2 weeks ago, Elvis sent me a text message. It was 10 at night, i was in a packed show in the middle of Austin, during the SXSW festival. I went to his hotel room, where there were just a few images on a mute TV informing us of the outside world. A welcomed pause in an hyperactive environment. And so we did a little film.
I was filming some videos for a website there, carrying my backpack with camera and computer all over town. Didnt want to plan too much with any artists, and going through labels, managers etc… A lot of bands i filmed in the past three years were playing the festival, so i was thinking i would probably bump into one of them amongst the crowd. Well, yeah, it sounds a bit stupid for someone who’s been to the busiest music festival on earth. But it worked, a little bit.
I filmed Elvis Perkins something like 2 years ago, in Paris, with his band, running all over the opera area. Great souvenirs we both kept in mind i think - my favourite being this little dance around him on Place Vendome, which would then be for me a strong basis to later images - on how to open your eye to the background, how to not only follow but go your own way and use the sound piece as your own soundtrack, to bring the document somewhere else, in your own space.
And so Elvis texted me on that wednesday night.
We did some other films in Austin - a beautiful walk whistling together ending with 6 other people joining who just saw him play two hours before - and even another time in New York the following week, before and after his Bowery Ballroom show - ending the show in the subway with 50 people following the band… They were great moments, but i’m not gonna show those images - partly because i did a mediocre job, and partly because, definitely in our era, less is better (btw, sorry elvis and all of you who offered me such a precious time… i remember especially this moment where Elvis’ keyboard player, after their NY show, came up to me and said ‘that is gonna be a great take away!’ - i felt bad, but the recording of such actions, sometimes, isn’t the point, the action itself is the goal - camera as a social tool for the year two thousand - i will come back another day on this idea, and the whole disappearance of the term ‘artist’).
I’ve been thinking a lot about the amount of information anyone generates in his everyday life (close, but on another side, to the ecological footprint we are now all trying to reduce). I’ve been filming so much over the past years, and showcasing so much of this on internet - that at some point, i wasn’t even watching my own images (i seriously dont remember at least 10 of my films). Two main questions emerge for me, and that i try more and more to keep in mind - the question of responsibility (the main theme associated to expression, new technologies offering us such a powerful communicative tool) and, more specifically maybe to my own area, the question of space for the viewer, for the listener, for the other - the one you communicate with (not anymore the one you are talking to). Even this morning i was listening to Dominique A, great french singer, talking about the question of missing in Joy Division albums. What is the missing? It’s the part left free to the other, the spectator who in such Tarkovski or Kiarostami movies (will come back next week to Kiarostami, been rediscovering all his filmography recently) is invested in a mission - finishing the movie, finishing the art piece, by his own presence, action in it. Far, so far from this culture of TV, his monodirectionnal talk, and the monoform of it that Peter Watkins theorized in its great book from 2004, Media Crisis. So, how is it possible that a huge part of our cinema culture from the 20th century, our relationship with images built with Kubrick or even more recently with Lynch (i obviously don’t talk here about any idea of entertainment or hollywood cinema), is totally forgotten at the moment where a new screen is offered to us? How is it possible that most of the images we see on this screen are such a bad copy of what was already a bad medium - TV?
There is an important point there - giving away all the information is not the purpose of an idea of cinema that i share, of such images at least. You can read books, newspapers, blogs, if you want to know what ‘really’ happened, if you are interested in information, in details (and i am mostly such a wikipedia addict). But ‘cinema’, or call it whatever you like, should continue to offer something else, something the best music or art piece also offers - an impossibility to translate it into words, into numbers, into data. Don’t believe “number of views on youtube”.
How do those various ideas translate into my most recent work? I would say by the missing of some images - what we could call b-rolls, outtakes, what the tv channels have been formatting in the past 20 years, what would give some informations about the situation of the scene, the place of the shooting etc… Accepting to focus on the core of the action only, to not try to impress its viewer by the rapidity of its cuts, is then a way to let him enter the film a bit more, preserving him a place in the room. Where are you when you watch a show on TV? You are following the train.
This ‘new’ project which is Fiume Nights starts at this point where i am just excited to create long and simple shots, without any cuts, asking viewers to take time to enter the images and live in them. Without too much explanation on those images, and without too many images i hope.
And so it happened like that: a night in the middle of a crowd in Texas, Elvis texted me, i came to his hotel and he sang me a song. End.
from
http://fiumenights.com/?p=38
