This is full of unexpected depth. It's about that day in June of 1994 when OJ Simpson fled in a Bronco with a dozen helicopters filming from above, expecting drama. That same day the US World Cup was opening. The Rangers were celebrating their first Stanley Cup in decades. Close by, the Knicks were playing game 5 of the finals in Madison Square Garden.
So we flit between all these events, from one coast to the other. We flit from festive crowds at the Rangers parade in New York, to crowds of reporters gathered outside the LA courthouse waiting for Simpson to give himself up. It's comprised entirely of TV footage from that day, no narration other than from TV. There's palpable excitement in the air, a sense of event.
Nevermind that it's financed by ESPN, this is eyeopening work. Simple if you peruse as just a documentary. But if you peruse it as a wandering montage, all about entirely visual flows churned out by life and picked up by the eye to splice together a larger world?
See, crowds gather up in bridges where OJ's car is going to pass by, followed by a dozen police cars. What do they see in those few fleeting seconds? A car has just come and gone, zipped by before you know. Others are waiting for hours outside his house in the hundreds, again seeing nothing much, maybe a house a few hundred feet that way.
More than just about obsession with spectacle, the same hysteric culture that would soon be gobbling up reality TV, I see this as about people coming together to be part of something larger that rends the air with anticipation. People want to partake. How descriptive then, transcendent almost, to see TV footage of Simpson's aerial chase bleeding on-air from one channel to the other, the airwaves blurring and coalescing, because there were so many cameras transmitting close by?
And all this as memory that hovers over these events from the distance of time. I was at a beach-house on the other side of the world with my grandfather that day watching the World Cup, my first ever. None of the other things reached us. I'm sure people watching at home would be doing so with some of the same anxiously fascinated sense as people below. Looking back now? Fondness at recalling, probably. Life has that completely marvelous quality, it unravels, then works itself out.
So when it all aligns, it lights up this world which would never take the shape it does without people clamoring to watch. Watch this as if it was a Soviet 'city symphony' from the silent era.
So we flit between all these events, from one coast to the other. We flit from festive crowds at the Rangers parade in New York, to crowds of reporters gathered outside the LA courthouse waiting for Simpson to give himself up. It's comprised entirely of TV footage from that day, no narration other than from TV. There's palpable excitement in the air, a sense of event.
Nevermind that it's financed by ESPN, this is eyeopening work. Simple if you peruse as just a documentary. But if you peruse it as a wandering montage, all about entirely visual flows churned out by life and picked up by the eye to splice together a larger world?
See, crowds gather up in bridges where OJ's car is going to pass by, followed by a dozen police cars. What do they see in those few fleeting seconds? A car has just come and gone, zipped by before you know. Others are waiting for hours outside his house in the hundreds, again seeing nothing much, maybe a house a few hundred feet that way.
More than just about obsession with spectacle, the same hysteric culture that would soon be gobbling up reality TV, I see this as about people coming together to be part of something larger that rends the air with anticipation. People want to partake. How descriptive then, transcendent almost, to see TV footage of Simpson's aerial chase bleeding on-air from one channel to the other, the airwaves blurring and coalescing, because there were so many cameras transmitting close by?
And all this as memory that hovers over these events from the distance of time. I was at a beach-house on the other side of the world with my grandfather that day watching the World Cup, my first ever. None of the other things reached us. I'm sure people watching at home would be doing so with some of the same anxiously fascinated sense as people below. Looking back now? Fondness at recalling, probably. Life has that completely marvelous quality, it unravels, then works itself out.
So when it all aligns, it lights up this world which would never take the shape it does without people clamoring to watch. Watch this as if it was a Soviet 'city symphony' from the silent era.
