This post is a response to a query posed by gokinsmen in the Ask Karina thread: “Avant-garde and short films. Your favorites, ‘the state of…’”
I’m not sure I know what “avant-garde” means anymore, and the only reason I admit that is because the very haziness of the concept seems to be the crux of the issue. What could avant garde possibly mean, in an time and place where Jonas Mekas takes to his video blog to drop wisdom from the Kabballah and defend Paris Hilton, and anyone can watch clips of Out 1 on YouTube (which is pretty much the only place to watch music videos such as the above), and an incest-heavy work of poorsploitation with riffs on Italian neorealism is poised for major mainstream success –– and all the while the general public shows little to no interest in movies starring movie stars, over and over and overagain?
If there’s a single crippling irony to the explosion of web video over the last half decade, it’s this: no single piece of media created specifically for online distribution has so far engaged the masses as deeply as the bits of cultural detritus, from cat videos to classic films, that end up online unofficially, accidentally and/or illegally. Taking into account his own viewing habits and those of the post-internet generation, with Stingray SamCory McAbee set out to make a film that could be watched in discreet ten-minutes segments while still maintaining the narrative and image quality of the widescreen experience.
And so several months after premiering at Sundance, Stingray Sam became available for purchase in a variety of different formats from McAbee’s website, while the filmmaker continued to tour the world accompanying the film to festival screenings and other theatrical events. When the six-part musical space western screened last month at Fantastic Fest, McAbee and I met up at the new Alamo Drafthouse-adjacent clubhouse The Highball to talk about science fiction as political allegory, the peaks and valleys within the landscape of web video, and the further adventures of Stingray and the Quasar Kid.
At the screening last night, you said that Stingray Sam is political, whereas your earlier film, The American Astronaut, was personal. What are the politics, as you see them, in Stingray Sam?
Right after the US bombed Iraq, a woman from Copenhagen came and interviewed me for an art magazine. She was talking about American Astronaut, and she said, “Right now, Europeans are very angry at America because of what your government is doing, and they’re starting to feel like they don’t like Americans.” But, she said, Europeans always enjoyed loving American culture, and The American Astronaut had all the things they enjoyed loving about America.
When the trailer for David Lynch’s new web series Interview Project premiered in early May, I was so skeptical that I mocked the repetitive banality of Lynch’s “drinking game-inspiring intro.” I’ve since had a chance to see five episodes of the series — which premieres publicly on June 1 and through which Lynch and Co. will unveil one short video each day for the rest of the year — and now I think I’ve found the method motivating the mundanity.
We’re to take that introduction as its producer’s statement of its thesis, but it also reveals something about its form. Addressing the camera in his rumpled shirt and jacket, firing off a deliberately prosaic monologue in sing-song, with the words “people”, “interview” and “different” pushed so many times as to completely lose meaning, Lynch appears to be using that banality as a smokescreen. And why not? This is, essentially, what he’s done for most of his working life.
The House Next Door points to David Lynch’s website, and the trailer for Interview Project. The filmmaker apparently traveled across the country and back again interviewing random Americans, and the footage will start appearing in web series format on his site next month.
If you can get through Lynch’s drinking game-inspiring intro to the trailer (take a shot every time David Lynch says “people”, and prepare to be on the floor for several days thereafter), you’ll find black-and-white, Dorothea Lange-esque footage of mostly middle aged people (drink), mostly with Southern-ish accents, asking (scripted, it would appear) questions like “What was my first experience of death?” whilst standing in front of shacks and railroad tracks, while brids chirp and jangly guitar plays on the soundtrack. In other words, stereotypes of Americana, which Lynch has shown interest in before, appear to be well represented, but how will these stereotypes be interrogated? We’ll have to wait until June 1 to find out.
In today’s New York Times, Brian Stelter talks to muckraking filmmaker Robert Greenwald about his latest project, Rethink Afghanistan, which Greenwald calls “a real-time documentary.” Greenwald has posted the first two of five parts of the documentary on the Rethink website and is currently in Afghanistan shooting more; eventually, the video blogs will be “stitched together” into a full-length film for potential festival play, DVD release, and even theatrical distribution.
Greenwald says speed is his primary motivator for releasing his works in progress to the web in this way; with President Obama somewhat quietly escalating the war in Afghanistan, Greenwald (who titled the first chapter of Rethink “More Troops + Afghanistan = Catastrophe”) is hoping his film will impact policy. On the Rethink website, he’s already obtained over 36,000 signatures to a petition demanding congressional oversight hearings on Afghanistan spending, in the name of creating “a national conversation to address the many questions surrounding this war.” The YouTube comments on the first chapter would suggest that the film is already making it possible for that conversation to take place amongst the rabble, and at a surprisingly high level of discourse for the video sharing site.
One issue that Stelter and Greenwald don’t address is the fact that Greenwald is at liberty to work this way only because he has a massive grassroots base already built, and its members are already online, and he doesn’t need film festival accolades to raise his profile, and theatrical release for his films is an afterthought. Does the collapsing of distinction between online video and feature filmmaking become less significant when it’s simply a question of finding your audience where they live? Is this a model that any other name brand documentarian would be willing to play with at this point?
It certainly is a weird time to be a creative user of YouTube, as robotic programs troll user data in search of copyright materials, putting the users who submit it at risk of being banned or silenced. But over the course of nearly two years, Michael Agrusso has steadily picked up a die-hard geek following making videos that use his voice, action figures and nearly every bit of Apple software known to the world. He moves beyond pandering to fans with lame comic jokes, and instead plays up to inside jokes and broader commentary on the state of films and how comics have taken so long to break into that market.
Perhaps you know him better by his alter ego: It’sJustSomeRandomGuy. The series started with I’m A Marvel/I’m A DC, a creative response to the news that DC Comics had canceled their proposed plans of Wonder Woman and The Flash live-action films on the same day. Agrusso continued the parody ads between a Spider-Man and Superman action figure with Batman, Iron Man and even the Hulk. As he wrote the words, his partner and girlfriend Brianna Li (neé It’sJustSomeRandomGal) would wrangle figures and provide the ever-important ‘motion.’ Beyond the ads, the spin-off series After Hours and Happy Hour would emerge, drawing on fan reactions to recently released comic book films while remaining true to developments in the actual comics themselves–for example, Captain America visiting Superman as a ghost, or playing up the aspect that no one remembers Spider-Man was married after the controversial One More Day storyline.
More endearing than Robot Chicken’s take on “action figure comedy,” it’s been a geeky word-of-mouth phenomena, resonating with fans of both the comics and their film adaptations (even Jon Favreauadores Agrusso’s work). Recently, Agrusso has even been discussing the idea of “fan donations” for toys–the Spider-Hulk figure used in his NYCC promo was donated by a fan–-and may soon establish a means for fans to send him their figures. After Agrusso premiered the two-part Happy Hour season finale at a panel at New York Comic Con on Saturday, he took the time to chat about returning to NYCC, concerns about YouTube’s recent crack down on original content based on copyright material, and whether or not he’s yet a “web celebrity.”
MoMA sent over a press release this morning about an event called Silent but Deadly: An Evening of Comedy Shorts, which looks very cool. Curator Ron Magliozzi and silent film accompanists Steve Massa and Ben Model have put together a program of silent slapstick comedy shorts that “explore social, cultural, and political subjects”; they’ll be screening these, followed by shorts comissioned from contemporary comedians including Nick Kroll and ThunderAnt, AKA Fred Armisen and Sleater-Kinney’s Carrie Brownstein.
The press release doesn’t reveal exactly what they’ll be showing in terms of silent films (when I think slapstick silent comedy I think Fatty Arbuckle, but unless the comedy of being fat is a cultural issue, I’m not sure his work qualifies), but I hope the contemporary response pieces fall somewhere along the lines of ThunderAnt’s Boink!, embedded below. It’s a mock, New York Noise-like public access indie rock show, featuring special guest Sadaam Hussein, who strums an acoustic guitar in his “home recording studio in Manhattan” while talking about the life of a dictator in the language of a jaded old punk rocker.
“Narrative Jackass.” That’s the genre shorthand Micheal Tully has invented to describe Benny and Josh Safdie’s latest short film, There is Nothing You Can Do, and it’s pretty fitting.
The film was shot by Josh on a tiny prosumer video camera on a real-life, New York City bus crowded with both actors and unknowing actual riders. It stars Eleonore Hendricks from The Pleasure of Being Robbed as a young mother, and Benny Safdie as an irate businessman who complains that the noise coming Eleonore’s baby is distracting him from reading his newspaper. Various regular Safdie associates, including Ronald Bronstein, are planted around the bus, and when Benny starts harassing Eleonore, some of them rise to her defense.
The Safdies and crew pull off the street theater element so flawlessly that I’d love to see them turn this into a regular series––but not so regular that average New Yorkers start to recognize their troupe.
Kent Nichols and Douglas Sarine of Ask a Ninja fame are bringing a bit of web video’s interactivity to their feature-film debut, a remake of Attack of the Killer Tomatoes. The above video runs down the rules for the “Get Cast In Attack Of The Killer Tomatoes Contest,” through which the boys are soliciting videos depicting death by tomato (tomatocide?) through a YouTube channel. The winner will win a role as a “a real tomato fatality” in the film.
It looks like a couple of videos have already been uploaded to the Real Red Menace YouTube channel, where you can also watch a four-episode mini-web series called Tomatocalypse, which I’m assuming is a kind of test drive for the movie, although I can’t find any information on it anywhere.
The Perfect Ratio isolates a heretofore unanalyzed aspect of The Wackness‘ appeal. “[Olivia] Thirby plays the indie-standard ideal female, what I like to call the “Quirky Aggressive”…Advice: Quirky Aggressives are only beloved in indie films. Please do not try to be one in real life…For the first few months your dude will be all like, “OMG, you’re so cool and funny! You’re not like other girls!” because you said something about giving “Nietzche a BlowJ” or some Quirky Aggressive-esque bullshit, but then after about six months the charm wears off…”
“I like to watch movies in a theater, on a big screen. At worst, I like to watch them on television, on a smaller screen,” Michael Tully disclaims, before reviewing the latest offerings at YouTube’s Screening Room. “Having said all of this, perhaps I’m not the right person to write about [the Screening Room]. Or in a strange twist of logic, maybe this makes me the perfect person for the job!”
A court has ruled that Google must turn over logs containing the “log-in ID of users, the computer IP address (online identifier) and video clip details” of every single video watched by every user on YouTube. This is the result of a class action copyright infringement lawsuit, brought against the video sharing site by Viacom (parent company of MTV, VH1, CBS and Paramount) and the Premier League football association. Google will also be required to “disclose to Viacom the details of all videos that have been removed from the site for any reason.”
So what does this mean, beyond the fact that multi-national corporations will now have evidence every time you watch semi-dirty Duran Duran videos or footage of Margaret Thatcher asking the media to “rejoice” that British troops have taken back the Falklands (yes, these are my two most recent YouTube searches)? The BBC has posted a good decoding of the ruling. Takeaways after the jump.
Longtime YouTube hater Mark Cuban, writing two days before the video site’s new Screening Room launch was announced, predicted that fast-growing Hulu will eventually put YouTube out of business. “The Youtube business model is broken and there is no light at the end of the tunnel as they are currently constructed,” he blogged. Because Hulu has the right to put ads on every clip and not, like YouTube, not just those produced by “partners”, “the more traffic Hulu generates, the more money it makes. The more traffic Youtube generates, the more money it loses.” I’ll be interested to see how he responds to Screening Room; if skeptical, he’d hardly be alone. Some links:
“In all the coverage in the blogosphere, no one has mentioned that this is the exact same thing AtomFilms did for 10 years, and it didn’t work for them,” writes Chris Albrecht, a former Atom employee, at NewTeeVee. And why didn’t it work? “YouTube has a much more massive scale than Atom could have ever dreamed of, but that doesn’t change the fundamental situation. People prefer farts being lit on fire to artsy short films.”
Another potential issue: much of the content that will be screening in the Room has been seen elsewhere. Two of the four films available at launch were pulled from the first issue of Wholphin, and according to the Wholphin blog, “Another dozen Wholphin films have been selected to appear in the Screening Room throughout the year.” Also of note: the Miguel Arteta/Miranda July short Are You The Favorite Person of Anybody?, a Wholphin title which was pitched in YouTube’s press release about the Room, has been on YouTube for almost two years.
Scott Kirsner has some suggestions for how filmmakers can make the most out of their Screening Room deals, recommending that they “post in the YouTube comments area, so YouTube users feel you are a real, accessible human being — not some remote big-shot director!”
Maybe Cuban can’t see the light at the end of YouTube’s tunnel, but Silicon Alley Insider can. “Google famously hasn’t figured out how to sell ads in the video stream itself, though it keeps promising that it will. Doesn’t matter…their most lucrative opportunities, so far, haven’t been in the videos themselves but on the real estate surrounding it.”
NewTeeVee, the web video journal that I freelance for, has just launched a sub page called NewTeeVee Station, which pulls editorial reviews from the main site, as well as reviews written specifically for NewTeeVee Station, into an IMDb-like database with cast and crew information, user comments, and more.
Yes, some of my reviews are included on the site, but I’m not posting this here on Spout purely as self-promotion. Obviously, there’s more overlap every day between the world of web video and what’s going on in indie film/film blog land, and I think a project like this does more to emphasize and strengthen those connections than diminish them. Plus, there are review on the site of work that should be familiar to Spouties, like Joe Swanberg’s Young American Bodies and Rob Parrish’s Next to Heaven and Micahel Cera’s Clark and Michael. Yes, I wrote those reviews, but I had absolutely nothing to do with these entires on Ze Frank and Star Wars Kid and Lazy Sunday, the latter of which contains Liz Shannon Miller’s immortal reminder that “2005 wasn’t that long ago. And it’s important to remember that back then, Hollywood had no idea what it was doing.”
Do you remember 2005, when Miranda July was blogging and making those bittersweet video diaries from the road whilst promotingMe and You and Everyone We Know? Remember how she filmed her walk up the red carpet at the Cannes, and it seemed so quirky and novel and maybe even a teeny tiny bit punk rock for a Portland-based video artist to be taking home movies from the Croisette whilst wearing borrowed Dior? Do you remember that things like that used to be special, because YouTube didn’t used to exist?
It looks like she’s back at it. A YouTube account was created 17 hours ago (as of this writing) under the name mjsecretary. The first video, embedded above, shows July in what I assume is her own kitchen, putting together a cardboard display stand for her book, No One Belongs Here More Than You. She has a conversation with the woman holding the camera about trading t-shirts. Then July pretends the cardboard stand, which is almost as big as her, is a purse.
You know… it’s cute. But three years on the internet is at least a decade in real time (this is why I feel like I’m actually 50 years old, even though my birth certificate says otherwise), and since July last dabbled in this field, the bar has been raised. I loved her Me and You festival videos, even though I wasn’t totally in the tank for the movie itself. More like that, please.
No, it’s not just an urban internet rumor: winners of Webby Awards really are restricted to five word speeches. Last night at the Webby Film and Video Awards––the slightly lower-key web video-centric run-up to tonight’s big real super Webbys proper––host Judah Friedlander threatened to kill any winner who went over the limit. I guess the finest minds in the world of web video live in fear of comedians with gimmicky hats, because by my count, only one winner went over, and Friedlander decided to let her slide on the grounds that she was “pretty hot.”
So: it now falls to us to hand out our own awards, in our own totally made-up categories, for the best and worst use of the alloted five words of the night. The nomination and selection process was extremely arbitrary; all voting was done by me whilst sitting in the back row of the show, and the results were undoubtedly influenced by the 2.5 glasses of complementary chardonnay that I enjoyed at the pre-show reception. The full list of winners and losers after the jump; the winning video from one of our Best Speech winners is embedded above.
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
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The Perfect Ratio
