Paul Tarragó showed a film shot in Super 8. It was also black and white. And I would add that it seemed to me to maximize the look of large grain as well. Various dimensions of the film sought to identify it with this past now receding so quickly, the format and grain and all.
All of this was interesting because I have seen his work and think of him as a very proficient digital artist. Tarragó said in the Zoom discussion that he made three films last year, which announces a prolific practice. I will remember him for how prepared he was to make whatever compromises seemed necessary to submit work, and to consider the different possible venues that might be most appropriate for a given work. I think of Tarragó as basically doing little else but make films, and of never really facing any crisis about that. Discussion placed emphasison considerations that a young practitioner might want to be thinking about. Elena Duque said she also had a film shot in Super 8 that she was ready to digitize. This was on the prompt from Bryan to speak about any new projects they are up to. I was imagining the artist who could not say what was next. But Wenhua Shi was able to answer by talking about teaching and about the progress his colleagues are making in preparing to hold the RPM Film Festival in Boston. Soetkin Verstegen's film involved a focus on the action of moving a large chunk of ice. I found this very satisfying to watch. Wenhua Shi's film also gave prominence to the human form, only this time of a slim Asian woman who has a beautiful arm. There is a dwelling on the particulars of human locomotion in these films that one might recognize in early cinema. I also liked Magorzata Bosek-Serafinska's film. This was the piece in which a lot of wrappers and tickets were manipulated on a plane surface for their visual interest. It is, to an extent, a continuous process,but it was also a narrative about someone who smokes. A Marlboro pack provides a kind of design basis for one segment of the work, and a Winston pack for another. The work identified five or six months, arranging the film in segments that were so named, and the film included brief lines in text suggesting the progression of the smoker's life, health, or care. Nothing of Bergson could be remotely relevant for any of this. The work was for me a particularly dramatic shift away from any interest in narrative. I was thinking today that narrative might have more to do with computing. But I also thought it was interesting to think about who was able or interested in taking part in the Zoom. There is a very palpable interest in internationalizing the festival, a mark of academic funding (though I hope this doesn't appear to be a critique). The work selected might also begin to acquire certain internationalizable qualities (as we might expect, for example, when very different cultures are exchanging a product a great deal and there isn't necessarily the means to become particularly familiar with the low-level activities of people who live and breathe there: a McDonaldization, for lack of a better word). [I don't know what's going on with the formating of this message.]
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