[Frameworks] Schaus

[Bernard Roddy]

A note on St Francis Hears a Noise, screened at Nightingale in Chicago
Sunday evening.

One would want to reference Warhol.  People are always talking, and
it's pretty much improvised.  Man with a Movie Camera becomes Man with
a Boom Mic.  What are people saying?  That is where one might want to
insist that radio be the reference.  When we listen, we are often not
looking.  The strongest parts, however, are these locations Schaus
sets up.  A film artist of a more calculated kind would say, now frame
it up, select the moment.  But Schaus isn't looking through a lens so
much as watching a scene.  And the scene is of people talking.
Friends talking, but they have to be certain kind of friends.

Mike Stolz had shown a film set in a television studio, what one would
recognize from an education that has a broadcast component.  Or maybe
it's the black box of theater.  At any rate, the whole situation is
that of cable access: the space and its lighting, the camera on wheels
that can never leave the room.  You'd expect the filmmaker equipment
to appear in this, and the whole project is to maximize image
"quality," which however requires perfect, crisp synchronized sound.
(I remember this from work i did in film and using a studio stage I
built. But these screenings never seem to acknowledge
intergenerational dimensions: students talk to their professors)

Schaus has these decadent moments that will remind one of the poolside
exchange or the dope shooting psychadelic hang-out.  The speaking is
in synch but it could have been radio.  Like Warhol, these people have
a certain part, and they understand it or otherwise "know" the part.
Schaus performs, and so it's not exactly like Warhol, who never seems
to be on screen.  But I wanted to say, as I remember saying to a
student, look . . we wouldn't sit through most of Warhol's films.  Or
if we do, it's like sitting through Stolz, which consists in
meditating on the spectacle, on the "values" inherent in the work.
Schaus is going video, and virtually radio, however.  Here video's
history with sound becomes essential:  When St Francis lives up to the
technical standards, we are profoundly rewarded, but when Schaus is in
love with a conversation, and that's why it's in there, we will
suffer.

Bernie