[Frameworks] Avant-garde film, Facebook, and the nature of attention

[40 Frames]

On Tue, Jun 14, 2011 at 4:08 PM, Brook Hinton <bhinton at gmail.com> wrote:

> For what its worth, most of those same students of mine who are
> email-averse not only have no trouble paying attention to the types of work
> Fred mentions, they seem to crave it, and are excited as well by
> challenging, slow and extreme-attention-requiring works of narrative cinema.
>  But then I teach at an art school, which may skew the polling so to speak.
>
>
>

I did not attend an art school, and was in college before social media. My
fellow students and many of the faculty dreaded the work Fred mentions. My
exposure to ag-exp work did not come from attending college.... fortunately,
San Francisco had more to offer than what was screening on campus.

Alain






>
>
> On Tue, Jun 14, 2011 at 3:33 PM, David Tetzlaff <djtet53 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> > Are such works, and the ideas behind such works, becoming less and
>> > less accessible to those weaned on Facebook and texting and Twitter?
>>
>> Well... yeah. I suppose the level of concentration required for full
>> appreciation has always been a somewhat rare commodity, struggling not only
>> against technology but a system of alienating wage labor that defines
>> 'leisure' as time for escapist fun. But there's no doubt that info-bits are
>> getting shorter, and expectations for brevity are raised. It seems people
>> will read pages and pages of insipid one line posts in a web-forum, but if
>> anyone posts line a WHOLE SUBSTANTIVE PARAGRAPH, they just get trashed with
>> a dismissive TL:DR.
>>
>> > Will a new kind of art emerge from this culture of interruption and
>> > inattention? Has it already?
>>
>> Again, yeah, though it may be hard to find amid the dross. I think Rick is
>> on the right track in noting Haiku as a precedent. We might also think of
>> graffiti or posters. Most of the little blurbs just flash on by, but some
>> stay with with you. You can grasp the meaning of John Heartfield's 'Five
>> Fingers' poster pretty quickly. But, for me anyway, that image has a lasting
>> power. No reason the ephemeral products of the digital age couldn't work the
>> same way.
>>
>> The examples Fred mentions are mostly 'challenging' works, that have no
>> 'easy way in.' However, we are all familiar with artforms that have been
>> around for some time (popular song, for example) that have 'layers'. That
>> is, they're directly accessible and easily digestable at one level, but hint
>> at something deeper, and open themselves up upon return visits. I don't
>> really know Corey Archangel's work, but the profile in the recent New Yorker
>> made it sound pretty interesting.
>>
>> I'm also not positive that art is necessarily dependent on the struggles
>> of a mind in solitude - too much Romantic baggage there. I don't know if
>> there is an art of the hive mind, or whether it would be worth anything if
>> there were, but I'm not sure I want to rule out the possibility tout court.
>>
>> And finally, I don't know which postmodern exhibits Fred finds
>> not-serious, too ammenable to distraction, etc. But a lot of PoMo has been
>> unfairly trashed by critics who just didn't get it. That is, since PoMo
>> often has a shiny, glittery surface, one can assume that's all there is -
>> which may BE the case, or may not. To take an example from Hollywood film, I
>> once heard a very prominent film scholar (someone whose work I respect very
>> much) discuss 'Miller's Crossing' as a kind of 'pure cinema' that wasn't
>> about anything but itself, that offered only exhileration in own mastery of
>> style employed for the sake of style. Yet, every time I see the film, it
>> gets deeper, more profound, more subtle, subverting it's own easy ironies.
>> The opening sets the audience up to laugh at Johnny Casper's apparently
>> ludicrous declaration that 'It's about ethics." But it is about ethics, and
>> a lot more.
>>
>> Of course, that's still feature-length narrative cinema, not a viral
>> YouTube video of yet another impossible basketball shot from Dude Perfect.
>>
>> Anyway, I worry less about the future of 'Art', than about the future of
>> cinema. There is much art that rewards at a whole different level when it
>> assumes a different scale, a different mode of attention. We keep hearing
>> that the new generation is 'platform agnostic' and just as happy to watch a
>> 'movie' on a big screen, on a flat-screen TV played from DVD, or streamed
>> onto an iPhone. I'm sorry, you cannot watch Kubrick or Malick (much less
>> 'The Great Art of Knowing' or 'Riddles of the Sphinx' or 'Skagafjördur') on
>> a fricking iPhone!! And even if some new improbable Twitter-art takes it
>> place, the replacement of cinemas by handheld devices is a sad, sad event.
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>
>
>
> --
> ____________________________
> Brook Hinton
> Moving Image and Sound Maker
> www.brookhinton.com
>
> Associate Professor / Assistant Chair
> Film Program at CCA
> California College of the Arts
> www.cca.edu/film
>
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