If it's of interest to anyone, I recently did a fictional Blog exercise called Carfilhiot, consisting of three intertwined blogs. I didn't know where it was going when it started, and the additional blogs were an afterthought.

quote:

Originally posted by Shevchyk:
"When a fake is revealed, they are disappointed and they lose interest in the story-- the story itself wasn't actually compelling enough to begin with."

That's odd, don't you think? I don't know why that happens, nor what the explanation for it. Voyeurism? A projection of some inner need for perceived understanding and intimacy?

How odd.

I don't think the lg15 story is so much about a sense of intimacy-- though vlogs, podcasts, etc do carry more of that sense than previous media. I think the big thing with lg15 was the speculation and interaction that surrounded it. It was a puzzle, something to work on collectively and talk about. For all I find the videos themselves tedious, this interactivity is the interesting part of it. Harking back to Footage, the nature of the footage wasn't the really interesting part, it was the boards and discussion and activity of assembling it that held the community together.

Indeed, doing to the discussion of "power of 'true story'" here, I don't think the storytelling here was even the driving factor. While I speculated about it earlier, I think people would be much more annoyed to find that Flemming had been astroturfing the community activity -- the actual compelling part -- that they are to find out it is "fake".

(And free time suddenly appears on the horizon!)

It seems part of the discussion, or issue at hand, may be in having to ask, if not reconsider, what constitutes a story. Or whether the definition has changed, or shifted, if even a bit.

Yet I wouldn't agree with Barry, as I do think he does sort of try to say many things at once. But his point about marketeering? If an advert for a non-existent product exists, it is really an advert, then?

That depends on what you think their motives are.

It could be a particularly ingenious and manipulative kind of product development where you find out where the weak points in a person's psyche are and then devise the ideal thing to sell to them.

Or is that paranoid?

I think kebernet has some interesting points, but I'd like to mention that PR has some pretty explicit descriptions of Cayce's emotional reaction to the clips that have been distributed, and it's a very strong aesthetic reaction: the clips are high-quality, interesting, and moving in some fundamental way. The high aesthetic quality is what spurs the community to form in the first place, not the puzzle (the puzzle forms as people start wondering where this incredible stuff comes from).

And, yes, Sentinel, that is paranoid.

Maybe you're right. Meanwhile...


Could the short, anarchic movies now springing up on YouTube ever rival mainstream cinema? Our film critic Peter Bradshaw confesses to a growing addiction

Tuesday October 24, 2006




In parallel with its own exponential growth, my fascination with YouTube has galloped into a raging obsession. Whole evenings, theoretically dedicated to writing, have been hijacked by a terrible need to click away from the Microsoft Word document, onto the internet browser, and from there the lure of YouTube is irresistible.
What's not to be fascinated by? However slick or however rickety, the best of these mini-movies have an unmediated quality, a found-object realness that is completely lacking in anything available in the cinema or on TV. YouTube now has imitators:Google Video, ifilm.com and putfile.com. For a growing number of people, time spent surfing the web exceeds the time spent watching TV, so who knows if this way of making and watching movies might not become a huge and serious rival to the mainstream. Many contemporary movie-makers have become fascinated by the lo-fi video aesthetic, and by blank "locked off" camera work with a deadpan surveillance feel, which has risen in parallel to this internet revolution.
The cinema has something in common with the confessional, video blog aspect of YouTube. The popularity of Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez's The Blair Witch Project was inflamed by a vast, grassroots internet campaign which mischievously suggested that the film's horrors were real. And there's a cousin to this blurring of fact and fiction in YouTube - confessional blogs which turn out to be faked by ingenious actors. Documentaries like Werner Herzog's Grizzly Man and Andrew Jarecki's Capturing the Friedmans have YouTube qualities, in that the footage was shot by the participants themselves, but needed a professional cinema practitioner to bring it to light. If the unhappy heroes of these films were making their videos now, they would probably bypass these directors and take them straight to YouTube.

Where straight cinema and YouTube come more closely into parallel is the use of the continuous shot: the persistent, unjudging, almost uncomprehending gaze; an unedited, deep-focus scene in which our attention as audience is not coerced or directed. Some of the most remarkable clips on YouTube are from the Iraq war. Army personnel are increasingly editing their tapes and adding music (have a look at militaryvideos.net).

But in military or civilian life, the true YouTube gems are not the digitally carpentered mini-features. The most gripping material is raw, unedited footage in one continuous take. The legendary French film critic André Bazin would probably admire the genre, favouring as he did the spiritual purity of a single, unedited shot. An outstanding example is KBR Convoy Ambushed in Iraq (7 minutes 6 seconds). I defy anyone not to be scared, really scared, by this extraordinary film, one of YouTube's flourishing "ambush" sub-genre from Iraq. Watching it, and going through it in real time, is genuinely disturbing.

The Dogme film movement of Lars Von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg explored minimalism, and film-makers such as Michael Haneke, Andrea Arnold and Christopher Petit have exploited the eerie, disquieting quality of video-surveillance footage. They might all be fascinated by, and even learn something from, what I think of as YouTube's snuff comedy genre: bizarre things captured more by accident than design, which often have a sublime quality.

Fat Woman Falls Down Hole (13 seconds) is a clip of CCTV; the camera is apparently fixed above a bar in a busy pub. Someone opens up a trap door directly behind a woman serving drinks, with results that Buster Keaton himself would have admired. The scene is shot and framed with unshowy formal perfection; a professional director and crew could work for months on a slapstick scene and not get it as right as this. It's something in the way the woman disappears so utterly from view.

The genre takes on a darker tinge with its elements of cruelty and even sadism. Amateur Slamball (1 minute 17 seconds) could have been made by Michael Haneke in a facetious moment. Three teenage boys are playing basketball on a trampoline. Something goes terribly wrong. But the awful event happens just 17 seconds in; for the remaining minute, the camera is just trained, implacably, on the boy writhing in agony. Wobbles and zooms indicate that there is someone holding this camera: not helping the guy, just filming, filming, filming. There is a worrying level of unconscious cruelty in the camera not looking away: as in Haneke's Hidden or Powell's Peeping Tom, the audience is implicated in this callous detachment. On a TV "funny videos" show, Jeremy Beadle would cut this off after 20 seconds and you would never know that the film's most compelling aspect is this blank, extended aftermath in which nothing is happening, yet the story is there in its entirety.

Happily, the genre has its U-certificate side. Black and White (28 seconds) is a brilliant and sweet little home movie, which just shows two rabbits gobbling away at their food and looking into the lens with the utter calm of cartoon creatures or young children.

The cinema of YouTube has, at its best, a transcendental amateurism, un-housetrained by the conventions of narrative interest or good taste. It is a quality to be savoured, and quite different from documentary or the classic verite effect of realism in feature films. What makes it so involving is that the viewers extend this amateur process in choosing, playing and sharing the files: they supplement production with a new, vernacular type of distribution. It's this that makes YouTube so addictive.

On the other hand, I find randomly surfing YouTube about as rewarding as randomly surfing television... i.e. not very. Maybe I just haven't got the hang of it yet.

No, I agree with you. I think Bradshaw is a film critic who has seen too much now and in looking for the next Big Thing he surrounds these crummy home videos with a thick haze of words that make them sound a lot more interesting than they are.

quote:

An outstanding example is KBR Convoy Ambushed in Iraq (7 minutes 6 seconds). I defy anyone not to be scared, really scared, by this extraordinary film, one of YouTube's flourishing "ambush" sub-genre from Iraq. Watching it, and going through it in real time, is genuinely disturbing.

Not scared. Not disturbed.
But then I really, really dislike Haneke's 'Hidden' and I also reject the idea that a watching audience has to be "implicated in this callous detachment".

What I've found appealing in Youtube have been the old or hard to find videos that now and then appear (and more than often go away as swiftly). That's what redeems the service for me, because otherwise, the video quality sucks. And so far, have yet to find some candid video that goes beyond amusing and into the category of 'footage'. Clips of pranks, happy kitten and such are funny but not very filling, more like candy that leaves a sour aftertaste.

The promise of this channel to be an outlet for unedited, raw footage from everyone from a garage Kubrick to a corporate whistleblower to army personnel is very attractive. More and more you see blocky, pixellated clips featured on broadcast news; strangelly, it's become the equivalent of the 'shaky home video' look of the 90s that gave a sheen of authenticity to a clip. The stuff being uploaded from Iraq and other places of conflict could be a very potent factor in the public opinion... that's why an attenpt to clamp down on it and on military blogs is underway.