So the nice thing about my digital video class (I am going to have to upload some of them somewhere and let you all see them) is that the prof is totally awesome about giving you feedback about your ideas and stuff like that.
So we were talking about the projects we were going to do for our final projects. i said Fight Club was one of my favourite movies and he said I should do something about fight club.
So now I'm thinking about something to do for my fight club digital video project and I figured it would be more productive to post it on LJ and get any passing feedback y'all have than not and try to come up with something in a vaccuum.
Here's why I like fight club
- in a lot of ways i find it kind of gen-x-nostalgic, from the point of view of someone who isn't genx but is entertained by the extreme emoness
- I find it hilarious for the same reasons.
- I think I like fight club for the same reasons I like TS Eliot and Waiting for Godot. I find them all hilarious.
- I got into fight club in grade 12 (when i got into tse too) and I guess it was kind of a formative period for me (or whatever)
- As I am sure many of you know, I did this gigantic project in grade 12 about Fight Club and the Wasteland that I still love ... I had so much fun working on that project. Grade 12 in general was good times, so it's quite likely that some of my fightclub love has something to do with that
- I also find grunge entertaining in much the same way I find all these other things entertaining. Same with modernist literature (esp Great Gatsby / The Stranger [Camus])
So I'm not completely sure what that means or how I could make art out of it. We had to do presentations on video artists. I presented on Douglas Gordon, who does a lot of projections using existing footage. Sometimes he plays one film several times, out of synch, and sometimes he plays too apparently thematically opposed films over top of each other and in doing so "reveals how well they actually work togehter". He also did 24hour Psycho, which was about how well you know it and the anticipation created for things you know are coming, and about your own personal relationship with films. We also looked at Martin Arnold (
wikipedia /
Alone on youtube) which is also, for me, about personal relationships with films and the space between the details that can stick with you and the entire film. Not sure whether that's a critic-sanctioned reading of his work, but that is rather immaterial at the moment.
So. What could I look at in this project?
I might like to look at the worldview and related it back to TS Eliot .... it would really be a video art version of my project, but I really liked that project and I think there's something interesting implicated in a realisation of how similar depression is over vast timeframes where the causes seem totally different but are similar. Also I get a lot of [perverse] joy out of that comparison, somehow, so that might be interesting to explore too ... the intersection between this sort of very (now) cliched and over-the-top depressed worldview which is, I think, for me, existent in both those works but that then translates into a huge source of entertainment for me, reading it a bit (or a good long while) after the fact. Also, I think the way in which I identify with these worldviews is pretty ... weird or ambivalent, so I think that might be an interesting thing to explore by trying to bring out the sorrowjoyhumour in both works (or just fight club)
Also, on wikipedia, there's this quote about the movie: This film is now popularly considered to be an uncompromising critique of humanity's loss of identity through mass consumerism. I think this is one of the things my prof was talking about when he said that Fight Club is a movie that deals a lot with stuff about its time and captures the mood and so on. I think that was what he said.
Anyway I think I'd like to do the sorrowjoyhumour all existing at once in tension thing. I think that might be (at least for me) the most pertinent thing about the movie, and the way in which it captures any sort of zeitgeist. I'm going to watch the movie a few times and email my prof about it. I would love to bring The Wasteland into it, except that I think it might be too complicated. Also I seem to bring The Wasteland into many, many things, which I suppose is because I like it so much.
Heh, I was reading my old posts from 2004 / early 2005, when I finished the Fight Club / Wasteland project, and wow was that ever a while ago, and how ridiculous do I feel about it! I can't believe third year will be over in a month and that I might graduate by the end of 2009 and that I might actually successfully come out of four years of working myself to insanity with a BFA Hons Visual Arts. Then I will move back to Calgary, do web design to pay the bills, and be involved in the art community and have some kind of artistic practice until I know enough about what I am about to begin thinking about getting an MFA.
I don't know if I said anything about this on LJ, but I got a co-op job for this summer back in feb. I'm going to be working as a 'web design and projects assistant' at the co-op office, redesigning their website and promotional materials. I am really excited about it.
And because I am in that don't-want-to-make-an-imageless-post mode ... new etching ... not finished yet.
So my plan is, when I finish my classes I will start catching up with project 365.