(Experimental Documentary)
The Nightingale (1084 N. Milwaukee Ave.) - Saturday, 8pm
The street-theater of a good protest should, through its
very nature, provide a rich allegory for the systems it rails against
and rich contrast to the street-theater of collective celebration that
takes place outside any major sporting event. Yet both forms of
spectacle can render control over an audience so absolutely that their
will to object is taken away and a de facto participation results,
merely through the act of observing. This intersection is central to
Michael Vass' VANCOUVER #1-13 (NOTES FOR A REPORT…) (2012, 60 min, HD
Video Projection), which uses the critical distance of a fictional
intelligence-agent-as-narrator to weave a self-reflexive essay about the
disparate goals of protesters and drunken revelers, while visually
highlighting the many behavioral similarities between the two groups.
Often relying on footage with a crisp and well-intentioned handheld
aesthetic, Vass initially guides the viewer toward a left-wing
interpretation of both the arrest of protesters during the 2010 G20
meeting in Toronto and the early public gatherings during Vancouver's
Winter Olympics. However, as the "agent" assigned to view the
"confiscated" tapes of a protester proceeds to analyze the motivations
of the cameraperson in ever-greater detail, Vass' own perspective
becomes increasingly less clear. While the structure is not a direct
route to an essay film, the major point is to provide documentation of
these two events through simultaneous objective and subjective lenses,
highlighting the unseen hand of the artist in this process. The film
questions the morality of street videography, both literally and
figuratively, and conveys skepticism of direct documentation's ability
to give agency to the protest filmmaker. Although uneven and, by its
narrator's admission, ambiguous in its policy statement, it ultimately
succeeds in using distanced intimacy to contextualize two events that
represent opposite poles of living in a globalized world. Shorter in
length but still great in impact are two brief videos by Jem Cohen,
GRAVITY HILL NEWSREEL NO. 2 and GRAVITY HILL NEWSRELL NO. 4 (each 2011, 4
min, HD Video). These portraits of the Occupy Wall Street gatherings of
2011 are visually stunning and poetic in their construction and
repetition. Equally ambiguous about the prospects of the protesters,
they also place the filmmaker's conflicted emotions near the surface. Michael Vass in person. JH
