What difference does color make?

Our new camera arrived yesterday, and while my yin was out bringing home the tofu, I was at home pushing buttons. Fortunately, the former action was metaphorical and the latter literal rather than vice versa; otherwise it would have made for a soggy, aggravated bean curd dinner.

But this is beside the point.

The point is that this new toy is way, way cool and makes me incredibly pleased that we chose not to purchase the iPad. Besides having a camera that will actually take photographs worth seeing, it's also capable of full HD video. And, in the ninety minutes between my yin's departure and return, I was able to read the manual, familiarize myself with the layout, and make this short experimental film, which questions the signifying practices of language:

The possibilities, it seems, are endless, and I find myself more interested in filmmaking than at any time since my undergraduate days, when I stayed up all night with my roommate in an abandoned theater shooting a heavy-handed, well-commaed, overly-hyphenated, quasi-sado-masochistic 8mm black and white film that used the text of the "Our Father" prayer like placards in a silent movie.

Lamentably, either I or the camera malfunctioned that night, and the negatives returned from processing totally unexposed, leaving me soured on the whole filmmaking endeavor for the remainder the Nineties. I suppose the experience was something of an aesthetic trauma, and I found myself drawn more and more towards the analytic side of cinema rather than the production. Lighting design for the human eye became more important than production design for that of the camera, and by the time I graduated my sole focus was live performance.

(Do you see what I did there?)

A few weeks ago, however, I worked a video shoot that must have reignited this passion for the camera's mechanical gaze, the same one for which Chris Marker once wrote a poem:

LET US PRAISE DZIGA VERTOV (1967)

Let us praise Dziga Vertov
for if I had to choose the Ten Best Documentaries of All Time
i’d call it preposterous
but if there's ONE to choose:

“A SIXTH OF THE WORLD”
Because this moment of our history, this palingenesis
this dawn, this birth of our memory,
this first draft of what was due to be our world, good and bad,

Paustovsky made us think of it
Eisenstein made us dream of it
but only one man made us SEE it
DZIGA VERTOV

KINO GLAZ Film Eye Eye First
Camera Eye But Man’s Eye (you SEE what I MEAN)
Camera, machine, montage, eyes, like hounds at Harry’s heels
(O for a Muse of light…)
but the Eye über alles, the Eye leading the pack
seeing—donner à voir
and not only the faces, the gestures, the segments of life
but words also, words suddenly alive
by filling the whole screen, heavy words, real words,
(and the magic of the cyrillic, of course, but who’s complainin’?)

Words coming to a new stage of perception
owing to these large, big BLOCKletters,

words achieving equally with images
ideas achieving equality with facts
art achieving equality with life

How d’you say that in Russian?

DZIGA VERTOV

(More films and poesy to follow...)