you're on candid camera

On Thursdays at the Walker Art Center, admission is free, and there are often lectures or films. We had a little something at the Wolfgang Puck restuarant 20.21, and then saw a program of three films that are part of the series Expanding the Frame.

Here's the program description: "In an era that revels in the voyeuristic cult of celebrity and celebrates surveillance on reality TV, these works sharply critique our society under watch: Rebecca Baron’s How Little We Know of Our Neighbors; Deborah Stratman’s In Order Not to Be Here; and Julia Meltzer and David Thorne’s It’s Not My Memory of It.".

Baron's film includes the story of the Mass-Observation Movement, which I had never heard of before; this New Yorker article gives a great account of combination of anthropology, surrealism, and mass wackiness. This film was a traditional documentary, telling a story through images, sound and interviews. The other two films were much more experimental, or rather much more deliberately non-Hollywood narrative, and hence somewhat more demanding to watch.

In Order Not To Be Here has multiples segments that look as if they are footage from surveillance cameras: parking lots, ATMs, store aisles, spaces around buildings, in corridors. At night, when people are not in those spaces, but you can hear sounds of dogs barking, cars or trains going by, police sirens in the distance, these scenes look likes places where something is about to happen. But nothing does. When a camera is trained on something for more than a few seconds, for up to half a minute, and NOTHING SEEMS TO BE HAPPENING, you are forced to look differently. You notice the sounds, you start to speculate on what the image might mean. You fight off annoyance or tedium, or you surrender yourself to a kind of trance-like receptivity in which you suspend your narrative expectations (although they never really go away) and let the images and sounds wash over you, as in a dream. What is happening becomes your feelings about the images, your relationship to the sequence. The opening and closing sequences DO contain more traditionally narrative elements that frame these static shots in light of surveillance, apprehension and escape, so the overall effect is one of expectant paranoia (not an especially pleasant experience, but a fascinating one). In looking for more information about this film, I discovered this site, Peripheral Produce where one can purchase DVDs of experimental film.