For this last of three blog posts I decided to attend Metrograph’s screening of the recently released documentary about Chris Burden simply titled Burden. I was a little disappointed to discover that the format of the documentary was fairly traditional but nonetheless, as a collection of Burden’s filmed performance art pieces it still is as awe-inspiring and disturbing as most experimental films I could’ve viewed instead. What was particularly interesting to me about the documentary, besides the fact that it allowed me to see more of Burden’s pieces beyond the three we watched together in class, was that it essentially lifted the veil, or the camera if you will, and allowed for a contextualization of both the man and his work. For example, in class we watched the piece in which he had someone shoot him with a shotgun from just a few feet away; which needless to say was impressive and thought provoking on its own. But the documentary shined a light on the fact that it was a friend of his who he had tasked with shooting him and that the piece had actually gone wrong as this friend has, despite numerous rehearsals, moved a bit to the left as he pulled the trigger resulting in a more serious injury than the one intended. This sparked so many questions in me as to the possible deterioration of the two men’s relationship following the incident but most of all about whether the very presence of the camera, which I assume wasn’t there during rehearsals, had affected the shooter’s judgement and decision on shooting day (pun intended). If it was just him and his friend Burden in the room unobserved would he perhaps have been more careful and less likely to injure him more than was intended? Did the presence of a camera make him, as a figure in the art world, less concerned with the well-being of his friend in favor of posterity and the power of the final product? Equally fascinating was the insight into Burden’s personal life at the time of his most daring pieces. It was during those years that he was, off camera and out of the studio, living a rather normal and domesticated life. I’m not quite sure what conclusion to make from that but for someone who, despite his recording of his pieces, sees himself as a performance artist rather than a filmmaker it does make sense that non-domesticated or tumultuous years would not lend themselves to risky or disturbing pieces as the live being lived at this time is already that. I found that to be quite a powerful piece of food for thought on what motivates us to do what we do. Interjected between footage of his pieces were short interviews of Burden on the farm that he lived on in his later years and up until his death in 2015. He described himself as having changed and no longer being interested in the kind of performance art pieces which he did during his youth and I couldn’t help but to think that all of it had taken a toll on him and that he perhaps had ventured a bit too far into the possibilities of reality and the limits of mortality to the point of, for lack of a better word, scaring himself straight. It reminded me of talking to people who had lived through the 60’s and greatly experienced with psychedelics but now, rather disappointingly, dismiss these adventures as youthful antics.

Since my last project was inspired by Mulholland Drive I felt it was only right I go and see it again; in theaters for the first time. I’m pretty skeptical on whether or not it can qualify as an experimental film but it is labeled in such a way online and the screening which I found was listed on the Screen Slate website which you suggested we use. Because of that ambiguity as to whether or not I should have selected this film over more clearly experimental ones I will center my critique around why Mulholland Drive is indeed an experimental film that managed to finesse its way to the box office.

If we were to watch the first couple of minutes of the film, stop there and determine its genre we would probably be right to assume that, because of its rather linear and fairly sensical start, this will be no more than an odd yet traditional narrative. However, just like as is often the case with experimental film I would argue that what this storyline set up points to, as do many seemingly traditional elements of the film, is the artist acknowledging the medium that he is working with and letting its clichés and glitches show. But David Lynch’s medium which he is making transparent is not film. It’s not the camera he uses (otherwise we would see static or skips). No, his medium is Hollywood itself. It’s the industry and culture which is both the topic of the film through the main female protagonist(s) and most importantly which is where Lynch will succesfully sneak in this film. Almost like a joke with its set-up and punch line then, he gives the viewer a slightly traditional entry point and then catches them off guard with every scene going forward.

Another element which has often, in my experience, not been the main focus of experimental films but which is very present in the film, and which could make someone argue the idea of it as an experimental film, is dialogue. However the dialogue is an even better example of Lynch acknowledging his own medium as experimental film-makers tend to do. Although quite often logical and understandable the dialogue always seems overacted as if to point towards a movie within a movie. Something which is reinforced by the fact that the protagonist is an actress herself and at some point even reads lines at an audition.

Lynch shows no desire to answer the audience’s question or give them a comforting ending as traditional filmmakers tend to do. In fact it’s the opposite. The deeper we get into the film the less sense things make.

Lastly, if we are to judge a movie by the sum of its parts rather than by how it was packaged as a whole than how we could not recognize that in nearly every shot Lynch is trying something, experimenting if you will, whether it be with light in the saturated shots of Laura or with sound in the gorgeous scene at the opera house where the performer drops dead yet she can be heard finishing the song. A moment which I think is the key towards understanding that this is a movie about movies in that this opera scene points towards the illusion of cinema, the lack of “live-ness” in contrast with theater which results in the character which you love on the screen being already dead and gone (the actor’s job being already finished) by the time you see it on film and the suspension of disbelief which both performers and the audience members engage in to go along for the ride despite the flaws and distractions of the medium.

During our visit at the Whitney, the only piece to truly capture my attention, so much so that I watched it loop twice, was Anicka Yi’s The Flavor Genome. The short 3D film seemed to have for objective to set up dichotomies, between organic and artificial for example, and then to violently challenge those both through juxtaposing sets of subjects and through a rather monotone narrating talking of genetic mutations and the creation of hybrid creatures for the entertainment of those creating them. Yi would then take her argument further by pinning molecules up against language by discussing Frankenstein-like words created out of a desire for mental shortcuts and which smash together two terms like “sex” and “text” at the risk of losing both original meanings in the process. By doing so she is of course attempting to help move our discussing further by removing the fixed, respectively positive and negative, connotations attached to nature and science. What she’s also effectively doing though is suggesting that pollution is not just something up in the clouds making our cities hotter. There is also an equally real, although more subtle and therefore perhaps more poisonous, kind of pollution which can affect our minds if we are not weary of what ungodly hybrids we birth in our language, and more broadly speaking in our culture. If culture is nature than it is harder to change but it poses the question of who is the apex animal meant to thrive in this environment. If culture is artificial then not only can it be altered at our will but some people amongst can also be held accountable for the atrocities created in the name of culture. In a style reminiscent of body-horror cinema, Yi then shows up glimpses of human hands glossing over skin, wood or metal as if positing the idea that, just like we can break down our language to genes, our selves can be broken down to limbs which, when shown from this point of view, seem to have a will of their own, to be autonomeous. Furthermore she connects living yet seemingly different things through metaphor such as the juxtaposition of a vagina with an octopus and pearls. It seems to suggest that our metaphors can, or do, become our realities. That everytime we compare one thing to another what we are in fact making is a new hybrid. And when we do end up creating that hybrid we henceforth have brought on a new subjectivity to the world. Somehow the film is therefore about creating consciousness for entertainment or subjectivity for consumption. The Liger might’ve been born to please our sight but it is now through his eyes that we wish to see the world and no such eyes had previously existed. Similarly we assembled computers only to slowly, if only through glitch art in the present, birth a new form of consciousness with its own perspective on the reality in which it was born. To return to these hands gliding over surfaces though: I can’t quite explain what I mean by it but if there was to be a message within The Flavor Genome it would seem to be that everything is divisible and that therefore, when shrunken to a sympathetic enough, or weird enough if we’re talking molecular or god forbid quantum level, size then everything is alive.