3 posts tagged “documentary”
1.
Last night I showed some work and ran the A/V side of a presentation of extremely difficult information.
The work was the video projection with dance choreographed by Stephanie Tiel, a piece called Flip the Script. We presented it at the Union Project, along with about twenty minutes selected from a documentary called Invisible Children.
Invisible Children documents a problem in Uganda, where people are abducting and indoctrinating children into killing machines for an insurgency.
Flip the Script traces an individual's journey through the long inner argument, the struggle that is addressing reality without compromising the self.
It's the old truth, the personal is political.
Believe it or not, these things are connected.
Whatever darkness some other human has decided to make visible in the world, thanks to the internet and the global reach of news media, we are more and more able to witness what they are doing. How we choose to deal with distant evil, our relative ability to stomach that darkness made visible by others, is a simple mirror of how we choose to deal with the darknesses and struggle inside of ourselves.
God forbid we ever admit to the struggle!
2.
How do we, as a culture, address culturally traumatic material?
There's very little language available to us for discussing the horrors of war. I spent a few weeks working with material from Iraq this fall, footage shot by soldiers there.
This material included footage of other soldiers being blown up.
Its complicated and difficult, this war, and it has become wallpaper on our televisions. Instead of discussing or portraying what is, over there, the media turns it all into an argument of one kind or another. They don't ask, What's true? Instead, they ask, Who's right?
This stimulates endless pontification by talking heads, instead of simple representation of what is.
3.
How do we, as a culture, address historically traumatic material?
Memoirs from Hijiyama is Jonathan Yuen's memorial to those who survived the bombing of Hiroshima. He provides an information context that is very instructive.
I am beginning to call this kind of work the poetics of annihiliation. The aesthetic, the wow-factor of the design eases the fact that you may be reading about the peeling-off of skin that survivors endured, that you may be looking at the stop-motion of a house exploding from the blast that killed so many people.
It is painfully beautiful, and still, his website that responds to the click of a mouse, his website that unfolds as a book would, page by page, but in many dimensions, not just paging left to right.
Pittsburgh documentary filmmaker Chris Ivey has been making documentaries about the 'revitalization' of East Liberty neighborhood of Pittsburgh for the last three years. He just released the trailer for the second segment and it looks to be as interesting as 2006's East of Liberty.
