Video, 13 min with surround sound
May 2008
Looking at my body of work, I regard Captured, my most recent one-channel video, as a point of change. For the first time, I place myself within the frame of this fifteen-minute film as the one and only character. In doing so, I consciously pluck myself away from the symbiosis that I usually maintain with the camera mechanism. My role within the work shifts from being synonymous with the camera to the opposition and the subject of examination.
The set of actions in Captured is simple: I, the filmmaker/film artist/video artist, box the camera as an equally capable opponent. As I attack my opponent, I am also on my guard, anticipating a return. Eventually, I am enervated by my actions and physically forced to stop the match. The idea for Captured sprouts from a brief conversation about particularly grotesque (yet simultaneously beautiful) sports photography of boxing matches. The camera’s capacity to distill incredibly imperceptible details in fast movements astounds the spectator, despite the reality of the movements always being present. This connects back to my discussion about film as a revelatory medium at the time of its first proliferation. Yet this ability to reveal reality beyond what the human eye can see is also frequently used to dramatize an event – to bring forth all the “gory details,” the strange moments within an act that appear awkward, out of context, and doubly bizarre because it is real. These surreal moments become spectacles not only captured, but generated by the camera. For them to exist, one would have to assume the presence of a camera in the same setting. The image and the lens are in conflux and conflict with each other.
Originally, my plan was to hire a professional boxer to carry out the previously mentioned set of actions. My goal was to make a film that firstly provides a constant stream of this said confrontation. The boxer regards the lens as not necessarily a receptor of substance, but a force that projects outwards its target. The camera is not so much anthropomorphized as it is viewed as sitting on the same organic and free-willed hierarchy as the boxer. Secondly, the punches’ physical impact against the lens calls attention to the object-ness of the camera, that it does not simply replace the eye of the spectator, but stands between the subject and the spectator as a physical filter.
After some consideration, it becomes clear that my intimacy with the camera is a very salient point in the conception of the project, which results in my taking the role of the boxer. Working as a cinematographer, I perceive the camera as both the container of a physical reality and a weapon toward that reality. By hitting the lens repeatedly until I am exhausted to the ground, I wish to not only address my original goals for the piece, but to illustrate my emotional relationship with and regard for the powerful mechanism.