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Lorna Mills and Sally McKay
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According to my friends J&J, people in Pickering, Ontario used to do this to recreate "that puppet from The Dark Crystal." I thought I knew what puppet they meant until I went looking.
I just saw Elephant. ow ow ow. If you are feeling too chipper, this'll deflate the mood in no time. I like it a lot, though, as a document and a marker in time. I like that it is so clearly Columbine, but at the same time clearly fiction. This ain't no mock-u-mentary, but rather knock-down, drag 'em out, expressionistic narrative. The first part of the film, before the shooting started, hit me hard with all the bad, remembered pain and hopelessness of high school. By the time the violence kicked in I was tear-streaked and numb. My own indifference to the bloodshed was in itself the most bleak and, I think (hope), informative part of the experience. I felt similarly about Larry Clark's Kids: painful to sit through but important to see. Now, 9 years later, I am sick of Larry Clark and his self-indulgent, self-serving fetishization of adolescence. And I have felt similarly about Gus Van Sant in the past. But maybe it takes a salacious point of view to provide otherwise clear-eyed, judgement-free pictures of the dark interior of teenager-dom.
Bowling for Columbine is the only place where I've seen a direct connection made between the amorality of youth (which we distance our selves from) to the amorality of the military industrial complex (in which, as adults, we are complicit). While Elephant, is paralysing and despair-inducing, Bowling for Columbine, is a call to action. I'd suggest seeing both.
All that said, here's a good angry rant by Michael Niederman, who hated Elephant and does a very nice job of saying why .
From a 1998 article in transmissions by Judy Radul:
Distance is needed for analysis, too much closeness tends to produce immersive and manipulative scenarios. The twentieth century has been charted via the disappearance of distance (Jameson), similarly live "presence" in performance works against distance to provide a sense of immediacy, a tangible connection to the performer. Paradoxically, our present moment seems bereft of live performance - yet besieged by compulsory liveliness, presence and animation. Let me crassly overstate the point': we crave animation because we want to feel alive. We have a distrust of contemplation and things passive, and an overdeveloped belief in "action" and "dialog".
I really love Radul's Empathy With Victor which is currently showing (scroll down) at the Power Plant in Toronto. In the 3-screen video, an actor and a director are working together on developing a scene. This scenario is itself scripted. There are many levels of representation and they fold back in on themselves, as the scenes within scenes play out, and our attention shifts back and forth from a meta-appreciation of the construct, to engagement with the characters and content. Sounds dry and boring but nope, its not. It's a thrilling, chilling existential experience. The 'actor' is working himself into the character of a man (Victor) who is about to present a eulogy at his friend's funeral. He is practicing his talk, while ironing. The eulogoy itself is an abstracted exploration of mortality. What does it mean to be a person, and by extension to be dead? Victor ends up concluding that his friend's death is a sad occasion because, and only because, he was human. He concludes this many times, as the actor tries to get inside the character with helpful prods and suggestions from the actor playing the director.
Here are some more of Radul's words, from the article quoted above:
What can or should be considered "live" is a philosophical question but wittingly (or unwittingly) it is also a question which performance engages with. Is the live situation best defined in terms of humans, sentient organisms, matter, conjunctions of time and place or an intensity of lived experience? What we accept as "live" structures a hierarchy between the live and the inanimate. It also structures our understanding of time. The present is alive, and dies with each passing moment. The death of not only the mortal body but of experience is something capitalist society uses to trigger a panoply of consumptive responses through anxiety. But, if, like many other cultures, we broaden our understanding of what is "live" or "alive" we may be able to work in the interstices of these hierarchies for an oppositional effect.
Top ten art lists for 2003 are gathered together here. Thanks folks!