Colin Marshall

The Ubuweb Experimental Video Project: 20. Igor and Gleb Aleinikov's Metastasen (1984)

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Metastasen. 16:01 min., b&w, 1984. By Igor and Gleb Aleinikov. Ubuweb's description:

The Brothers Igor and Gleb Aleinikov belonged to the first generation of independent filmmakers in the Soviet Union, who no longer worked within the studio system, but founded the 'Parallel Cinema'. Their films, like Western experimental film in the 60s, deliberately refused to conform to professional standards, and were thus rejected not only officially, but also by many filmmakers.

I've been stuck on Metastasen for a while, totally unsure how to approach it. I've finally come to settle on "something to project onto the wall during your most outré parties." Really, how else can one get a foothold on such an accretion of found imagery? You've got bug-covered mules, cars and military processions in negative, bodies in the street, kids in school uniform saluting, aerobicize class, karate matches and an oddly Nick Bergian (though somewhat more realistic) sheep-beheading sequence. Much of it's taken from television by actually aiming a film camera at a TV screen and some of it's on damaged film, creating what academics might call a "distancing" effect.

Ultimately, I suppose this comes to one of those exercises in decontextualization and juxtaposition, and it turns out to work surprisingly well when viewed that way. The image and sound have nothing to do with each other at the beginning and drift farther and farther apart as the minutes pass. Not that any visuals could to justice to the mélange of tinny, beepy quasi-reggae beats topped with Planet-X operatic vocalizing and slowed-down, sped-up, reversed and turntable-scratched stern Russian speech. The dissonance grows nightmarish. Again, throwing a dissonant nightmare party? Here's your ambiance.

The Ubuweb Experimental Video Project: 19. Igor and Gleb Aleinikov's I'm Cold, So What? (1987)

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I'm Cold, So What?. 15:35 min., b&w, 1987. By Igor and Gleb Aleinikov. Ubuweb's description:

The Brothers Igor and Gleb Aleinikov belonged to the first generation of independent filmmakers in the Soviet Union, who no longer worked within the studio system, but founded the 'Parallel Cinema'. Their films, like Western experimental film in the 60s, deliberately refused to conform to professional standards, and were thus rejected not only officially, but also by many filmmakers.

I should've known I'd run into a language barrier at some point. A great many films on Ubuweb hail from out of the Anglosphere — just have a look at the artist index, all Holmqvists, Wojnarowiczes, Richters, Terayamas and Duchamps — and most seem to have English subtitles, but sometimes, especially in the budgets of the experimental, there just ain't the resources for that. The Aleinikov brothers' I'm Cold, So What? would seem to be an example: it's shot in 8mm, it's got no sync sound and its titles are hand-drawn. Whaddaya want?

Though I can't claim to have missed nothing by my inability to read or understand anything spoken or written in the film, my enjoyment remains. The piece presents a series of bizarre tableaux, many involving cinematic voyeurism, blurring of the living-dead borderline and a healthy amount of stabbing, of oneself and of others. A catatonic fellow gets costumed as a ghoul; a literal tree-hugger, ecstatic in his arboreal embrace, gets stabbed; a bespectacled fellow with a Bolex-y camera goes around documenting it all.

The soundtrack begins as a monologue by one male Russian-speaking voice and becomes a dialogue when a female's, also, unfortunately, talkin' Russian, enters the mix. As far as actual linguistic comprehension, I've got pretty much nothin'. I know that nyet means no, and the man says it to the woman every so often, as if to cut down her erroneous conjectures. Several times, the man says a word that sounds like a cognate for "cinematography." The pair's tones and cadences suggest the man is explaining something complicated and the woman, not fully understanding, is popping in with questions and propositions. Can any Russian-speakers verify this?

Words aside, I found myself surprised by the goofy humor on display in the visuals. More than once, I thought of student videos I've watched from the past 20, 25 years. Then I realized something: this pretty much is a student video from 25 years ago! 23, anyway. The muddy black-and-white image and stern voices laid over it make the film feel as if it's much older than it really is. In reality, these are teens and/or twentysomethings from the 80s dicking around, shooting film, having fun and composing strange, striking imagery. It's foreign, sure, but not in every way it seems to be.

The Ubuweb Experimental Video Project: 18. Igor and Gleb Aleinikov's Cruel Illness of Men (1987)

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Cruel Illness of Men. 9:58 min., b&w, 1987. By Igor and Gleb Aleinikov. Ubuweb's description:

The Brothers Igor and Gleb Aleinikov belonged to the first generation of independent filmmakers in the Soviet Union, who no longer worked within the studio system, but founded the 'Parallel Cinema'. Their films, like Western experimental film in the 60s, deliberately refused to conform to professional standards, and were thus rejected not only officially, but also by many filmmakers.

Some would be tempted to describe this film as "a bunch of random stuff" and leave it at that. But if there's any single lesson I feel I should be learning from the Ubuweb Experimental Video Project, it's that there is no such assemblage as "a bunch of random stuff." We're dealing with wrought projects here, not television static, and as such necessarily the products of directed human effort. That's not to say that rhyme and/or reason are always easy to suss out, nor that sussing out rhyme and/or reason should be the aim in watching avant-garde motion pictures — but it's one of the reasons I find it interesting to do so.

Under a score of abbreviated drones and freeform woodwinds, the Aleinikov brothers cut together a series of images, found and made, that look unfailingly bleak, industrial or both bleak and industrial: disused factories, clunky utilitarian machinery, strings of unsettlingly young violinists, old-timey group portraits with everyone's eyes scratched out. Interspersed are less overtly sinister but somehow eerier snatches of action, like a circling brood of crude stop-motion mice or a bunch of little wooden people chopping wood and sawing logs, all differently affected by the vagaries time and the physical world foist onto film stock.

About six and a half minutes in, the action moves to the inside of a train, where a normal-looking young fellow finds himself sitting across from a slightly less-normal-looking, slightly less young fellow in a suit. The soundtrack's drone becomes an ill wind as the suited man stands up and confronts normal guy, getting way too close for comfort. Another (relatively) well-dressed tough joins the fray, and things descend into a grappling match.

Igor and Gleb, two young, unconventional filmmakers coming up right after the end of the Soviet era, no doubt had feelings to express about their situaiton and that of their country. I nevertheless hesitate to read any grand statements into a production like Cruel Illness of Men. They put deliberate craft into it, though, and by nothing less than total receptivity can I learn from it. Claims about the moving image's ubiquity and subsequent devaluation in the modern day are tired, but there's a certain something to the notion that we write off visual constructions too quickly simply because there are so damn many of them around, of any degree of strangeness or conventionality you like. Think of how much that must not have been the case back in late-stage Soviet Russia.

The Ubuweb Experimental Video Project: 17. Doug Aitken's Blow Debris (2000)

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Blow Debris. 20:39 min., color, 2000. By Doug Aitken. Ubuweb's description:

Blow Debris similarly suggests narrative but prefers to offer it in the form of a drifting, almost aimless experience; the piece enacts a passage or journey as we follow a group of nude wanderers in a desert landscape. As with Electric Earth, what could be postmodern anomie becomes celebratory drifting. Aitken spurns a romantic nostalgia for a pristine past and its untrammeled landscapes in favor of the stories suggested by the discarded remnants and detritus that litter the expanse of the Mojave Desert. He also fetishizes the feeling of the desert. Even in the cool, dark space of the gallery rooms housing the huge projections, you sense the lassitude of the characters and time seems to slow down. And then things explode, time reverses, and you are compelled to walk around some more, from dislocation to relocation and back again.

This follows in the vein of Autumn and Electric Earth in that it offers a series of compelling images I haven't quite seen before. It differs from those in its wider purview. Where Aitken's first two pieces on Ubuweb stuck to teen aimlessness and urban wandering, Blow Debris gets all the way from the desert to the creek to the palm tree fields to the suburbs, no sweat.

Also like its predecessors, the piece starts out measured and exploratory but turns urgent and nutso. We see a roving pack of nudes emerge from their encampment of bright red tents, amble down dirt roads, climb rocks, push old couches end over end, examine electronic junk and drive cars. As the setting moves from the sometimes strikingly Lawrence of Arabia-y sand-and-brush landscapes to a carved-out basin to a creek under a bridge and finally to a sprawl of tract houses, things get strange. Stranger than a welter of naked people walking through a series of disconnected environments, I mean.

Powerful gusts of wind blow papers around. Couches explode. Bookshelves disintegrate. Detritus scatters across all visible space. Humans turn to ash and blow away. Utter destruction! This is what I've come to consider the standard Aitken end-stage turn, though greatly amped up from the other examples I've seen. (Clearly, the other videos didn't have the luxury of a demolition budget.) But then there comes a surprise reversal, à la Weird Science: via the miracle of reverse motion photography, all this decimated stuff assembles back into wholes and flies back into place.

Oh, and did I mention there's also a nude dude playing tennis? 'Cause there's a nude dude playing tennis.

The Ubuweb Experimental Video Project: 16. Doug Aitken's Electric Earth (1999)

Electric Earth. 15:01 min., color, 1999. By Doug Aitken. Ubuweb's description:

"A lot of times I dance so fast that I become what's around me." So says the lone protagonist of Electric Earth Doug Aitken's hyperkinetic fable of modern life in the form of a sprawling eight-screen installation that took home the International Prize at last summer's Venice Biennale. An uncanny cross-pollination of genre conventions sampled freely from music video, documentary, and narrative film alike, the work forged a weirdly precise portrait of urban angst, wedding installation to the vernacular vocabularies of cinema and dance. In Electric Earth as in Aitken's previous works, the landscape — here an anonymous expanse of urban wasteland — isn't a passive backdrop for human action, but rather its driving force. The blinking traffic lights, panning video cameras, and automatic car windows create an environment of jerky, accelerating rhythms that Aitken's young black protagonist begins to mimic, as if involuntarily. Projected on enormous screens in three adjoining rooms, Electric Earth is itself an immersive landscape of motion and fractured information, which viewers are meant to experience as much as to watch.

I happen to have just read about this piece in Michael Rush's Video Art, an informative if somewhat stiffly-written and -designed tome on the form. If memory serves, the "proper" way to view Aitken's work would have been in a gallery, surrounded in all directions by screens playing different segments of the protagonist's lonesome wanderings. That is, not as a compressed web video.

But a compressed web video is what we have to work with, and so a compressed web video we shall discuss. I must say, though, that even thus hindered, Aitken's got one sharp cinematic eye. He has the film's lone character, after emerging from a static-staring daze in his hotel room, stroll and then dance through a variety of dimmed, empty urban environments, each seen more strikingly than the last. (Most of these shots qualify as eminently stealable.)

Aitken's own commentary on the piece reveals that the kid's walkabout takes him through not just one city, but a seamless patchwork — if that's not an oxymoron — of several. The resulting invented metropolis presents an equally forbidding and strangely welcoming (or at least non-threatening) landscape of 99-cent stores, laundromats, brown barren stretches, car washes and barbed wire. The protagonist doesn't stop to examine; he just keeps moving. And occasionally busts some moves.

This guy and his reactions (or lack thereof) to his subtly unusual surroundings are interesting enough, but I personally took more notice of Aitken's mastery of what Ozu called "pillow shots," pieces of transitional imagery meant to connect two parts of a narrative without its own connection to that narrative. If the narrative thread in Electric Earth is the kid's walking/popping path through the city — and frankly, that's about as much narrative as I want these days — then the pillow shots are all the details, closely observed, of the built environment: harshly angular streetlamps, blinking brake lights, rotating satellite dishes and security cameras, car wash hoses that move on their own, some kinda gnarly water tower.

Like Autumn, this one eventually turns unsettling. The trouble seems to start when our carefree hero can't convince a Coke machine to accept his crumpled dollar bill. (Cokes in 1999, by the way? Only 75 cents. Yeah, I couldn't believe it either.) Soon, he's shirtless, jittery and hyperventilating as a disorienting streak of city lights surround him. By the end he's back to what I assume is his normality, casually heading down a tunnel in silhouette. Whether he's returning to stare at static for a while I can't say.


I spend sleepless nights pondering whether to make myself available to all — and only — sketchy, small-timey media outlets for Ubuweb Project-related interviews. If you own or operate a sketchy and/or small-timey media outlet, I can be reached at colinjmarshall at gmail.

The Ubuweb Experimental Video Project: 15.5. Doug Aitken's Autumn Redux play kit

Watching Doug Aitken's Autumn, I couldn't help but feel that its soundtrack was acceptable, but somehow nonetheless wrong. It seemed to me, and seemed strongly, that an altogether different track should have accompanied these shadowed, bleached, 1990s-shot impressions of teenage in slow motion.


I've only just realized which track that is, and, thanks to the bewildering power of the internet, we can all experience the its new, more powerful union with Aitken's images. The embedded player above contains Autumn, which you should mute first and then play.

Now immediately play the video embedded below. Start it as soon as possible after you start Autumn, then scroll back up and watch the latter with its new backing song.


Uncannily suitable, huh?

The Ubuweb Experimental Video Project: 15. Doug Aitken's Autumn (1994)

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Autumn. 7:28 min., color, 1994. By Doug Aitken. Ubuweb's description:

Aitken wanted to create three music videos, each with their own narrative, to be aired separately at different times as part of his commercial production. The resulting video, shown in galleries, fuses together the three separate narratives in a non-linear fashion. Located on the precipice between the oft-thought mutually exclusive realms of art and entertainment, Autumn stands as an emblematic example of Aitken's video practice, investigating the cultural numbness generated by the flow of media images.

Just reading about Doug Aitken's career as pre-viewing research got me so intrigued that I darted right over to the library and checked out his book Broken Screen, a heavily-designed compendium of short conversations about nonlinearity with luminaries no less luminescent than Carsten Nicolai, Mike Figgis, Rem Koolhaas, Alejandro Jodorowsky and, yes, Werner Herzog. Sure, I hadn't seen any of Aitken's stuff yet, but how could he not be just my kind of guy?

As regards Autumn, Aitken's earliest piece available on Ubuweb: I would totally watch an early-mid-1990s high school period piece with these aesthetics. Its starring elements appear to be two girls, a guy and a jet, of which at least three look highly era-specific. The fellow sports a buzz cut, necklace, Woody Woodpecker shirt, BMX bike, floor bed and retro lava lamp. The first girl, a brunette in low-top Chuck Taylors, has one of those angsty glares you can tell was shaped primarily by "alternative music." The second girl, with extremely short, artificially blonde-looking hair and a perhaps ironically-patterned flannel shirt, adopts what I've come to call the "failed pixie" look. At no point, from what I could tell, does anyone drink a Surge — but I wouldn't be surprised if someone did.

So maybe the character's aren't strikingly original in appearance, but were I a bigwig television exec, I would immediately commission Aitken to produce a series based on Autumn solely due to the evocativeness in which it places them. It's got the long shadows, blurred analog edges, solid fields of black, blinding patches of white and dreamy motion that simply scream the teen equivalent of mono no aware. A young filmmaking hopeful with a few pieces of vintage video gear and a Youtube director account could take this visual perspective and run profitably with it.

Semi-contrary to the description, the shots don't look so much like bits of music videos as they do bits of music video-ified life. But things turn frantic and creepy in the piece's final third, when the shadows take over. We see slow-motion video voyeurism, eyeball closeups, amped-up grain, scanlines and a host of other amorphously freaky things. What's more, the music gets all insistent. This may be too abrupt a genre change for mainstream television, but don't long-running fictional narratives thrive on that sort of thing? Hear this, whoever's gunning to produce the next teen hit: you might consider hiring a video artist from the 1990s. That's my advice.


Hey kids, tweet this: http://bit.ly/8xs7rq

The Ubuweb Experimental Video Project: 14. Peggy Ahwesh's Beirut Outtakes (2007)

[This one isn't embeddable, for some reason, but you can watch it on its Ubuweb page.]

Beirut Outtakes. 7:24 min., color, 2007. By Peggy Ahwesh. Ubuweb's description:

Composed entirely of film scraps salvaged from a closed Beirut cinema, Beirut Outtakes is a collage of sensational visions. Ed Halter writes in the Village Voice: "Outtakes appears to be a ready-made, albeit one tailor-made for Ahwesh's career obsessions, pre-filled with her signature elements: gleeful disruptions of high and low, affection for decayed textures, a peeping eye for lurid sexuality, and a fascination with unlikely images of the Middle East. Just one sequence of a go-go-booted belly dancer wriggling in an Arabic-language cinema advertisement for home air conditioners alone has the power to shatter more stereotypes than 500 pages of Edward Said."

After seeing his turn as one of those amiable but slightly unsettling fortysomething promoters of/hangers-out among the artistic affairs of the younger generation in Andrew Bujalski's Mutual Appreciation, I grew interested in Bill Morrison. But I never get interested in actors, so why this one? Because of his other, dominant career as an experimental filmmaker. I'm particularly intrigued by his Decasia, which, The Wikipedia relays, "was noted by J. Hoberman of the Village Voice as 'the most widely acclaimed American avant-garde film of the fin-de-siècle.'" Furthermore, "Errol Morris commented while viewing Decasia that 'This may be the greatest movie ever made.'" Need one seek more credible endorsements?

None of the works of Bill Morrison, Decasia included, are yet available on Ubuweb. But Peggy Ahwesh's Beirut Outtakes is, and it strikes me as at least a little Decasia-like in its use of found footage in less-than-pristine condition. The Beirut cinema from which the content was salvaged must have been a little more than just closed. Shelled? Flooded? Swallowed by a towering alien monstrosity, then partially digested? Some of these clips haven't aged well at all — they've decayed, one might say — and that only adds to the fascination.

Most of the footage seems to date from the late 1950s to the mid-1970s: cowboy movies, appliance commercials, war movies, underwear commercials, harem movies ("Swingtime at the Potentate's Pad"), Gitanes commercials. Some is in English, some has (what I assume to be) Arabic subtitles, some is in (what I assume to be) Arabic, some has French subtitles. One of the potential pitfalls would have been to fall into the well-defined "Behold the extent of the depredations of Western cultural and commercial imperialism" groove by stringing together a bunch of garish U.S. produced spots, and the influence of the midcentury U.S. advertising and mainstream cinema aesthetics don't fail to represent, but the overall product looks as if sourced impartially from all available nationalities.

These bits and pieces would be fun to watch when presented as a somewhat goofy time-and-space capsule; an enterprising Gen-Yer could probably knock together a few saleable Adult Swim interstitials out of them. But it's the decay that brings the interestingness. While some clips look comparatively pristine, others have been ravaged by the elements. Scratches, bad splices, frame misalignment, soundtrack gaps and age-related inflexibility all manifest in the image. It's a reminder of film's ever-more-distinctive nature as a truly physical medium, and, by way of extreme cases, the sort of richness to which its imperfections can lead. Those currently duking it out in the grand vinyl-versus-digital debate are no doubt all too familiar with this suite of concepts.

But does the air-conditioner-selling go-go dancer do more to promote cultural understanding than your average Said tome? It's possible. And besides, I'm not sure how down I am with the concept of "Orientalism." The Orient's pretty neat.


I am considering making myself available to all — and only — sketchy, small-timey media outlets for Ubuweb Project-related interviews. If you own or operate a sketchy and/or small-timey media outlet, I can be reached at colinjmarshall at gmail.

The Ubuweb Experimental Video Project: 12. Bas Jan Ader's Selected Works (1970-71)

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Selected Works. 11:31 min., black and white, silent?, 1970-71. By Bas Jan Ader. Ubuweb's description:

Includes:

Fall 1 (Los Angeles 1970)
Fall II (Amsterdam 1970)
I'm Too Sad To Tell You (1971)
Broken Fall (Geometric) [West Kapelle - Holland]
Broken Fall (Organic) [Amsterdamse Bos - Holland]
Nightfall

Bas Jan Ader intrigues me. A man of many pursuits — a conceptual artist, performance artist, photographer and filmmaker according to The Wikipedia alone — he was in 1975 lost at sea and presumed dead while attempting a solo east-west Atlantic crossing. The journey was itself part of a performance piece entitled In Search of the Miraculous. I realize this sounds like a fate you'd actively avoid, but at least it was something, and as the years have passed, somethingness has become all I care about.

The first evident quality of this compilation is that there's something wrong with the sound. A reedy static blankets everything, rendering the films silent by forcing me to hit mute. Though I don't think this was intentional, it's unclear which link in the chain failed. Bad production audio? Glitchy film-to-video transfer? Faulty video export? I should e-mail Ubuweb about this, but probably won't. Maybe they already know. Maybe it is intentional.

Thus silenced, Ader comes off in these films as something of a conceptual Buster Keaton, his wiry, distant frame subjected to several stripes of physical turmoil. In 1970's Fall I (Los Angeles) and Fall II (Amsterdam), he takes a couple spills, the former in slow-motion off a roof, the latter on a bicycle straight into one of those urban rivers they're supposed have in the Netherlands. In Broken Fall (Geometric), Ader teeters for a while in a striking down-the-road shot before collapsing into something stting on a tripod. In Broken Fall (Organic), he hangs from the limb of a tree, wriggling and wriggling until ultimately accepting his fate: that of dropping into the river below.

In the middle comes I'm Too Sad to Tell You, Ader's most famous piece. Despite its renown, I can summon sadly little to say about it. He cries on camera for a while — too sad to tell us anything, presumably — which, I can already tell, was a popular artistic endeavor back in the 70s. It actually took me back to those old days of Acconci.

I found Nighfall, which ends the collection, considerably more interesting. It at first appears to be an Abu Ghraibish tableau, with Ader perched on a block as wires run across the ground. But on closer inspection, it's nothing of the sort. Ader was simply one of those unbelievably tall-and-skinny 70s art guys, and he's standing behind the block, not on it. The wires lead to two lightbulbs on the floor, which provide the barn's (or garage's) only illumination. He considers lifting the block, slowly hoists it, then manages to let it drop right onto one of the bulbs, leaving his surroundings half in shadow. It's a surprising, intriguing visual effect.

Though I enjoyed these small films and would watch them again, I get the feeling that they provide only a small, unrepresentative glimpse into what seems to have been the wholly artistic life of Bas Jan Ader. To the library!


If you like my Ubuweb Experimental Video Project, join its awesome street team. Or tweet this: http://bit.ly/8xs7rq

The Ubuweb Experimental Video Project: 11. Adbusters' The Production of Meaning (2006)

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The Production of Meaning. 14:34 min., color, 2006. By Adbusters. Ubuweb's description:

"Here is the challenge of media democracy: to change the way information flows, the way we interact with the mass media, the way meaning is produced in our society. This DVD - a collection of television spots and video clips produced over the years by regular culture jammers - is proof that anyone can seize the media reins and begin producing real meaning." A compilation video from Adbusters contributors. Presented as montage.

I guess I knew I'd encounter this sort of strident advocacy stuff when I started the Ubuweb project. Nonetheless, I have always wondered what gears turn beneath the mindset of an organization like Adbusters. Stunty graphic design has drawn me to its eponymous magazine for numerous flippings-through, but I can't claim to have gained any insight into the greater enterprise of "culture jamming."

The Production of Meaning doesn't clarify anything either. Set to ominous music and peppered with faux film-damage effects, it comprises a series of clips on Adbuster-y subjects: the presence of corporate logos, the percentage of calories from fat in a Big Mac, the shortsighedness of CEOs, "consumerism." The usual suspects.

It's not so much that I disagree with the grievances of material like this — though I can't point to any advertisement-inflicted pain of my own — but that this means of expression is so juvenile and inarticulate. If the villains in your cosmology are as abstract as the crassness of business and the commercial inclinations of the American public, you can simply bat them around in perpetuity, never knowing if you've accomplished or even made progress on your goal — if you can even articulate your goal in the first place.

What's more, most of these stances appear premised on the fact that those taking them have somehow avoided the brainwashing — industrial, cultural, governmental, military, corporate, what have you — that has thoroughly hoodwinked all the sheep with whom they're surrounded. The sheep, of course, can only morally salvaged by having their culture jammed by a bunch of middle-class youngsters in blackspot sneakers.

I could forgive a lot of this if the videos had aesthetic value, but nah, they don't.

If you like my Ubuweb Experimental Video Project, join its awesome street team. Or tweet this: http://bit.ly/8xs7rq