Hmmm. I had a big epiphany this week, so obvious and so simple that it humbles me entirely. I want to be precise as possible in this revelation and that is not an easy task. I'd love to provide a bio of how I arrived at this realization, but it would just take too long. So the short version is that I've been a curator since 2002, and my shows were composed of some of the most beautiful & radical films I have ever seen! Also, I made my first experimental film in 2000. I have absorbed film & video art through the best teachers, such as Mike Kuchar, who taught me how to edit sound on the Steenbeck, Su Friedrich, who taught me how to operate the optical printer, Jeanne Liotta, who taught me how to treat film as a material object using applications such as paint, bleach, collage, and nail polish, Bradley Eros, who helped me learn how to write poetry, Nisi Jacobs & Tim Reardon, who helped me learn Final Cut Pro and other aspects of working in video, and I'd estimate at least 50 other film/video artists, curators, & poets that I know. I have to say that when I am in this world, often I feel such a sense of belonging & being at home, as well as a high level of engagement, that it eclipses any negative emotion. I feel very lucky!
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A few years ago, several of us were hanging out at Millennium Film Workshop, and I had wondered aloud what I imagine every contemporary experimental film/video artist must wonder at some point: "Why isn't anyone writing about experimental cinema?!"
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(Okay, I have to back track a minute and say that this query pre-dated the blogosphere & there are people who are writing about experimental cinema (Ed Halter, Pip Chodorov, Michael Sicinski, Bradley Eros, Brian Frye, Chrissie Isles, Henrietta Huldische, Adrian Martin, everyone at the Millennium Film Journal, the Frameworks Archive, all the curators who compose notes for their shows, academics, and of course, the bloggers: Albert, Courtney, Zach, Aquarello, Brian, Girish, Thom, Long Pauses, & so many others. You people rock my world!)
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Back to the story . . .
I had just asked this question, when we noticed that Ken Jacobs was a few feet away. I had not met him yet, and I was a bit intimidated. Ken is the nicest, coolest, youngest experimental film/video artist, and he is also one of the best! So one of my friends posed my question to him, "Jen wants to know why no one is writing about experimental cinema!" And Ken looked at me with all of his handsome charisma, and he said this:
"If you want to see writing on experimental cinema, you're going to have to do it yourself! And be out there!
Write!!!"
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Let me just get to the point. There are a growing number of writers who are addressing experimental cinema, but yet the 50 or so experimental film/video artists that I love are not represented in print or even on blogs, if we don't count my little blog. Yes, Jonas Mekas is somewhat known, Stan Brakhage in certain circles, Ken for people in the know, but this world I've participated in for the past 7 years is essentially missing in the media.
So my big revelation is this: Contemporary experimental cinema (from NY & other locations) should be documented & recognized in the media!
Really obvious, right? Well, I had every excuse for why this omission was okay, from considering that perhaps it was better for me personally that this little avant-garde family remain underground, to being fearful that if the film critics initiated more writing on the subject, that it would be disparaging. I had the excuse that the war and all the brutality of the world made the documentation of experimental cinema irrelevant. And a rationale so selfish as to wonder if I would approve of the film critics style of writing! I still struggle with this. :) Anyway, these are all excuses.
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I will give you an analogy:
Let's say that the engineers at STScI were able to create the Hubble Space Telescope with their own incomes. (Yeah, right!) Okay, let's say that they launched Hubble and when the first photos came back from the earliest, youngest reaches of the universe, that no scientific media would publish & recognize the photos. Think about that . . .
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Experimental Cinema absolutely should be documented and recognized in the culture, because if not, the knowledge will be lost. I curated the most beautiful cinema programs for 5 years, and they were never addressed in the Village Voice, a newspaper only a few blocks away from the screenings. It's personal!
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So I know that I've been all heavy here, and that you want for me to find the humor in this situation, but honestly, I don't find it amusing at all. If anything, I think it's just bizarre. I live in Brooklyn! In the media capital of the world! With the most fantastic film/video artists in the universe! & the NY media is erasing the A.G. cinema?!
Look I'm not going to sweep in Jonas Mekas style and become a one person PR agency, there is too much cinema to write about, even if I wanted to. I'll do what I can in a way that I find creatively interesting and true to myself as a person. I wonder if experimental cinema will become like the early Greek poems created by Homer, passed down from person to person, until some future generation finally comes along to see how ahead of our time we really are!
xoxo
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This image is from Sheri Wills's papermedia series, Efflorvescent. Her photogram films are some of my favorites!
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