I had already seen "A Movie", Bruce Connor's montage of found footage--explosions, sex, and action, everything a Hollywood movie achieves--but this is much more his "work" in a sense that he truly knows how to create something special and beautiful without using it as a sort of tongue-in-cheek parody of convention.
A dancer dances in several different outfits, cut with black frames in between at a rapid pace to create a sort of strobe effect (Connor seems thus far in my experience to not only really like fast cutting, but to have superb control over it). The camera doesn't seem to move but between cuts will go far and close-up, sometimes in focus and sometimes out, to create a movement of bodies that goes beyond just the dance and choreography of the woman. Sometimes the image becomes abstract, in some cases so close up that it is more like a straight black and white flash, like the effect in some other experimental films like the 1999 "Outer Space".
Apparently this film is considered by some to be the first "music video", and I suppose in a way it can maintain that acknowledgment even though it seems (to me) to be much more concerned with form and movement than with providing imagery for the music that's playing. There's a lot to be asked about what a "music video" really is, of course, but I think a quick rule of thumb for the time being would be to consider it the creation of images for a music piece, not the other way around. Whichever way this movie was made, however, it's still very beautiful.
--PolarisDiB
A dancer dances in several different outfits, cut with black frames in between at a rapid pace to create a sort of strobe effect (Connor seems thus far in my experience to not only really like fast cutting, but to have superb control over it). The camera doesn't seem to move but between cuts will go far and close-up, sometimes in focus and sometimes out, to create a movement of bodies that goes beyond just the dance and choreography of the woman. Sometimes the image becomes abstract, in some cases so close up that it is more like a straight black and white flash, like the effect in some other experimental films like the 1999 "Outer Space".
Apparently this film is considered by some to be the first "music video", and I suppose in a way it can maintain that acknowledgment even though it seems (to me) to be much more concerned with form and movement than with providing imagery for the music that's playing. There's a lot to be asked about what a "music video" really is, of course, but I think a quick rule of thumb for the time being would be to consider it the creation of images for a music piece, not the other way around. Whichever way this movie was made, however, it's still very beautiful.
--PolarisDiB