Boredom, Expectation, and Intent

This post is somewhat inspired by Mike’s post: Jay-Z: “If the war calls for Warhols / hope you got enough space on your hall's walls”, Or: Jay-Z is not always a good rapper.

When the Vancouver International Film Festival was taking place, a group of friends and I went to go see a film called Klatsassin. The blurb about the film in the VIFF guide sounded really interesting:

“Screening as a World Premiere, this Cariboo-set Western is Vancouver artist Stan Douglas’ Rashomon-like exploration of time and perception, bound together to create BC history. Using the events surrounding the killing of a Tsilhoqot’in chief named “Klatsassin,” Douglas layers characters and events in five different time periods, separating the tangled skeins of constantly shifting stories and versions of the truth, to reclaim the past.”

Unfortunately, about forty-five minutes into the film, we began to think otherwise…

Basically, as we discovered, the film consisted of only about twenty scenes looped together in a seemingly random order. So, after about twenty minutes, we started seeing scenes we had already watched – then, after about thirty-five minutes, there were no new scenes – by the time the film was over, we had watched each scene at least three or four times. Needless to say, by the time we had been sitting there for an hour, we were shifting in our seats, sighing, and rolling our eyes. This movie was not what we expected.

When the film ended, director Stan Douglas went to the front for a brief explanation and a Q & A. We were told that the film we had just watched was only an excerpt from an eight hour long film!!! We whispered silent, “Oh my God”s to each other.

But then, we were told that the actual purpose of the film was to have it shown as a continuous screening in an art gallery. In this context, the film could be viewed by spectators coming in and leaving at different points in the narrative. It would be a different film for every single person who saw it – seeing things in a different order and coming to different conclusions as to who the killer was.

This is where Mike’s post comes in. Mike says: “…as a painting, Empire is pretty. It is realistic. If you projected it onto an art gallery wall within a frame, people could walk past and admire as they pleased, at their own rate, and be happy about it. But as a film it is infuriating, precisely because it won’t be a film.” When we were forced to sit and watch the movie in a theatre, it was boring because it destroyed all the traditional conventions of film. But as soon as we knew the actual intent behind Douglas’ film, we all agreed that it was brilliantly exacted.

But not everyone in the theatre found the repetition boring. During the Q & A, many audience members explained that they were not bored because they kept finding new details when they saw a scene more than once. Like Sherlock Holmes, some people are able to find the uniqueness and newness created in repetition. This is very possible in a film like Katsassin…but is it possible to find newness in the repetition of Empire? Without sound, without movement, and without detail, can we find new things after viewing this image over and over?

On a side note, during the Q & A, I discovered that over-analysis of something can be very boring. One woman in the audience asked Douglas a question about a couple rusty utensils hanging on the back wall in one of the tavern scenes. The woman was wondering whether the rust was meant to be a self-reflexive detail to symbolize the time that has passed between the contemporary viewing of the film and the historical setting of the film (she took about five minutes to ask the question, but this was the gist of what she said). Douglas replied by saying that it was a detail he was not even aware of.

Is forced meaning, where there is not supposed to be any, boring? Warhol claims that he doesn’t want us to find meaning in his work. In a piece such as Empire, the only way to really find meaning is through what we might call over-analysis (the only conclusions we can come to must be based purely on assumptions and inferences – not on any specific details). Perhaps Warhol finds this very analysis of his work as boring, and by telling us he does not want us to find meaning he is merely trying to save us (and himself) from the potential boredom of analysis.