Filipino films in general they are devoid of humour. I guess it’s reflective of the effects of history and we try to laugh everything off but deep down inside it’s a history of sadness. So I wanted to move away from that and just show us on a superficial level but also to see inside of it, inside of a Filipino.

About the Author: George Clark is a curator, writer and artist. At the Independent Cinema Office between 2006 and 2008 he managed a range of touring projects including: ‘Essentials: The Secret Masterpieces of Cinema‘, ‘Artists & Icons’ and ‘The Artists Cinema 2006′. Independent curatorial projects include ‘The Unstable States of…’, ‘Without Boundaries: European Artists’ Film and Video’ and the retrospective ‘The Cinema of Miklos Jancso’ [co-curated with Travis Miles]. He has written for Art Monthly, Afterall, Sight & Sound, Senses of Cinema and Vertigo Magazine among other publications. He is currently collaborating with the artist Beatrice Gibson on the script for a film commissioned by the Serpentine Gallery and Camden Council.

Apichatpong Weerasethakul

Apichatpong Weerasethakul is a singular and distinctive artist and filmmaker. All his films and artworks are set in his native Thailand. Often non-linear and with a strong sense of dislocation, his works deal with memory, subtly addressing personal politics and social issues. Working independently of the Thai commercial film industry, he is active in promoting experimental and independent filmmaking through his company Kick the Machine.

BFI Gallery in London is presenting the UK premiere of Apichatpong’s single screen work Phantoms of Nabua from 14 May.  Described by the artist as ‘a portrait of home’ the installation creates a real-time, yet hypnotic and other worldly experience.

The directors most recent feature film Uncle Boonmee who can Recall his Past Lives (Lung Boonmee Raluek Chat) has been selected for competition at Cannes International Film Festival 2010.  Part of Weerasethakul’s multi-platform Primitive project, the film follows the story of Uncle Boonmee who is suffering from acute kidney failure, as he spends his last days in the countryside surrounded by his loved ones. Here Apichatpong talks about the stories and influences that inspired the film.

Carol Morley

Carol Morley’s films have been shown internationally in galleries, cinemas, festivals and on television, and have been described as “provocative films that cross boundaries between fact and fiction, exploring extraordinary things that happen to ordinary people” (BFI Southbank Catalogue). Since graduating from Central St Martins in 1993 with a first class honours degree in fine art film and video, she has received the Best Documentary Award at Melbourne International Film Festival, been nominated for a BAFTA and received a special Grierson Award. In 2003 was awarded an Arts Foundation Fellowship for Documentary Filmmaking. She is currently making the feature length film Dreams of a Life with producer Cairo Cannon and production company West Park Pictures West. Here she talks about her life, her influences and the about blending actuality and autobiography with her film The Alcohol Years – subject of an APEngine showcase.

15-Pixel Street Fighter, Alaskan Military School

APEngine put a few rapid fire questions to Ian W Gouldstone, award-winning filmmaker and design Drill Sergeant at the Alaskan Military School.

Can you sum yourself up in one sentence?

Ian W. Gouldstone is a designer, writer, and filmmaker based in London, UK.

So what do you take your inspiration from in your work?

I grew up in a house full of engineers and cartographers so my view of the world is heavily influenced by science, math, geography, logic and machines.  Having said all that, I’ve always been fascinated by everything that these things have no way of expressing.  Talk about making life difficult!

What piece of work would you say are you most proud of?

There’s no question that I love my first film, All Very Well and Good, the most.  It’s a student film, so it’s not going to win any prizes for craftsmanship.  However, it was the first thing I ever made that even began to express who I am.  If I hadn’t made it, I think I’d have gone down the strict numbers route: working late nights in a bank or at sea on a one-man submarine.  Maybe one day I’ll even revisit it…

Your RCA graduation film, guy101, was very successful – winning a BAFTA… it’s a darkly funny film – can you tell me where the story came from and how you used computer animation to represent it?

guy101 is based on a series of conversations I had with Keith who I met in a chat room years ago, so it’s pretty much a true story. At the time I made the film, I felt really overcome by how explicit animation had become, so with the film I really wanted to explore how animation could illustrate things implicitly. I figured the best way to do this was to illustrate these very human scenes in an extremely cold computer language.

You recently set up an outfit in deepest, darkest Deptford called the Alaskan Military School – where does the name come from?

That’s classified.

OXFAM: Face the Music, Alaskan Military School

How did your residency at Newport come about? What did you get out of the experience?

Newport University, in partnership with Screen Academy Wales, runs an annual Animator in Residence scheme, so getting the residency was as simple as putting together a compelling proposition and submitting it. At the time, I was concerned that the university might not opt for something so process-led but I was immediately blown away by the enthusiasm and support of the university.  The staff and students alike embraced the experimental aspects of the project and at times I was working with about 60 people from different departments all at once.

For me, personally, this project was all about finding the fun again in animation.  After the success of guy101, I was really paralysed for a while.  I put so much pressure on myself to make my next film even better that I forgot how to have fun with filmmaking.  So for me, this project was never about making a great film, it was just about having a really good time.  It worked!  And even better–it gave me loads of ideas too!

You mentioned that you were interested in taking the concept of your residency film To Whom It May Concern further, have you had a chance to do this yet?

Yes, I’ve been furiously pitching the idea as a means to help people and organisations quickly develop their visual communication skills. I’ve had lots of interest so far on both sides of the Atlantic and could be launching some new sessions very soon.

And what about your ‘virtual actors’ work at MIT Media Lab?

That was a dream job–I loved it.  I got to work with some of the best AI researchers in the world to make these autonomous animated characters that could use both their their voices and their bodies to communicate just like people do.  In the process I was constantly amazed to learn about how we subconsciously use our bodies to convey what’s going through our heads.  As an animator, it made me acutely aware of the multi-modality of film, a theme which I really got my teeth into a few years later with guy101.

So, have you ever considered working in gaming?

Definitely! Actually, I worked for a while at Sony’s flagship game development studio in Soho where I got to help build and launch one of their giant AAA titles.  I was very tempted to stay there after the launch, but I wanted to explore other things for a while.

This October, though, I returned to the gaming world with a series of animated spots we at the Alaskan Military School made for the huge indy games festival, GameCity.  Not only did we have a ludicrous amount of fun making the spots, but they also went massively viral amongst gamers.  It would be silly of us not to explore that further!

What was the concept behind Face the Music, the video you recently made for Oxfam?

Beating climate change is all about taking responsibility so I figured this film needed to reflect that in its form. Normally, a filmmaker would edit a film and construct a story by cutting away to different scenes or camera angles.  However, I thought the best way to turn passive viewers into active participants in the film was to give them the job of editing the film themselves. Here, I took inspiration from painting and fixed the camera on the landscape. Once I had determined that idea, it was my job to make sure that the investment the viewers had made in the film really paid off for them.  Clearly, my love for games came in handy at that point!

What projects are you working on at the moment?

Lots! In addition to producing a variety of commercial projects (animation, branding, art direction, consultancy) and teaching, I’m working with the others at the Alaskan Military School on some super top-secret stuff.  All I can say is that off the back of our recent work for GameCity, we’ve got some incredibly exciting collaborations lined up!

Addictive TV's Graham Daniels

APEngine talks to Addictive TV‘s Graham Daniels about life as an audiovisual artist.

How did it all begin… how did you come to set up Addictive TV – and why?

I started my creative life working in a studio that made music promos and all kinds of bizarre corporate videos, and later began working in film as an assistant director, then later a producer for broadcast television, mostly making arts programmes and off-beat late night shows.

This was how Addictive TV originally started. I’d gotten into VJing in my spare time at clubs and parties and wanted to fuse this experience with producing, and so created a TV series about electronic music and visuals called Transambient for Channel 4 – this was back in 1998.  Transambient led to another music series called Mixmasters for ITV1 and it opened up a whole international world of visual artists, VJs and music producers for me. Even though I began to perform professionally more and more as a VJ, I grew tired of playing all night for little money with the DJ getting all the glory, and this led on to thinking about how to create material that combined my love of cinema and music.

I wanted to combine electronic music with film, but not in the way others were doing it, I wanted to create much more integrated tracks where you could see pretty much everything you also heard, so there was little separation or emphasis one way or the other. The visuals would be the music.

It’s not a new approach – early experimental filmmakers had been doing this since the 1920s with abstract art, painted frame by frame on film – but what was new with us was that we didn’t want to go the abstract route, we wanted to experiment with narrative film and figurative images. Video artists like Emergency Broadcast Network (EBN) in the US had been doing this since the late 80s, remixing news from the CNN and the like, and they really inspired us, although I’d also say that that people like Oskar Fischinger, who worked on Disney’s Fantasia, also provided initial inspiration.

So… what and who is/are Addictive TV?

We’re a group of artists and producers, based in London with one of us up in Liverpool. Things have changed slightly in the last year, as former member Tolly departed having started a family, and the team has now expanded to include ex-Cream resident DJ Morf, who I’ve been playing all our live shows with, and mash-up guru Mark Vidler – best known for his Go Home Productions remixes – who’s been working in the studio with me on a lot of new material, including our recent football idents for Channel Five.

And in the back office are producers Francoise Lamy and Nick Clarke, who get the fun job of managing us creative types and our various projects.

In your live work, how does the balance between sound and image work – how much is planned, how much is ‘mixed live’?

We’ve always said – and hopefully showed with our work – music is inseparable from images. It’s unthinkable for us to not to be influenced by music, but it’s just as unthinkable for us not to regard images as equally important. They’re synergistic partners, which means the sum of their parts is greater than they are in isolation. We create original music built from sounds and their associated images sampled from films, music concerts, archives, video games and even sports events – so when audiences watch the results, they can ‘see the music’. With our work, images and sound are equal partners in a more pronounced way than in conventional audiovisual work such as films or montages, where the soundtrack is created separately, or even music promos where the video is created separately to illustrate the music; we create both side by side. And in our live shows, it’s all mixed live, just as any DJ mixes a live set, plus we use effects and live triggering of audiovisual samples – cutting and scratching. But it’s also all planned, in the sense that huge amounts of studio time has gone into creating all our tracks that we play.

Do you like the term VJ?

It’s fine to describe an artist who mixes visuals with a DJ or band, but it’s not really relevant to what we do, so we prefer to be called audiovisual artists. VJs will typically work with images only, whereas we work with sound and music too, but that’s a simple way of looking at it though; the wider media has been slow to understand this field of work and still likes to refer to anyone who works with images – despite what else they do or how they work – as a VJ – though it’s a bit like calling any musician a DJ.

Grandmaster Flash described you as ‘next level shit’ – is experimenting and playing important in pushing forward possibilities?

For sure, ’if you gonna do the crime you gotta do the time…’ It’s not an entirely appropriate saying, but you get the idea… there’s no progress without investing time and effort in experimentation. Doing audiovisual remix work sometimes seems like reinventing the wheel each time, there are always new challenges and things to learn, and no two remixes are alike. A remix made for our live set would have a very different feel to an installation created for an exhibition or even an alternative web-trailer for a film.  Creating our installation Sportive for the Beijing Olympics was a real challenge and forced us to think outside of our comfort zone.  Like most worthwhile things, it’s hard slog in equal measure with creative pay off.  Over time our work changes and develops, and now our work is different from how it used to be, and that’s how it should be – we’ve hopefully picked up something along the way and developed new techniques.

Why do you think film companies are happy to let you re-mix things up? Are they hands off ? Has anyone ever been unhappy with what you’ve done with their stuff?

I guess because they like our work. We understand film and that we treat the material with respect. Cinema is immensely important to us, we love it and I think we probably became as known as we have because of our remixing of films. It was never a conscious thing to do to get noticed, it just happened that way when years ago New Line Cinema saw our bootleg remix of the Michael Caine classic The Italian Job. They approached us to remix the 2006 Antonio Banderas film Take the Lead, and at that point no one had ever officially remixed a movie, and that job started the whole ball rolling, with making official film remixes for the Hollywood studios, and it also made the whole film remixing thing a lot more mainstream.

Remixing Slumdog Millionaire was great for us because up till then we’d only done big American movies and this was a credible indie movie really. When we were creating the alternative trailer no one knew the film would go on to win so many Oscars – we were just over the moon to be offered a Danny Boyle film! He was shown some of our previous work, loved it and gave the go-ahead and that was really pleasing -  having a great director allowing you free reign to remix their work is as good as it gets.

By and large we’re given total creative freedom with what we create, but when you work with a Hollywood studio for instance, they quite rightly have their own ideas and needs, which adds to the creative challenge. A viral or alternative trailer has to hit the right buttons for the marketing department and their vision of the film as well as anyone else who might have creative or artistic veto like directors, producers or distributors.  We’ve only ever had one instance of ‘unhappiness’ with a remix we created for one of the studios – they felt it was too ‘weird’ and ‘disturbing’ – so had to start again from scratch, and they loved it second time around – but don’t ask me which job it was, we’re sworn to secrecy!

Addictive TV is lots of things – but what do you enjoy most about what you do?

Creating the work is probably still the main thing. Flying around the world gigging in lots of different countries can be great fun too, after many years performing at clubs and festivals and all manner of arts events, it’s still a buzz to get up on stage and see an audience having fun and responding to what we do. You always meet great people too, working in the area we do; crazy creative types that become good friends over the years but still at the heart of it, I’d say creating work is still the most enjoyable.

What’s next?

Next is whatever anyone throws at us and we like the sound of…! In reality that means more live shows and remix work. Early next year we’re playing a few dates in Canada and the US and before that in early December we’re performing in Jakarta at the big annual music conference; it’ll be the first time we’ve played in Indonesia, so really looking forward to it. We’ve also just been asked about a national ad campaign for TV by someone who likes our style of work and thinks it fits with what they’re planning, so fingers crossed!  We’ve also been asked by Warner Brothers about creating an alternative trailer for an upcoming film, and by a gallery in Belgrade to exhibit a solo selection of our work.

Check out a taster of Addictive TV’s remixes here on APEngine.

Stuart Croft, The Stag Without a Heart (2009). Image courtesy of the artist.

APEngine talks to Stuart Croft about how, as an artist, he makes films that explore the language of cinema – for the art gallery context… touching on Hitchcock and Hammer along the way.

How and when did you start making film work? Did you train in filmmaking?

I went to art school. I was a painter for quite a long time, for about a decade. I did my BA in painting, had a studio practice, and then quite suddenly started making video, around the time I started my MA at Chelsea. I can see now that this happens quite often, now that I’m teaching. I see people who’ve got onto an MA and they’re given that extra confidence to try something that they always thought they might do but didn’t quite before…

Did you just happen to pick up a camera one day?

I bought two VCRs – it was the 90s – plugged them in, and messed around with found footage. I would do lots of TV cut ups and bits of movies on VHS. I would re-film the screen on Hi8 video and I would then make these very fast-moving frame by frame re-edits.

And that’s how you edited video in the 90s – you copy edited – because there wasn’t digital editing.

It was tape to tape. Non-linear was coming in by then but it was out of reach. And I had no idea that I would move into video – I had never thought that I would make anything that used technology. I was interested in painting because of its lack of technology. I was very, very interested in painting, but I realised that I probably wasn’t going to actually make an interesting painting. It was quite hard to stop. But I was very excited and kind of turned on by the directness of video.

You show your work in gallery spaces but the subject of your work is emphatically narrative, cinema. Your films almost always involve the telling of stories, but in a sense they’re not fiction or even narrative kind of films are they?

They’re definitely and deliberately not short films and although I dabbled with a kind of naïve structural practice, I moved fairly quickly into using narrative as an idea and as a subject and as content. I never wanted to make short films and I feel uncomfortable with the short film as a form for various reasons. Partly because it’s too often used as a stepping stone by fiction filmmakers who want to make features and also because I think it’s a very difficult format to successfully use – the 10 minute short.

But I’ve always been interested in making narrative work and seeing what happens if you place that in a gallery space.

I was thinking of people like Candice Breitz and Mark Dean who appropriate the material of cinema. But with you it’s a different engagement in that you’re using what might be called tropes. You make work that has the appearance of cinema, would you be comfortable with that?

Absolutely. I’d be very pleased if you were to come away from seeing a film of mine in a gallery thinking about that. Not for the sake of it, but because in the films I make you’re given certain expectations of cinema that are denied and thwarted – essentially the characters are entrapped in a particular scenario and the viewer is not given access to the ‘next’ scene. But on a practical level it’s also quite difficult to make work that looks like cinema on a restricted budget.

Stuart Croft, The Stag Without a Heart (2009). Image courtesy of the artist.

How do you manage that then? You work with professional crew?

I fundraise. I just shot a £20,000 piece of work with a research grant for a 12 minute work on 35mm with a crew of around 20. And we’re trying to make it look as Hollywood as possible, so that 12 minute sequence should really cost upwards of £300,000. But we’re shooting it on £20,000, so you come away feeling like you’ve just taken some very bad acid because the pressure is unbelievable. It means you have to shoot in a very, very short space of time. And I think nowhere is the relationship between time and money more evident than in fiction filmmaking.

The idea that what you’re making isn’t cinema but it’s about cinema. I’m thinking of how you actually deny people a story. You don’t just deny them the next scene. You can be rapt by what the narrator in your film is saying. And yet if you think about it, the whole thing falls apart and it’s as if there’s nothing there. So in The Death Waltz, there’s a ghost story but you’ve distilled things, and pushed things – the stories are very long – in cinema terms.

Yes, they’re longer than scenes in the cinema. So in that way they are distanced from cinema.

So it seems to me that you’re pushing things until an idea of cinema becomes very fragile.

I like the description; it’s not a description I’ve really come across. So yes, the work is about both the fragility and power of cinema.

I get into trouble in the art world because there’s a cinematic homage in the work which comes and goes as a thing that’s allowed. It wasn’t allowed in the gallery world when I started making work like this in the 1990s. Then it became accepted. And now it’s kind of a bit disallowed again. But that’s interesting, the way things move in cycles.

Is there a difficulty there in that the art world generally finds it hard to refer outside its own often quite limited parameters of understanding?

Yes, the parameters are limited and it depends if it’s quite local. I will go without showing in London for a while, and then suddenly lots of things will happen. And I’ll show in Italy where a curator will be very excited and there’ll be an audience that’s absolutely vitriolic. Because they have a Cinema that they’re proud of, unlike the cinema that we have in the UK, which we’re not particularly proud of. It’s been interesting the last few years showing very widely in an international sense, how different audiences engage with the works.

The Italians were incredibly hostile because this guy from London was, in their eyes, critiquing their Cinema. And they were getting up and leaving. I’d like to say they were throwing vegetables at the screen but they weren’t.

Where has your work been well received!?

In New York for instance very early on, I was in a small show and it was one of those things where it just kind of mushroomed into lots of different opportunities and it was instant. That’s part of the New York attitude, they commit straight away and it’s like, “Right I want you in a show in a month and it’s in a hotel and I want you to do this.” They instantly understood the homage-critique aspect. It took longer for that to happen in London.

But New York has that kind of art underground mix-up tradition doesn’t it? There’s Warhol of course, and then people like the Wooster Group who make artworks that are narrative fictions.

It has the underground and the early cable TV tradition, but I’d say there’s less of a dogmatic hangover in the US than here. And maybe that’s why there was this instant acceptance, from doing tiny hotel shows to PS1 in the space of a year, whereas in the UK it’s less sure. It’s hesitant. When I first started making video work, which was very lo-fi, and which referred to television more than cinema, there were people here saying, “You can’t show this in a gallery because it has a narrative content.” But I liked the idea that it wasn’t allowed. It suggested that I might be finally doing something interesting if it had a badge on it saying ‘disallowed.’

Stuart Croft, The Stag Without a Heart (2009). Image courtesy of the artist.

Going back to the question about fragility, there is a thwarting, there is a denial, there’s a deliberate frustration. There’s an element of entrapment and recurrence which is at the core, but out of that comes this sense of fragility – I like what you said about the kind of nothingness that comes out of narrative. And I think there’s a sense of celebration as well – it’s not a dogmatic oppositional stance, even in its appropriation of the language of cinema.

And there is no direct appropriation of the actual material – though that’s kind of where my first sketches started. And I was interested in my early days of making video in Fischli and Weiss – not their videos, those kind of quotidian vernacular home camcorder videos, but their sculptures – incredibly accurate replications of the ready made. The first video works I made were recreations of local television and corporate video, that were intended to fool the viewer, or to make the viewer think that they were watching a genuine piece of badly made corporate video.

And then I used that to move onto a new level which was about, in a sense, recreating or appropriating the language of cinema. But without lifting it directly as found material – I was always interested in making and constructing the language of fiction. And it’s always been – with a couple of exceptions – about fiction rather than documentary as a mainstream language.

But you’re appropriating stylistics as well there, both in the kind of fiction and with the visual style as well. I’m thinking specifically David Mamet and now the kind of Scottish baronial country house.

It’s Hammer.

Of course!

And a sideline here – something that’s interesting about shooting on film, and why I get a bit frustrated with those who suggest that you can shoot on HD and claim that “it’s the same.”

It absolutely isn’t the same, because if you shoot on film something really extraordinary happens, which is that it decides what to do with your work. It takes the work to a very precise point. So in the ‘Hammer’ piece, The Death Waltz, it wasn’t just the decision to shoot on film. It was the decision to shoot on Super 8, the decision to give the camera to the actors using an old camera with an old lens. Putting in new film stock, new Kodak film stock which is actually commercial 35mm motion picture product spliced into the 8mm gauge, which is fast, fine-grain, negative film.

All of that, but primarily the fact that it was shot on film, and a dose of the lighting, emerged as Hammer somehow. And it was never really explicitly discussed in pre-production that we would go for Hammer. It wasn’t like “we’ve got to make this look like Hammer.” When you shoot on film, it just happens.

All that makes it sound like a material sculptural practice.

No it’s not.

Well you’ve talked about the material, you’ve talked about process, you’ve talked about…

It’s a film making process.

Something mysterious that happens in the process?

One of the reasons I think it’s not a material sculptural practice is that the works never stay on film. They’re shot on film but they don’t go back to film, they go to video essentially, and I don’t want the film apparatus in the gallery, and I don’t want the entropy of the print, the gradual decline of the material over the course of an exhibition.

I’m interested in the works being seen and consumed and read as hybrids of film and video. To originate a chemical image and then to consume a hybrid of chemical and electronic pixel. Which is what the work’s partly about – how the content is vernacular and quotidian, and so I think the mode of consumption should also be vernacular and quotidian; we consume an awful lot of moving image which is a hybrid. You’ll see somebody watching a movie on their iPod which has been shot on 35mm cinemascope. The negative would have been bigger than the image that’s being consumed on the iPod. Isn’t that perverse, but interesting?

Hollywood still shoots on 35mm. And then it’s consumed in this myriad of forms.

Stuart Croft, The Stag Without a Heart (2009). Image courtesy of the artist.

You did a series which was drawing on, you said vernacular, it’s like an American vernacular. And now you’ve made The Death Waltz and the new work which are in this other – exploring, drawing on other genres.

Well actually I’ve gone back to Hollywood with the new one – The Stag Without a Heart.

It is an American character and it’s Hitchcock in setting or Hitchcock in image. So it has that merger and hybrid of British and American in it, and in the character and the accent and the casting, with a bit of Welles in there as well. It completes a trilogy of films which begins with Drive In (which is a circular car journey/road movie), followed by The Death Waltz, which is an endless ghost story told at a dinner party.

The Stag Without a Heart is altogether more ambitious and at the same time more minimal. All three films are based around a different monologue – a single piece of apocrypha and in this third film it’s a rewritten Aesop fable, which I turned into a circular piece of text, and in the writing process I pushed the fable’s aspect of political corruption to the surface.

So it takes the essential themes of certain kinds of cinema – certain kinds of American cinema – which can be political corruption, temptation to power, deception and circularises them within this Aesopic tale…

You say circularised but the stories do have an end and a beginning. It’s that they’re held in this work where they’re forced to repeat. They’re not films that have an end or a beginning and yet… I think when you watch them – when I watch them – it dawns on you after a couple of minutes that the story has begun again, rather than it doesn’t have an end. There’s escalation.

I wouldn’t say they have an end and a beginning! I would say there are arcs and there are troughs.

I’m saying it’s another undermining of story structure.

It is. The way the music is used is an example of that. I’ll say to the composer, I want it to be as flat as possible and he’s saying, “No, no, no we’ve got to take this arc up here,” and he usually wins the argument. So you do get, because of the wholesale borrowing of a set of codes – a ‘slice’ – more than a circle. Although they are circular! They are repetitive, there is denial, there is recurrent, undoubtedly. I’m looking for a posher word than slice!

My other thought is that cinema is about resolution, it’s generally resolved for the viewer, whereas art – and I think your work especially – is not about resolution.

I prefer that thought to the discussion we were having about whether they’re really circles or not. There is, unequivocally, no resolve. And it’s about using a particular space, which happens to be the gallery space – and the conditions of the gallery space and the traditions of the gallery. And its inherent condition of circularity, of irresolution if that’s the correct word, in order to manifest entrapment and denial and recurrence.

Whose entrapment? Who’s entrapped?

I think we should stop!

All images courtesy the artist © 2009
Stills Photographer: William Martin

Hooliganship at Cartune Xprez

APEngine talks to Peter Burr about the Cartune Xprez roadshow.

What is Cartune Xprez?

We’re an experimental animation project from Portland, Oregon. We organise screenings, exhibitions, publications, performance events and whatever combinations we can weave together around a youthful cartoon spirit.

It started about four years ago in Pittsburgh with me, Christopher Doulgeris, and Cassandra C Jones. We were collaborating on a cartoon performance and wanted to present it alongside animated work with a shared spirit. Cassandra and I were both travelling around the US a lot at that time and asking friends to recommend their friends’ video work to us. We selected a line-up from the subsequent discoveries and screened them in a programme with other music and video performances.

The artists involved in the project so far include: Blu, Martha Colburn, Barry Doupé, James Duesing, Timo Katz, Amy Lockhart, Takeshi Murata, Joanna Priestley, Seth Scriver, Gay Deceivers, The New Jedi Order, and many more.

You show an amazing range of work by people taking all sorts of approaches – showing artworld people alongside graphics people, and pencil drawn work alongside high-end digital… but it all hangs very well together… so… what’s your curatorial approach?

For sure, the project is quite fluid. Pulling these different people together has a nice way of conjuring energy that doesn’t exist in the gestures of any single artist. Recognising this transformative power of group shows, we tend to program work that raises more questions than answers. We like stuff that is imaginative and leaves a lot of space for viewers’ imaginations. This, as a really loose structure for programming artwork, allows for many styles to mix together well…. hand-drawn with digital with structuralist with comedic with darkness…. always with a heavy dose of mystery!

How have the artists responded – with lots of the work, you’re showing it in a different context than it would usually be seen in..does anyone ever object?

All of the artists been really supportive of the project. Now and then we get audience members who thought it might be a more traditional animation show.

Where does performance come in – is it always part of your shows?

We like presenting our shows with enough live energy to pull away from being strictly on-screen events. These are social events, which we tend to exaggerate through the addition of living animation energy. Hooliganship, a cartoon party band I do with my friend Christopher, has performed at almost all of the shows throughout Europe. Additionally we are traveling with an inflatable installation that blows up at each venue, shifting even more energy away from the traditional cinema experience. Beyond all these extra elements we fit into our luggage we like to work with local artists in each community we visit who share our sensibilities. Some of the highlights from this tour so far have been Kallioinia‘s crazed costume jam in Stockholm, Katapulto‘s Polish disco video escapade, and Prejka‘s wild pagan party atmosphere in Malmo.

You’re in the middle of a huge European tour – is this your first tour outside North America… how’s it working out?

Yeah, this is our first trip abroad. Touring is such an intense way to see the world! We’ve gotten really good at sleeping in closets, power-lifting large bags, smelling wireless internet from afar… a bunch of impulsive shifts I’m sure we won’t fully realise till we are back in Portland.

For this tour I organised a programme exploring the tension between senseless darkness and youthful optimism. Each event has felt really different depending on the local artists that join the programme. For the final two weeks of this tour (throughout the UK) Famicon is joining the tour to show a 20 minute programme of their cartoons, which should add a good bit of absurd humour.

Catch Cartune Xprez in the UK in November 2009

Dates: November 20: Glasgow – CCA; 
21: Aberdeen – Peacock; 23: Edinburgh – GRV; 24: Manchester – Islington Mill; 25: Leeds – Theartmarket; 27: London –The Old Police Station; and 29: London – House Party.