Guest Artist: Althea Thauberger

This week we had a guest artist who came in to present some of her films and videos. She showed us "Not Afraid to Die", "songstress", "A Memory Lasts Forever", and "Treeplanters". I was not a huge fan of any of the first three, but they were O.k. I thought it was really interesting how she uses collaboration in her films. She basically sets up the shots and such while the performers come up with their own material.

Treeplanters was a very strange, yet interesting film to me. I thought that for such a simple setup and idea, that it was executed in a way that made you think about things. A slowly moving dollied camera moves first left, across a sort of barren forest area with 8-12 people sleeping in various positions. Once the camera gets past all of the people a helicopter lands and someone jumps out to wake the sleepers up. They wake up in sort of a domino fashion, but once they all are awake they suddenly stare in to the camera. This final section of the film was powerful and really woke you up.

Monday, February 11th Response

This week in discussion, we talked mostly about the idea of deadpan comedy, and how it is, and was used in films. Carl mentioned that Buster Keaton was a pioneer, or even an icon of this sort of behavior. Robert Morris' "Mirror" was not really a favorite of mine. The idea was kind of cool I thought, but it just wasn't executed in the right way. Over all i thought that it was pretty boring. Hollis Frampton's "Lemon" was not exactly the most intense film either, but i thought it was an interesting one. The way he used the light to engulf, and then make the lemon in to a sillhouette was very cool i thought. The one that caught me off guard most was Wolukau's "A Short Film About Tate Modern". I had a few issues with this one. First off, i could barely read the words that came up fast enough. Once the words finally stopped, the shot that came after was very obscure, and i really wasn't able to tell exactly what happened. I don't know if this is what the artist was shooting for or not, but if it was they did a good job.