4/14/08

Negativland, a experimental music band consisting of members Mark Hosler, Richard Lyons, Don Joyce, David Wills and Peter Conheim, deals extensively with the concept of remix.

1. They use a heavy use of non-original material for their mixing.
2. Their name, in fact, came from a song form the German band Neu!
• Much like the controversy over Ken Jacob's "Perfect Film", Bruce Conner's found footage techniques, even the the U2 record incident alone attests to the ambiguity regarding authorship. Where is the line drawn between authorship and non-contribution. Why is "Perfect Film" accredited to Ken Jacobs although all he did was discover the footage? At least Negativland modulates the material in some way - it's different than the original, but there's still no objective line. I believe Negativland was trying to elude to that.
  


3. Their work is described as a 'collage' of both sound (and video)
• I, personally, believe this to be a comment on mainstream media. Everything seems to crisp and pristine - something entertaining but not necessarily engaging. The film itself (and the subsequent works of Negativland itself) feels like an attack of light and sound. It violates you in a way mainstream media would categorize as unbecoming. You'd never turn on the TV and see such jarring and disorienting (seemingly unrelated) images and staccato, monotonous vocal tracks. The style in which Negativland works itself is based, what seems to be, in the polar opposite of what we see every day (the non-avant garde).
  

- I was not present for the lecture, I took my knowledge of Sonic Outlaws from last semester

4/9/08

Frampton's formula seems to be overly simplistic. A film about what is shown the most does not [necessarily] reflect thematic material, symbolism, many cinematic techniques. A formal experiment on 'zooming' effect, for example, could be mistaken for being about flowers. Again - in Jean Renoir's 'Le Crime de M. Lange', much of the ideology was behind visual imagery, but not directly. Cyclical structure was pronounced by the shape of the courtyard, the movement of the camera, etc. The dualism between capitalist society and communist/socialist society is stressed between the co-operative employee union and the over-greedy publicist. None of this would be engaged if it was only a film on 'what was seen the most'.

There are too many distractions, anyway, not to more deeply analyze a film's thematic and structural elements. Love's Refrain, for me, was about the metallic rattle from the front of the room (much like John Cage's 4:33, during our viewing)...