Beautiful. Robert Houllahan, our friend over at Cinelab, just had his video for The Low Anthem’s new single, Ghost Woman Blues, featured on NPR.org (see it here), and it’s something special.
The Low Anthem recorded their (soon to be released) album Smart Flesh in a big, cold, empty warehouse (actually an abandoned pasta sauce factory) in Rhode Island last winter. Rob hunkered down with them, with some 16mm and some 35mm, and set about documenting the experience.
I remember Rob showing me the footage, a few months later — it was easy to visualize a nice landscape piece coming out of it, with that beautiful New England winter quality of light — but I don’t remember Rob telling me what he intended to do with it.
I’m a little surprised how cohesive it all feels, now! When I saw the footage for the first time, I saw it as a diary of the light in the warehouse — and it is, still — but not an expression of a sound or a feeling. But I hadn’t listened to the music yet (Oh, that music!)
The occasional bursts of color are lovely, as are the often different speeds of the film. The imperfect sync on the performers, too, lends a floating, ghostly, out-of-time quality to the images — Rob isn’t encouraging us to feel any immediacy; we’re watching from far away — and he cuts to them at just the right times, because he knows we’re aching to see their faces.
But what’s really killer about the video is how he doesn’t linger on those beautiful tableaus. Many of them don’t get the time they deserve; Rob’s a restless (to the point of irresponsible) editor, and it’s not what we’ve been trained to expect. Yet the images do become distinct moments, and are given appropriate gravity, with his consistent fades to black. It’s a really surprising technique, and with the hurried editing, it pushes the video towards a different feeling, somewhere between really long takes of landscape footage (the way I might have done it) and really choppy MTV (the way most music video artists would have done it). The contrast serves that feeling, that slipping away, that they don’t make em like they used to that Rob is talking about.
Yesterday, NPR.org’s picture show blog featured the work of Kate Stone. I knew Kate at Bard, but had missed her thesis show; boy, am I grateful to NPR for cluing me in to what I’d missed.
In her most recent work, Kate explores a space with her camera, prints the photos, reconstructs the space in three dimensions, and then re-photographs the scene. In At The Seams, Kate disassembles and reassembles strangers’ houses, leaving doors poking out of the floor and fans reproducing across empty rooms. In Wunderkammer (which translates to ‘cabinet of curiosities’), the stuffed animals at a museum seem to step right out of their displays. (more…)
