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High-Tech Exploration par Johanna Vaude (Johanna Vaude, 2016)


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rj2q7iZUY2g
Length: 6 minutes 07 seconds[/color]
Suggested by: Perception de Ambiguity
In her newest short piece for Arte's Blow-Up, a "cinema magazine" produced for the French/German TV station, Johanna Vaude who has been given carte blanche by Arte to make whatever the hell she likes since 2013, once again runs circles around all those other remix, mashup and supercut "artists". An unfancy work for her standards (without any superimpositions), perhaps because the films themselves already offer reasonably rich and abstract visuals without having to add any more to it, the piece nevertheless delivers and unmistakably shows her hand.
Most other creators of such works you find on the Web 2.0 generally take a collection of movie scenes fitting some theme, edit them to create a visual connection between one scene to the one that follows (in the best cases), set it to a nice music track, and they are done. Either that or they let the scenes run endlessly in their original form to the point where you think to yourself: "I could have just watched the movie instead."
Unlike those part-time video creators with their cute amateur efforts Johanna Vaude is an actual artist who also does work outside of this particular medium that has been gaining popularity in recent years thanks to the internet, creating works that even elitists can accept as actual avant-garde films rather than just online video distractions for kids and office workers looking to kill time until their shift is over. And luckily she does make work outside of it, because if she were to reduce her efforts to "just" this remix/mashup work (as outstanding as it is) her talents would be wasted right now because it unfortunately isn't being taken very seriously.
Mademoiselle Vaude is also a musician and sound artist, frequently creating her own rich tapestry of sounds for her films, and in the Arte pieces which she usually makes all by herself she composes her own captivating music that effectively incorporates audio from the films. In her "non-commercial" short films (which generally also are found-footage works) she combines film with digital, working with both film material and with digital means, hence the name of her DVD "Hybride", and she calls the method she applies in those films (like 'Notre Icare' or my favorite 'Samouraï') "plastic hybridization".
Vaude always shows great understanding of the films and themes she is working with in her Blow-Up shorts, and distills their essence in her "mashup" work. The footage bringing back memories of the original films or using it to evoke the exact same thoughts and feelings the original scenes in the film evoked, this is an easy thing to do. Vaude's work, in many cases, does much more than that, it leaves me with the impression that I have just watched all those other films simply by seeing her 6-minute short. So good is she in capturing and recreating their essence, I feel like I don't even have to see those films anymore because here they are, stripped of all the superfluous junk, concentrated to the one thing that is unique about them. Hell, I don't even need to see any more films about computers or virtual reality because Vaude has already said everything on the subject. I'm exaggerating, of course, but she does more in 6 minutes in terms of the exploration of its chosen subjects than almost any 2-hour film does.
In her other works for Arte's Blow-Up she may get to the essence of an actor, finding the often invisible things that all their performances and roles have in common, like her pieces on Leonardo DiCaprio, Michael Shannon or Scarlett Johansson. Or she tackles a director's films and gets to the core of what their oeuvre is about, like Abel Ferrara, Sam Peckinpah, Werner Herzog, or John Carpenter. Or as in this case she looks at a subject/theme/movie subgenre, like Time Travel, UFOs, or Martial Art films. She sometimes also takes on individual films or film franchises, like the Mad Max trilogy, Batman and Superman, or in one of my favorite first viewings of 2016 she seems to sum up everything worth pondering and experiencing in Blade Runner in six and a half minutes, the philosophical, the spiritual, and the atmospheric. I think in the cases of that last type in particular, she not only distills a few hours of film and brings out the essence of their intellectual content, but she also gives you the experience, working as a full substitute for the original film(s) in all possible regards, as far as this is humanly possible in just 6 minutes. But in all cases her films are an experience.
So, getting to 'High-Tech Exploration par Johanna Vaude', finally. It shows human life being progressively more digitized. It starts with computers as simply a tool, leading to computers as a means to connect to other people, to people's surroundings getting progressively more digital, to human life itself being progressively more digitized, to finally life BECOMING digital. Do ones and zeros themselves become the new life, was Cronenberg wrong all along? This is just a tiny fraction of what's going on in this piece, but this would be one way of how at least the overall structure could be described.
And some links of interest:
http://www.johanna-vaude.com/
https://vimeo.com/johannavaude/videos
http://cinema.arte.tv/fr/search/site/jo ... ude?page=1
Comments by: Perception de Ambiguity