jueves, 29 de julio de 2010

The Dissolving effect

The real life events are closer to me. That’s why this documentary effect is not accidental – it is achieved by combining a number of interconnected technical and dramatic methods. By the way, I am trying to avoid the word “narrative” – I think it has become outdated in relation to cinema. This term is not a genre and not a category – it’s from an area of philosophical categories. I do prefer to juxtapose the narrative and documentary cinema. You were quite correct in noting the dissolving effect. This is what the concept consists of: the relativity of the divide between life and its artistic comprehension.

Sharunas Bartas in conversation with Xenia Drugoveyko

Agreement with reality

Something I've noticed from making picture to picture is I have increasingly more confidence with what reality can give me and how I can come in agreement with this reality to create my discourse.

Jose Luis Guerin speaking about Los motivos de Berta.

martes, 6 de abril de 2010

James Benning interview by Scott Mcdonald

Well, there are many different ways to enter one of my films. Certainly the formal and aesthetic level is the most apparent, and perhaps the most immediately challenging. From the very beginning I tried to define a new film language, a new way of giving information (or telling a story). When I first showed 11 x 14, I lost half my audience because they didn't know how to watch the film, but it always pleased me when people would tell me they'd almost left but instead had stayed with the film and felt that the experience had taught them to look differently, to pay more attention and become more proactive as viewers, to look around the frame for small details and not wait for the film to come to them.

I have a very simple definition of an artist: The artist is someone who pays attention and reports back. A good artist pays close attention and knows how to report back. I teach a course called "Looking and Listening." The class and I practice paying attention Noun 1. paying attention - paying particular notice (as to children or helpless people); "his attentiveness to her wishes"; "he spends without heed to the consequences"
attentiveness, heed, regard . I take them to many different places, often for a full day, and we look and listen. Sometimes we go to an oil field in the Central Valley, or to a mountaintop moun·tain·top
n.
The summit of a mountain. to watch the sky brighten as the sun begins to rise, or to a homeless neighborhood in downtown Los Angeles Downtown Los Angeles is the central business district of Los Angeles, California, located close to the geographic center of the metropolitan area. The sprawling, multi-centered megacity is such that its downtown core is often considered just another district like Hollywood or , or to the port at Long Beach. We gradually learn that our looking and listening are coded by our own prejudices, that we interpret what we see through our own particular experiences, and we learn that we need to confront our prejudices and learn to see and hear more clearly. And to learn more about what we do see.

Yes, I do think people want to know more about things after they learn how to really hear and see. Yes, I do hope they will go on to interrogate not only what I show in my films but what they see and hear in their everyday lives. Paying attention can lead to many things. Perhaps even to a better government.

Testing your patience: Scott MacDonald talks with James Benning

domingo, 10 de enero de 2010

Jaques Ranciere by T. J Demos

"[Aesthetics] is a delimitation of spaces and times, of the
visible and the invisible, or speech and noise, that simultane-
ously determines the place and the stakes of politics as a form of
experience.”The aesthetic constructs the scene of politics as
much as it defines and (de)legitimates the discourses within it"
The aesthetic constructs the scene of politics as
much as it defines and (de)legitimates the discourses within it.
And while, for Rancière, aesthetics signifies a mode of appear-
ance that extends beyond artistic practice—in terms of its “dis-
tribution of the sensible” within everyday life, regulated by
institutionalized and policed systems of power—it also defines
the force of the political within art, which is capable of propos-
ing alternatives to conventional politics from outside its system.
For Rancière, fiction (as from the Latin, fingere) means
to forge, rather than to feign, and therefore what he appropriately
calls “documentary fiction” reconfigures the real as an effect to
be produced, rather than a fact to be understood.28“Documentary
fiction,” Rancière contends, “invents new intrigues with histor-
ical documents, and thus it touches hands with the film fable
that joins and disjoins—in the relationship between story and
character, shot and sequence—the powers of the visible, of speech,
and of movement.”As a result “we cannot think of ‘documen-
tary’ film as the polar opposite of ‘fiction’ film,”
Far from being opposed to fiction, documentary is actually one mode of it,joining—both in continuity and conflict—the “real” (the indexical, contingent elements of recorded footage) and the “fabulated” (the constructed, the edited, the narrative) in cinema.