Phil Albers' discussion topic at the end of his cultural
movie night for Karuk TANF was particularly resonant for me. He was trying to
make a point about how narratives existed for us on the Klamath
River pre-contact, but for me the evening was one of looking at
the usefulness of delicate technology.
Phil curated a selection of movies by Karuk videographers
for movie night, including Living Stories
(in which he appears as an interviewee). I went to the event planning on having
a talk-back after Living Stories
where I could suss out what was particularly engaging and where the video lost
them to help me figure out the next stage in developing this project. The
talk-back didn't happen, but what happened instead was probably just as
informative.
The biggest problem with the current iteration of Living Stories is its visual stasis -
it's all people talking to a point just off camera for an hour. As a theater
artist, I've been brainstorming spatial ways to improve the viscerality of the
experience. The video before Living Stories
had the same visual stasis, so when the sound went out a few minutes into
my movie and the audience perked up, I found a possible answer.
Video offers a lot of paradoxical possibilities as a medium.
For example, as a recorded medium, it ought to have a stable longevity. Without
constantly converting formats, however, that's not the case. It's also surprisingly
brittle: the wrong combination of technologies can result in the video not
playing, or not playing correctly. Third, and probably most alarmingly, video
and film promote audience passivity. When we watch a movie, we sit back and
consume the information, assuming that we're in good hands. It's only when
something goes wrong, the instability and brittleness of the medium creeps in,
do we sit up. This medium, that promotes passivity, has an equal potential to
promote activity.
So what's next? First, I need to take a cue from the length
of the other videos. I want to re-edit Living
Stories into a series of discussions-by-juxtaposition on the central topics
addressed in the interviews: books versus oral transmission, problems of
translation, the role of traditional stories in mental health, etc. These
smaller videos ought to play equally well separately as together. More
importantly, I want to use the weaknesses of the medium to engage viewers as
active participants in the issues under discussion. How can I present these
problems using video in a way that the audience is not satisfied by the
recorded material and needs to seek their own answers? And how can I structure
that exploration? Ought I use curricula or game-play? Or a combination of the
two?
And I need to figure out why the sound went out.
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