I Have No Memory of My Direction

I have trouble talking of this video without sounding like I am writing for an essay or even a professor for that matter. This entry is about a video I saw a couple of nights ago. I Have No Memory of My Direction -by Midi Ondera.

I am having problems thinking about the experience. I find in conflict about the whole thing. I feel that I cannot come to grips with what I feel about the whole thing. I have many reservations about the video, which may be relatedt to the fact that it was one of the first presentations I have been to where the artist was present. As expected she did talk about her prioject. She had an unimpressive pressence. It feigned to grasp my attention, and I thought it reflected on her piece.

She drew heavily from Chris Marker's sans soleil, although I have yet to see it.

It was a travel document at its very core. The subject was in transition, this was evident. It was the dominating movement of the work. Unlike a situation narrative that not only moves forward but linearly, this piece moved on multiple fronts, creating itself as it lived on. Like a plasticine that does not need an initiator.

It was filled with small individual stories that were outlines of the Japan that she was visiting. The stories were fantastic, they not only were part of this filmmakes real/imagined history, they were also very telling of their location. Of japan itself.

The filmmaker asked the audience to sit and allow youself to dream. This was perhaps the same phrase uttered to her by er film professor before a screening of Marker's video. But this was not the case for me there. I found myself constantly being asked to dream in the video, not to mention by the filmmaker herself at the beginning of the screening. The video set the stage for multiple dreams and dream-like stories, but there seemed to be a lack of a motive.

Why would one want to drawn into this space. Is there enought room left by the filmmaker to inhabit. I think not. I think that there was plenty of provocative imagery and scenarios presented by the filmmaker, but they are multiple tracts being presented, that it makes difficult to extend past the first stages of rem.

I thought that the use of multiple still photographic effects was well done. She obviously knows the esthetics of the media. I thought the use of lomo-layouts for video were particularly effective. There was also a fisher-price cam used, televison and video game footage, etc.

But in regards to the myths that she as a filmmaker built on, there were many. The play was in how true or how false these were. But their true-ness to life really was rrelevant. It was the quality of the story that really did matter. For example there is a myth that is recounted of a dog named Hatchiko.

And of particular concern to me was in my view an inevitability. It was the pronounced pressence of cell-phones. I thought there ought to have been a reference to this technology. Now this may have also dated and placed the film, but there was such a visible favoritism for it, there had to be a reference but there was not.

I think the problem with this work is that it trys to tell its story, instead of mediate it. Because I think this form of story-telling needs this attribute. I think Kafka can manipulate a story and a storyteller like Borges can mediate a story. The difference ends up being where the reader/subject finds him/itself in the narrative, either on the inside or the out.

-the dog- Hatchiko

-the cat temple

-the fish that swam in the Lake where the American dupped all the celluloid news and propaganda footage after the end of the war.-bake sakana

- the cameras and types of footage used (Apocalpyse Now, Buffy, Sailor Moon, )

-the use of george bush's image, I think this did more to date the video than keep it timeless. It places the video too much, in a specific time and also projects a certain political perspective. I think this detracts from the

-the sneaking and miss-attempt at keeping covert.

-she didnt have an editor.