Blake Williams is a Texas-born, Toronto-based video artist, installation artist and critic. When I first stumbled upon his cinema blog, R and G and B, I instantly understood that he was a pretty sharp character. While most bloggers on film simply write about whatever they happen to see, Williams' posts cover primarily the most interesting names in the medium: Terrence Malick, Alan Zweig, Sangsoo Hong, Miklos Jancsó, Werner Herzog. You know, the ones worth, like, talking about. When I found out that this unsually smart critical perspective accompanies actual art-making skill, I knew I had to engage the man in a conversation.
Colin Marshall: Because what initially hooked me about your blog is the particular selection of pictures you choose to cover, we might first want to establish what we can of your — as people often call this hazy, amorphous quality — "critical perspective." But I can't simply ask you what your critical perspective is, since that doesn't even provide the barest framework within which to answer, so let's reveal it this way: could you name a few of the filmmakers who most frequently and most fully satisfy your viewing sensibilities? Who can you rely on to turn out the movies most closely aligned with your taste?
Blake Williams: My semi-recent spike in film-watching (and, recently, blogging) began as a research tactic for my own video work. Though what I make still rests snugly in the 'fine art' category, I've easily been more inspired by certain films than art in gallery exhibitions. The best film to my taste, then, is one that has an aspect of it that I respond to intensely enough that it evolves into something that I can, without any feelings of plagiarism, call my own. I've probably gotten just as much use from "bad" cinema as the "good."
If I were having a massive idea and productivity strike, I might first turn to the oeuvres of guys like James Benning, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, David Lynch and Jacques Tati (though, if we're strictly talking good cinema for good cinema, I've yet to be anywhere near disappointed by Mr. Kiarostami).
Colin Marshall: Kiarostami has never disappointed me either. But as a friend once told me, "I mentally divide the people I know into two groups: those who get Kiarostami and those who don't." While I wouldn't quite make it an issue of "getting" his work, I do sense a pretty stark divide between his appreciators and the rest of the filmgoing world. I've tried to introduce my own friends to his pictures, and those disinclined to enjoy them don't tend to give an inch. What would you say Kiarostami does right that other filmmakers don't? What about his work do you think puts off some people?
Blake Williams: I'm clearly living in a delusional bubble where everyone loves Kiarostami! Especially living in Toronto, where the Cinematheque Ontario's best of the 90s poll last decade had all four of Kiarostami's films in the top twelve or something ridiculous. He's no Almodóvar, for sure, who appeals to anyone willing to read subtitles, but I've never understood the occasional complaint of pretension that A.K. gets called out on. It's like once he stopped making didactic kids' films (very good ones though, to be sure) and started playing with narrative and postmodern twists, people finally found something to criticize him for.
I think Kiarostami's films can be very clever, but what really gets me is all of the hidden emotion in the veins of his work. Whether I'm watching one of his early shorts or his Koker trilogy or his award-winning 90s stuff, its obvious that he understands the most basic elements of human happiness and sorrow, and pulls them out at just the right moments. I'm still waiting for my first Kiarostami experience in a theatre, which I expect will change the way I see his films once again, for the better.
Colin Marshall: A bubble where everyone loves Kiarostami? Jeez, where might this bubble be located? I wouldn't mind moving in myself.
As much as I'd like to spend this entire interview discussing A.K. — either the Iranian one or the Japanese one, really — I should do a little more exploration of the other names you've dropped. You happened to name another one of my own very favorite filmmakers, Thailand's Apichatpong Weerasethakul. (I even devoted an entire 3Quarksdaily column to Syndromes and a Century.) Either surprisingly or totally unsurprisingly, I've encountered the same problem with his work: I love it more than almost anything else on celluloid, yet when I show it to friends it flops more often than it flies.
And so the exercise in revealing critical perspective continutes: what about Weerasethakul's cinema fires you up? What has he mastered that most filmmakers haven't? When you're about to watch a Weerasethakul film, what about it do you most look forward to savoring?
Blake Williams: With Apichatpong there's definitely no bubble, unfortunately. When Strand released their DVD of Syndromes and a Century at the beginning of 2008, I told all of my art school friends to anticipate a movie night when I got the disc in the mail. Well, the disc came, and so did the people. I had about fifteen people over and I showed them the film. There was respectful silence throughout, but when it ended three or four of them just went off, criticizing the film's lack of plot, incoherence, emptiness, "pretty pictures and nothing more." That negative tone overshadowed the general mood, and I think everyone ended up leaving feeling pretty ambivalent about it. I was very disturbed by this, because I thought that it was a film above all skepticism and cynicism, but that proved to very much not be the case.
I certainly don't anticipate Apichatpong's films for an emotional response like I do with Kiarostami's, but it's not an intellectual one either. There's an intuitive satisfaction that is beyond my comprehension that floors me in his work. I wouldn't know where to begin if I tried to convince anyone that the vacuum in the steam room at the end of Syndromes is potentially the best cinematic moment of the 21st century, but I believe it to be the case. Likening his work to hypnosis feels cheap, and it isn't merely spiritual or ethereal. I don't think I've learned the adjective to describe the best quality of his work, but when I do, that's my answer to your question.
Colin Marshall: Indeed, despite all I've written — er, tried to write — about his work, I fall just short of conveying the element you're talking about. Suffice to say that I heartily agree about that steam pipe representing the current high point of 21st-century cinema. I do admit to more than a little surprise, though, that your art student compatriots couldn't get with it. I'd have thought that the sort of person interested in pursuing an entire art education would be more than open to an experience like Syndromes.
Before I ask more about your own art education and art career, though, I must spend some time on the first favorite filmmaker you named, who I would bet also happens to be the least known of them all: James Benning. He's currently talked about for what are called his "landscape films," RR, Casting a Glance, 13 Lakes and Ten Skies, which you wrote a post reviewing in April. What do Benning's films express to you that others' — even Weerasethakul's and Kiarostami's — don't?
Blake Williams: Benning is more of a visual artist in the traditional sense than the other two, never addressing or showing an interest in narrative, using film as an art medium like video art uses video; I guess avant-garde filmmaking is how it's categorized. He tackles two of my favorite subjects in his work, landscape and duration, and does it quite well. I've only scratched the surface of durational filmmaking (Snow, Warhol, Ono, and Benning), but Benning's work is the most welcoming and "pure" that I know. (Though I hate using that word when discussing cinema, Benning is the most deserving.) But more than addressing the most basic formal and structural characteristics of the medium (the temporal length of the reel, the successive, forward motion it is locked into, etc.), he's documenting the American landscape during one of the most rapidly transitional periods it has seen, both industrially and meteorologically. It's all so simple, but heavily weighted with beautiful ideas.
Colin Marshall: And this brings me to what I've come to consider one of the most important issues of perspective in filmgoing. When you think of cinema, what form do you consider it the primary descendant of? I was just reading an old interview with Peter Greenaway, probably the most well-known of the painter-turned-filmmakers, wherein he explains his view that cinema is a descendant of visual art, and that it only produces anything of value when considered that way. This is, I guess, opposed to cinema's being a descendant of a more necessarily narrative-driven form, like live theater. Which branches do you see as the most relevant of film's family tree?
Blake Williams: This assumes that live theatre isn't visual art, which I think it is. In that sense, then, film was just an evolution of that medium. If they (theatre and visual art) are different, I'd say that it's a descendant of visual art, and was a mainstay because of its close relationship to theatre. Like most new technologies (video, internet, HD), they're embraced by the masses and incorporated into forms that are more useful to "them" before they are in the price range of the artists, who then make use of the technologies in their work. Film seems to have been invented and then quickly utilized as a storytelling medium after the very early developmental, experimental years in which the Lumiere bros. were playing around with it — before it was used for more "fine art" purposes by the dadaists and surrealists. There are always some visual artists who are able to sneak in — usually because of wealth acquired from an already established, commercial body of work — and utilize these newer technologies while they're still brand new (for the HD boom, Bill Viola was an early bird), and I think this work has its pluses and minuses (respectively, its ability to be created without influence, and its gimmicky, novelty qualities).
Personally, I am drawn towards filmmaking that rides a line between visual art and theatre (narrative).
Colin Marshall: And this brings us to your career in visual and video art, of which readers can get a pretty solid idea on your site. Reading your statement, one comes away with the notion that your sensibility as a filmgoer and your sensibility as a visual and installation artist are inextricable from one another. Could you describe a bit about how the cinema you view and the art you make influence one another? I imagine you draw plenty of inspiration from filmmakers, but do your art experiences double back and shape how you select and view movies?
Blake Williams: I don't think my art-making influences my movie watching. Rather, I make things that I like, and I watch things that I think I'll like based on my taste, so there will be similarities I suppose. Although I've been working primarily with video in the last few years, I consider myself more of a "light sculptor," if I have to choose one medium. Sometimes I will build these sculptures, but, lately, I've ended up imagining these sculptures in the video world, in works that are fictionalized documentations of the would-be sculptures and installations. This will only happen if the idea for the sculpture/installation is too ambitious for me to realize it in real space, either because of my limited budget, or, more likely, that it's not really possible for it to be built.
In these video incarnations, I've certainly tended toward a more cinematic display of the ideas, which could be extraneous to the point — that, being, to document a sculpture that doesn't, and never will, exist — and I think that that comes from the fact that almost all of my art heroes and influences are from cinema history rather than art history. I'm only recently diving into the dense art history that I've been missing out on (I nixed all of my art history courses in undergrad for film history courses), so I'll see where that goes.
Blake Williams' "The Storm" (2009)
Colin Marshall: Well, hey, the practice documenting entities that don't actually exist has a respectable history. I mean, what Borges wrote alone...
But your desire to commit nonexistent sculpture to video notwithstanding, I can't help but watch a piece like "The Storm" and see cinema at its core. I view it and think, "Damn, I want to see the rest of that movie." It's got a sensibility I wish more full-length films had. I daresay that I appreciate some of its moments in the same way that I'd appreciate an Apichatpong Weerasethakul view of the manmade world meeting the natural. So do you have any interest, even an inkling, in making what could be called "movies," as opposed to what's normally called "video art"?
Blake Williams: By saying "Damn, I want to see the rest of that movie," do you mean that it feels like an opening chapter, maybe even unfinished? Or is it that you want to see a feature with similar interests and sensibilities?
I don't see myself ever making anything that could be described as a feature film, but I could see myself extending my work to over the hour mark in a few years if the project warrants it. Most of the work feels like sketches to me anyway, so I can't justify drawing it out just because I love features. There's also this fear that I have of working with actors, or pretty much anyone else. Right now I have to have complete control of every single facet of a production — the camera, sound, subject, editing, et al — so I wouldn't trust an actor unless it was myself. I like the cinema crowd more than I like the art crowd in general, though, so I'm not through with trying to find a way to become more associated with that somehow. I submit my videos to short film festivals more often than I submit to art galleries, for what it's worth.
Colin Marshall: By saying "Damn, I want to see the rest of that movie," I don't mean that the piece feels unfinished — it feels like a coherent whole — but that, indeed, I'd want to see a feature with similar interests and sensibilities, especially aesthetically speaking. While it stands on its own, I can also watch it as something of a "trailer" for a nonexistent feature-length experience.
Oh, I totally know what you mean about the whole fear-of-working-with-actors thing. On one hand, I realize full well that collaboration is an engine of all manner of artistic innovation and surprise, but on the other hand... I don't really get along with actors that well.
Since you've worked and interacted in both artistic and cinematic circles, then, what perspective do you have on the difference between them? What sort of qualities of their people lead you to prefer the "cinema crowd" to the "art crowd"?
Blake Williams: Just a slight edge in modesty, I guess. All of my good friends are "art people," but then they are my friends. When I talk to curators, art critics, academics, established artists, regardless of how they feel about my work, there is almost always more condescension than there has a right to be. I think I've worked my way into a corner though, because I'm remembering that it's the same way with many film guys I've met too, I just don't know as many personally. I think good guys are hard to find in most fields of creativity.
Colin Marshall: Because what initially hooked me about your blog is the particular selection of pictures you choose to cover, we might first want to establish what we can of your — as people often call this hazy, amorphous quality — "critical perspective." But I can't simply ask you what your critical perspective is, since that doesn't even provide the barest framework within which to answer, so let's reveal it this way: could you name a few of the filmmakers who most frequently and most fully satisfy your viewing sensibilities? Who can you rely on to turn out the movies most closely aligned with your taste?
Blake Williams: My semi-recent spike in film-watching (and, recently, blogging) began as a research tactic for my own video work. Though what I make still rests snugly in the 'fine art' category, I've easily been more inspired by certain films than art in gallery exhibitions. The best film to my taste, then, is one that has an aspect of it that I respond to intensely enough that it evolves into something that I can, without any feelings of plagiarism, call my own. I've probably gotten just as much use from "bad" cinema as the "good."
If I were having a massive idea and productivity strike, I might first turn to the oeuvres of guys like James Benning, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, David Lynch and Jacques Tati (though, if we're strictly talking good cinema for good cinema, I've yet to be anywhere near disappointed by Mr. Kiarostami).
Colin Marshall: Kiarostami has never disappointed me either. But as a friend once told me, "I mentally divide the people I know into two groups: those who get Kiarostami and those who don't." While I wouldn't quite make it an issue of "getting" his work, I do sense a pretty stark divide between his appreciators and the rest of the filmgoing world. I've tried to introduce my own friends to his pictures, and those disinclined to enjoy them don't tend to give an inch. What would you say Kiarostami does right that other filmmakers don't? What about his work do you think puts off some people?
 Abbas Kiarostami: the coolest man alive? |
I think Kiarostami's films can be very clever, but what really gets me is all of the hidden emotion in the veins of his work. Whether I'm watching one of his early shorts or his Koker trilogy or his award-winning 90s stuff, its obvious that he understands the most basic elements of human happiness and sorrow, and pulls them out at just the right moments. I'm still waiting for my first Kiarostami experience in a theatre, which I expect will change the way I see his films once again, for the better.
Colin Marshall: A bubble where everyone loves Kiarostami? Jeez, where might this bubble be located? I wouldn't mind moving in myself.
As much as I'd like to spend this entire interview discussing A.K. — either the Iranian one or the Japanese one, really — I should do a little more exploration of the other names you've dropped. You happened to name another one of my own very favorite filmmakers, Thailand's Apichatpong Weerasethakul. (I even devoted an entire 3Quarksdaily column to Syndromes and a Century.) Either surprisingly or totally unsurprisingly, I've encountered the same problem with his work: I love it more than almost anything else on celluloid, yet when I show it to friends it flops more often than it flies.
And so the exercise in revealing critical perspective continutes: what about Weerasethakul's cinema fires you up? What has he mastered that most filmmakers haven't? When you're about to watch a Weerasethakul film, what about it do you most look forward to savoring?
Blake Williams: With Apichatpong there's definitely no bubble, unfortunately. When Strand released their DVD of Syndromes and a Century at the beginning of 2008, I told all of my art school friends to anticipate a movie night when I got the disc in the mail. Well, the disc came, and so did the people. I had about fifteen people over and I showed them the film. There was respectful silence throughout, but when it ended three or four of them just went off, criticizing the film's lack of plot, incoherence, emptiness, "pretty pictures and nothing more." That negative tone overshadowed the general mood, and I think everyone ended up leaving feeling pretty ambivalent about it. I was very disturbed by this, because I thought that it was a film above all skepticism and cynicism, but that proved to very much not be the case.
I certainly don't anticipate Apichatpong's films for an emotional response like I do with Kiarostami's, but it's not an intellectual one either. There's an intuitive satisfaction that is beyond my comprehension that floors me in his work. I wouldn't know where to begin if I tried to convince anyone that the vacuum in the steam room at the end of Syndromes is potentially the best cinematic moment of the 21st century, but I believe it to be the case. Likening his work to hypnosis feels cheap, and it isn't merely spiritual or ethereal. I don't think I've learned the adjective to describe the best quality of his work, but when I do, that's my answer to your question.
Colin Marshall: Indeed, despite all I've written — er, tried to write — about his work, I fall just short of conveying the element you're talking about. Suffice to say that I heartily agree about that steam pipe representing the current high point of 21st-century cinema. I do admit to more than a little surprise, though, that your art student compatriots couldn't get with it. I'd have thought that the sort of person interested in pursuing an entire art education would be more than open to an experience like Syndromes.
Before I ask more about your own art education and art career, though, I must spend some time on the first favorite filmmaker you named, who I would bet also happens to be the least known of them all: James Benning. He's currently talked about for what are called his "landscape films," RR, Casting a Glance, 13 Lakes and Ten Skies, which you wrote a post reviewing in April. What do Benning's films express to you that others' — even Weerasethakul's and Kiarostami's — don't?
 James Benning's RR (representative still) |
Colin Marshall: And this brings me to what I've come to consider one of the most important issues of perspective in filmgoing. When you think of cinema, what form do you consider it the primary descendant of? I was just reading an old interview with Peter Greenaway, probably the most well-known of the painter-turned-filmmakers, wherein he explains his view that cinema is a descendant of visual art, and that it only produces anything of value when considered that way. This is, I guess, opposed to cinema's being a descendant of a more necessarily narrative-driven form, like live theater. Which branches do you see as the most relevant of film's family tree?
Blake Williams: This assumes that live theatre isn't visual art, which I think it is. In that sense, then, film was just an evolution of that medium. If they (theatre and visual art) are different, I'd say that it's a descendant of visual art, and was a mainstay because of its close relationship to theatre. Like most new technologies (video, internet, HD), they're embraced by the masses and incorporated into forms that are more useful to "them" before they are in the price range of the artists, who then make use of the technologies in their work. Film seems to have been invented and then quickly utilized as a storytelling medium after the very early developmental, experimental years in which the Lumiere bros. were playing around with it — before it was used for more "fine art" purposes by the dadaists and surrealists. There are always some visual artists who are able to sneak in — usually because of wealth acquired from an already established, commercial body of work — and utilize these newer technologies while they're still brand new (for the HD boom, Bill Viola was an early bird), and I think this work has its pluses and minuses (respectively, its ability to be created without influence, and its gimmicky, novelty qualities).
Personally, I am drawn towards filmmaking that rides a line between visual art and theatre (narrative).
Colin Marshall: And this brings us to your career in visual and video art, of which readers can get a pretty solid idea on your site. Reading your statement, one comes away with the notion that your sensibility as a filmgoer and your sensibility as a visual and installation artist are inextricable from one another. Could you describe a bit about how the cinema you view and the art you make influence one another? I imagine you draw plenty of inspiration from filmmakers, but do your art experiences double back and shape how you select and view movies?
Blake Williams: I don't think my art-making influences my movie watching. Rather, I make things that I like, and I watch things that I think I'll like based on my taste, so there will be similarities I suppose. Although I've been working primarily with video in the last few years, I consider myself more of a "light sculptor," if I have to choose one medium. Sometimes I will build these sculptures, but, lately, I've ended up imagining these sculptures in the video world, in works that are fictionalized documentations of the would-be sculptures and installations. This will only happen if the idea for the sculpture/installation is too ambitious for me to realize it in real space, either because of my limited budget, or, more likely, that it's not really possible for it to be built.
In these video incarnations, I've certainly tended toward a more cinematic display of the ideas, which could be extraneous to the point — that, being, to document a sculpture that doesn't, and never will, exist — and I think that that comes from the fact that almost all of my art heroes and influences are from cinema history rather than art history. I'm only recently diving into the dense art history that I've been missing out on (I nixed all of my art history courses in undergrad for film history courses), so I'll see where that goes.
Blake Williams' "The Storm" (2009)
Colin Marshall: Well, hey, the practice documenting entities that don't actually exist has a respectable history. I mean, what Borges wrote alone...
But your desire to commit nonexistent sculpture to video notwithstanding, I can't help but watch a piece like "The Storm" and see cinema at its core. I view it and think, "Damn, I want to see the rest of that movie." It's got a sensibility I wish more full-length films had. I daresay that I appreciate some of its moments in the same way that I'd appreciate an Apichatpong Weerasethakul view of the manmade world meeting the natural. So do you have any interest, even an inkling, in making what could be called "movies," as opposed to what's normally called "video art"?
Blake Williams: By saying "Damn, I want to see the rest of that movie," do you mean that it feels like an opening chapter, maybe even unfinished? Or is it that you want to see a feature with similar interests and sensibilities?
I don't see myself ever making anything that could be described as a feature film, but I could see myself extending my work to over the hour mark in a few years if the project warrants it. Most of the work feels like sketches to me anyway, so I can't justify drawing it out just because I love features. There's also this fear that I have of working with actors, or pretty much anyone else. Right now I have to have complete control of every single facet of a production — the camera, sound, subject, editing, et al — so I wouldn't trust an actor unless it was myself. I like the cinema crowd more than I like the art crowd in general, though, so I'm not through with trying to find a way to become more associated with that somehow. I submit my videos to short film festivals more often than I submit to art galleries, for what it's worth.
Colin Marshall: By saying "Damn, I want to see the rest of that movie," I don't mean that the piece feels unfinished — it feels like a coherent whole — but that, indeed, I'd want to see a feature with similar interests and sensibilities, especially aesthetically speaking. While it stands on its own, I can also watch it as something of a "trailer" for a nonexistent feature-length experience.
Oh, I totally know what you mean about the whole fear-of-working-with-actors thing. On one hand, I realize full well that collaboration is an engine of all manner of artistic innovation and surprise, but on the other hand... I don't really get along with actors that well.
Since you've worked and interacted in both artistic and cinematic circles, then, what perspective do you have on the difference between them? What sort of qualities of their people lead you to prefer the "cinema crowd" to the "art crowd"?
Blake Williams: Just a slight edge in modesty, I guess. All of my good friends are "art people," but then they are my friends. When I talk to curators, art critics, academics, established artists, regardless of how they feel about my work, there is almost always more condescension than there has a right to be. I think I've worked my way into a corner though, because I'm remembering that it's the same way with many film guys I've met too, I just don't know as many personally. I think good guys are hard to find in most fields of creativity.
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