Taking Video to the Next Level

Mark Rothko….videographer?

I live over the Musuem of Modern Art in NY.

The apartment is in fact, part of the museum, and as such, we are members of the museum. With our membership we can bypass the long lines that often stretch all the way down 53rd street and go right in.

Often, during the day, I may drop into the museum just for a half hour or so to clear my head.

Walking through the galleries, some of the modern art does not work for me at all.  Some of it, on the other hand, carries a powerful emotional resonance.

That is what art does. It is more than just capturing a likeness of a cow or a person. It radiates emotion that, when it works, is felt by the viewer.  I often think of painting as a kind of time machine. The painter captures more than simply a likeness of the subject in oil; the painter also captures the emotion that he, the painter, was feeling and wants to convey.  Long after the painter is dead, the painting continues to broadcast that emotion to the viewer.

Video, up until now, (and particularly for television) has been a mechanical process.  It has been a way that we have used pieces of equipment to capture what something looked like.  In fact, we have gone to great lengths to control that capture process so that the images are perfect.

But this is not art. This is a craft.

But video, I think, like painting or photography, can also be an art form.

We have not, for the most part, thought of the process of shooting video as an art form in its own right. Oh, there are the occasional video artists like Bill Viola, but the vast rank and file of videographers don’t think of themselves as artists. They think of themselves as craftsmen. Good craftsmen to be sure, but craftsmen. They pick up the camera, do the job and go home.

But as video comes to dominate our culture and as access to video equipment becomes all the simpler, can we cross a divide and begin to drive videography into the realm of fine art at the same time as it serves its primary function of capture?

I think so.

But to do so requires approaching the process in a very different way.

I began to suface a few of these ideas in the past few days in twitter comments. The problem with 140 words is that it does not allow lots of room for explanation.  I wrote, ‘caress the camera’, and got lots of understandably uncertain or even hostile responses.  But I think that caressing the camera, as a start (and not the only start) is a step in the process of moving from ‘equipment’ to ‘extension’. That is, the camera as a physical extension of ourselves.

The drive toward video as an art, as an emotive and powerful art (while still capturing reality – much as great photojournalism) begins, I think, with changing the nature of the relationship between the shooter, the subject and the viewer.  It is a perpetual triangle into which we now wish to inject intimacy, emotion and passion. (And I don’t mean ‘I am passionate about getting a well lit shot’). I mean capturing the passion of the videographer and transmitting that to the viewer through the camera.

How to stop thinking of the camera as a tool, and rather more a an extension of the physicality of the shooter?

Zack Wilson, who works for us, commented to me this morning that one way would be for a videographer to shoot video 4 or 5 hours a day, every day, whether for a project or not. As an artist might paint, not because there was a commission, but simply from pure passion for creating art for its own sake.

I think this is a good idea, but I also think that this transition (which I think may result in something very very  interesting) begins in a different relationship between the machine and ourselves.

Canadian filmmaker Rob Spence was a speaker at DNA2009 last week. He is having a video camera implanted in place of an artificial eye.  Hearing his plans, (and seeing his initial video) made me start to think about how what we capture is so intimately related to how we capture it.

In any event, this thinking is very much a work in progress, but I think it is well worth thinking about.