"Communism"
DESIGN RATIONALE | INSTRUCTOR REFLECTION | COURSE & ASSIGNMENT DESCRIPTION | PROJECT TIMELINE
"Communism" This digital video project was created for Assistant Professor Justin Hodgson's RHE312: Writing in Digital Environments course. The project, loosely defiined, required students to remix educational footage in the public domain with other media forms in an attempt to make some form of social/political/cultural critique. This project was created using Sony Vegas. Video and audio samples taken from Communism (1952) and Dating: Do's & Don'ts (1949), produced by Coronet Instructional Films, house at the Internet Archives (public domain) Music from "Beat One" by Ratatat (Album: 9 Beats, 2006) | |
| ~click here for transcript~ | ~click here for work cited~ |
REVIEWER 1 COMMENTARY In Fausak’s video, reversal is as important as repetition. Stalin’s head swings back and forth, then forth to back. Lenin cannot settle his hands—up and down they fly against his will. Tanks crank into reverse; parade routes turn back. Time moves in fits and restarts, frustrates logic, refuses to progress. These are tropes of the mashup, and they usher their author to center stage. But what does this puppeteering compose? The temptation is to let the trick become the show. In a city square, I once saw an old street performer make a line of six showgirl puppets kick their legs in succession, like miniature Rockettes. Crowds never lingered long. The more successful shows invited audiences closer. They opened up spaces for the spectator to become both more self-conscious of the spectacle and, at the same time, more complicit in it. The same invitation is extended in Fausak’s video during the bridge to the third act when the boy lifts his head from crossed arms and blinks. (Most remixes structure themselves on the narrative timing of songs: Act 1—intro, verse, refrain; Act 2—verse, refrain; Act 3—bridge, refrain, repeat, and out.) Although time does not repeat or reverse, it does slow down. Color appears, and in contrast to the black and white clips which precede it, the degree of definition and fidelity is shocking. All the better that it details a blink. Not a gunshot or a dictator’s thumping fist, but a blink. A few stray piano notes carry the song into the most powerful round of its refrain. The boy lifts his head, space and time open up, and we are invited in. There and then is the promise of remix.
[Comments/Responses to the project and reviews added below] | REVIEWER 2 COMMENTARY
Drawing artistic inspiration from Japanese haiku, Sergei Eisenstein made one thing abundantly clear: the cut, that fundamental unit of cinematic transition, is not simply ontologically anchored to celluloid. Montage is a compositional term, and for Eisenstein, “composition is invariably profoundly human.”[1] Episodes, scenes, shots—conflict! These have come to represent moments of human experience, which we term the cinematic image. What Eisenstein says, speaking between the lines, is the cut is what matters unsubstantially. The cut is nothing, it is the no-thing created by “depictibles” (images) that relay something “that is graphically undepictible.”[2] What better way to engage Rusty Fausak’s response to a digital composition assignment entitled “Communism” than by stirring up the old quintessential communist filmmaker himself. But is this the “profoundly human” compositional experience of “Communism”? To be sure Fausak’s video engages in a general historical discourse that juxtaposes images of Stalinist Russia with kitschy scenes from an equally propagandistic American public service film on teenage dating. The images indeed collide with present political discourse. Fausak demonstrates virtuosic technical prowess in slowly building the analogy of the past as digital analogy of the present. The parading and gesturing figures now positioned within new context punctuate typical oppressive beauracratic and militaristic. They become terrifying when cut to the oscillating rhythm of the spoken cadence and dissonance of the harpsichord. To introduce the Coronet dating film footage is to wink at the preceding images of the gesturing Stalin and phallic warfare—yes, we get it; the montage tells us so. But then we have a new sequence; images of the proletariat, the fences and food rations that the Revolution was supposed to fix. Cut to teenage American boy looking longingly, dreamily into the sky. Rather than continue to wink at us he suddenly… blinks. The blink is a moment that escapes the winking message. Its placement precisely after the pathos of the working class plight desires the “profoundly human”; there is an unsettled hesitation in the midst of the smirkiness that has come before. The obtuseness of the blink stands out from the terrifying pictures and gestures. Or is this a conscious closing of the eyes. In any case the video continues pretending to not be fundamentally changed by this mysterious event Roland Barthes calls “the third sense”. Barthes himself notes the tenuous presence of the third sense in the image.[3] For Barthes, freezing the movement does not halt but suspends it where gesture is revealed. And for someone like Giorgio Agamben gesture belongs to the invariably profoundly human, where gesture belongs to the ethical domain.[4] And that is what is revealed in the blink—the profoundly human gesture of composition. [1] Eisenstein, Sergei. Film Form: Essays in Film Theory. Orlando: Harvest Books, 1977. 157 [2] Ibid. 30. [3] Barthes, Roland. “The Third Meaning”. Image, Music, Text. Trans. Stephan Heath. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977. 57. [4] Agamben, Giorgio. “Notes on Gesture.” Means Without Ends. Trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. 55. |
