MIX

I was infected with the urge to remix by my college film professor, Ken Jacobs, and, over thirty years later, the infection has spread. Collage - the mixing and rearranging of found materials - is informing nearly all my programming this year. The Virginia Festival Film Society s spring 2004 season is titled "SAMPLE THIS!" and our guests include Christian Marclay, Rick Prelinger, and Kevin and Jennifer McCoy. The audience is turning out in large numbers for these experimental programs, and the series has pulled us out of a slump. When I was programming the series a few months ago, Ken Jacobs gave me a copy of his latest "found footage" film, the six-hour-plus, nearly-fifty-years-in-the-making Star Spangled to Death. The film quotes long passages from cartoons, travel and propaganda films, NRA musicals, and much more, mixed with amazing Jack Smith and Jerry Sims vignettes set in dense junkyard tableaus. It revives for me the mind-blowing experience of watching a similar mix of materials in Jacobs' nine-hour-a-week class, all grist for his long, opinionated raps. His reflections often addressed, on the one hand, American racism and imperialism, and, on the other, the wild gasps of refusal that blew out of underground movies, "race" films, and some B-pictures.

The main lesson I learned from Jacobs' classes and films was that the highest aim of experimental filmmaking and good film programming is to get audiences to observe everything, especially commercial media, experimentally. Among experimental film genres, the "found footage" film gets down to business most directly, applying deconstructive strategies to liberate footage dripping with familiar ideology. The kind of film programming I admire most creates a mega-found footage film mixing mainstream and experimental film, allowing the latter to explode and illuminate the former. Mark McElhatten s and Craig Baldwin's programs, with their startling juxtapositions of film forms, are models for me.

As a recent touring art show proposed, we now live in a "Collage Culture." Sampling is everywhere, and audiences crave original rearrangements of familiar images and sounds. The public has greater access to editing tools; digitized images and sounds are easily remixed; the copyright gates are being stormed. In many ways, this is the future we fantasized when I first joined NAMAC back in 1984. But the culture industry is no less powerful. Remixing and jamming their images and sounds is satisfying, but it also holds us in their thrall.

I appreciate being asked to write this piece. I'm reminded that, in spite of the satisfied customers, I'm overdoing the collage stuff, and it's time to look again for more varied and unsettling work.

RICHARD HERSKOWITZ is the director of the Virginia Film Festival and chair of the 50th anniversary committee for the Flaherty Film Seminar.

---

© 2004 National Alliance for Media Arts and Culture. All Rights Reserved.