whatever works

[newyorkisnow]

This past weekend I cooked beef stroganoff with Faith. It's probably one of the biggest accomplishments of my whole summer. Actually reading through Foucault's Archeology is close, but not nearly as enjoyable (for obvious reasons). Pictures to come soon, I hope

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[newyorkisnow]

Hmmm. I wrote a lot about that movie for my paper, so I apologize if the following sounds like it came from a book. Haha.

I think a movie like TOUCHING is pretty dated as an artifact of structural film; you know, all that crap about how a film should represent nothing beyond what's happening on screen; or that we should return to the material properties of film as a self-enclosed medium and only make films that are specifically "filmic," like then-current trends in modernist painting. Sharits intended those films to be living thought-processes or keys to meditation, 'a temporary assassination of your consciousness.' I have to agree with Allan Sekula when he calls structural film a self-annihilating project.

But the beauty of postmodernism is that you can go back and approach those films in new ways! And I think that's where T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G, can be really interesting. I really like the way T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G, takes these images that suggest destruction (cutting off your tongue) while the film actually destroys the image itself (the "destroy destroy destroy" on the soundtrack) until the image is gradually erased toward the end. The different colorings of the body remind me a lot of the Warhol Marilyn Monroe series, where everything is just pushed to the point of totally meaningless simulacra. It's like the letters broken apart in the title -- all the elements of the image become shattered, too.

Rosalind Krauss liked to think of Sharits' films as metaphors for experience. We always want to reach out and grab these images, but the momentum is so incredible that they're always just slightly out of reach, they're always being replaced by others. It's like those moments where we try to step outside of ourselves for a moment of self-analysis, but it's impossible because consciousness is always moving forward. Not sure if that makes sense. I think that even though it fails to create self-enclosed filmic art, it's really good at playing up that tension of an image's presence/absence on the screen.