Re: [-empyre-] Vog applications

[Adrian Miles <adrian.miles@uib.no>]

At 20:48 +0000 21/6/02, Lachlan Brown wrote:
> Vertov?! Why so much Vertov?! Patrick references Vertov, you reference Vertov,
> Lev Manovitch cites Vertov. October #100 references new media's 
> citation of Vertov
> to bemoan the 'obsolescence' of Psychoanalytic Film Theory. Studies 
> of Cinema began
> a couple of generations after the emergence of the cinema. Scholars and theory
> preceded hypermedia. There's no correlation at all.

can speak for the others. for myself it is that in "man with a movie 
camera" vertov has let himself be explored by the process of being 
cinema, or being in cinema and so a machinic vision emerges. i tend 
to think all the work on the film that emphasises its self reflexive 
modernism sort of misses the point, at least to the extent that it 
gets grounded in vertov. so for me 'man with a movie camera' is more 
like the child's story where the baby duck walks around askig 
different things "are you my mother?". in this film the 
camera/montage is going around and by its looking/montage/collage is 
wondering (if you like) what it's mother might be. hence all the 
shots of machines-never-in-context-but-just-spinning-and-doing. it's 
a protocyborg cinema. and it's also a film where, as deleuze shows, 
the interval of the sensory motor schema is enlarged and made 
mechanical (though it's almost electronic in it's refusal to be only 
a relay to or for something else). what happens and how we see it is 
not about getting from a to b (in the story, in an argument about 
cinema, in terms of setting up an expectatin of just what we ought to 
see next). so as i said, it's the sort of film i'd imagine a camera 
wanting to make if the camera were allowed to think. so it's an 
emblematic text for what i characterise as a posthuman mode of work 
where we are inserted into it's thinking, not the other way round. (i 
happen to think this is what happens in print literacy, it's also why 
when i first read the deleuze cinema books in 1987/9 i became a card 
carrying deluezean film person - he shows how the cinema thinks us.)

but this isn't about vogs. though vogs are about trying to let go of 
what we think video/cinema etc might be to let it talk. this is also 
why i describe vogs as a writerly video. if you don't work in the 
materiality of the medium you ain't ever going to get it. more 
importantly it's not going to get you.

cheers
adrian miles
--
   
+  lecturer in new media and cinema studies 
[http://hypertext.rmit.edu.au/vog/vlog]
+  interactive desktop video developer  [http://hypertext.rmit.edu.au/vog/]
+  hypertext rmit [http://hypertext.rmit.edu.au]
+ InterMedia:UiB. university of bergen [http://www.intermedia.uib.no]