Building steam

Just to recap - if a fan-vid contains shots from Law and Order and music from Evanescence, it is Rubbish. Yes, the some of those parts really is definitely less than the whole. There is no artistic merit to be found in there anywhere. The clip we watched in one of our early classes was perverted: an affront to my integrity as an opinionated student and a fantastic and ludicrous example of how a denizen of the internet can create something so carefully considered and contrived and still get nowhere in life. I hate that television show, as I do most of that procedural rubbish that is thrown onto our screens, and don't get me started on that wailey death-girl. Now please enjoy this clip of bridges being esploderised that, while similar in construction, is better than the former by an order of magnitudes.



Did you notice that in the Law and Boredom film clip that the music swells just as the male lead bursts through the lift doorway and trudges down the hall? Or that in the tilt-shift clip I posted earlier that at 41 seconds in, as the man first falls in the swell, the percussion from the accompaniment begins? Something deeper is going on here. It is the same thing that draws us not to the shapes and outlines of the looming structures in the actualities but to the wisps of steam swirling from their rooftop pipes; it is the the kinetic allure of Deleuze's 'movement-image', from his Cinema 1. All that is modern is movement. We are obsessed with that which we did not have before. If something is built it is finished, it is in the past. Roads, rails, channels - sure they're there and they're static, but they're tools for movement, continuously, for ever. There is a joy in the observation of movement, but when environments are made specifically for that kind of movement, like in any of the spatial dioramas of the Eames creations, the sensations can be further distilled.

Ozu's Tokyo Story is a powerful export precisely because it sets itself against concepts of the modern that we have since come across. it is static (stoic) and compartmentalised. Everything is in its place. the camera is mostly still, and reflects the mesmerising, almost kaleidoscopic chiaroscuro quality of the Japanese domestic interior. It's like an eastern Ikea advertisement in every room, with collaged found objects and talismans not displayed but integrated, collectivised, busy but ordered, not ostentatious. If it is a period piece, not 'modern day' (should we fall back to that conundrum!) it concerns us more with the human condition but curiously how it operates - with a plethora of unknown cultural cues and attitudes - in an intensely un-western space. While not as alien as it could have been before the war, the Japan in Tokyo Story is still quite exotic, and as such is a veritable export. We are unnerved in much the same way as watching historical programs about our own domestic space, as in the interviews with the Eames.