Passage à l’acte, 1993, by Martin Arnold.
So I’m kind of doing this time warp thing where I’m remembering all of the films I saw in school that really left an impression on me in some way. And now they’re all on YouTube (and Goog-Tube, in this case)! We all know how I feel about YouTube, so part of me feels guilty for promoting these mind-blowing films in the context of a yucky little player. However, I can remember what a pain in the butt it was for my profs to just get a hold of some of these works to show us, and I remember wishing I could have access to some of them so I could just watch them over and over again. So I guess my rationalization is that it’s better to see this stuff on YouTube than to not see it at all. I feel the same way about my cell phone- I find myself resenting its existence but that doesn’t mean I don’t USE IT EVERY DAY. Ha.
One of my favorite courses at the Art Institute was the sophomore Video section with Cyan Meeks. Cyan was a video artist pretty fresh from grad school. She was very political and always seemed to be involved in some documentary project or rally or live video-mixing somewhere. She dated a tattoo artist and wore this one black leather jacket just about every day. I think some of us were a little apprehensive about how young she was, but in the end that wound up seeming like a positive thing rather than a negative. She was very plugged in to what was going on in the world of weird videos.
Most days we would show up and Cyan would screen videos for us and then we would talk about them. And most days I left feeling very excited and inspired. The range of works we saw that year was pretty mind-blowing; everything from and to and to and .
The day we watched this Martin Arnold piece (side note: it was funny when we started to referring to our videos as “pieces”- we always did it with a little bit of sarcasm, but somehow just calling them “videos” ceased to be arty enough)… OK I’m just going to bail out on that sentence and start over. The day we watched this Martin Arnold “piece” was one that has stayed with me. Martin Arnold is known for taking tiny clips from popular films and editing the crap out of them with the result usually being some kind of intense and darkly funny cultural critique. He uses rapid-fire editing, bam bam bam, advancing the action and sound for a fraction of a second and then reversing it, forcing characters to inch painfully, violently forward in their motions, with a sense of being stuck in time moving slower and much less smoothly than molasses.
Passage à l’acte (literally: “passage to the act”) consists of approximately 10-12 seconds from To Kill a Mockingbird which Arnold has extended to around twelve minutes. The source material is a simple family scene at breakfast, transformed into something tense and claustrophobic by Arnold’s editing. Like with most of our screenings, Cyan didn’t give us much of an introduction. She liked to get our gut reactions to what she showed us. A few minutes into it, some of us started looking around at each other like, “what the hell?” We didn’t quite know what to think. Watching what Arnold had done to this film was kind of like someone repeatedly poking you in the face- poke, poke, poke, poke. Or maybe like Chinese water torture- drip, drip, drip, drip. It was frustrating! Of course this was fairly early on in the year, before we were seasoned video-art viewers. We had only seen a few works at this point, mostly narrative-based stuff, so this one threw us for a loop. We started grumbling around and Cyan told us to just hush and watch.
Maybe five minutes in something started to change for me. I gave up on expecting “something to happen” and just kind of fell in with the rhythm of Arnold’s jackhammer editing. I was transfixed. Suddenly there was tension and anticipation in the smallest movements and details- is the kid going to make it through the door? Is Scout going to drink her juice, or is it just going to remain suspended in a never-ending journey toward her mouth? The originally brief verbal exchanges between characters became angry, accusatory, drawn-out arguments. In other words, Passage à l’acte was never easy to watch, but I think once we stopped trying to “figure it out,” it became much more interesting.
By the end of sophomore year we took great pride in being able to sit through things like Vito Acconci’s (2.5 hours!) without batting an eye.
P.S. I have no idea what Cyan is doing now, but I would be curious to know. A Google search of her name pulls up “Skinny Puppy, ” “Termite TV” and “Vampire Freaks.com,” so I’m sure she’s busy, at least.
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