¶ Short of the Day #11: High-Tech Exploration par Johanna Vaude

[Perception de Ambiguity]

"Short of the Day" is the daily discussion of a short.

Tasks:
1) Watch.
2) Discuss.
3) Send me your suggestions for the next Short of the Day per PM, along with links to the shorts and comments, questions for the other users to think about, and/or info about the short.

Detailed project introduction: here

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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

[Eve-Lang-El-Coup]

Cool, really well done music video. Definitely obvious that she's honed her craft.

[Cynical Cinephile]

Just wanted to let you know that your ICM link leads to I'm Not There and IMDb link to Serial Experiments Lain.

On to the film itself. It feels more like homage to all these films than its own thing. That's not necessarily a bad thing, I enjoyed it, but I couldn't really find a narrative in it. Editing is phenomenal.

[Carmel1379]

Just wanted to let you know that your ICM link leads to I'm Not There and IMDb link to Serial Experiments Lain.

I have seen links that lead to Vincenzo Natali's 'Nothing' before so... either PdA is just bad with films or maybe the titles are meant to mean something

[Coco LaBerge]

Not bad at all, the music was great. It's good for someone to make the music specifically for the montage, it all works much better that way.

As mentioned it shows a technological development and integration with technology over time, that's the theme it seems.

There were a couple of things I didn't like about it, but over all pretty cool. I'll have a look at some of her other stuff for sure.

[Carmel1379]

Avalon

Keyboard, computer, smartphones.
Hacking, Information, Cyber-Identities.
Social media. The pioneers. Fundamental uncertainty.
Scanning, passes, genetic code. Control.
Excess, Anomaly. Singularity?
Fusion. Virtual reality. New generation. Time bending. Violence in cyberspace. Layers of mind and


I personally find the first images already daunting, since those are the objects and machines I interact with right now, so the film immediately puts a cautious, self-reflexive mood. But obviously there's a progression meant in this film too - from the presently-available to the future stuff so extravagantly high-tech that man loses himself within it.

'The Social Network'-Mark Zuckerberg-Jesse Eisenstein says that "we don't even know what it is yet, we don't know what it is, we don't know what it can be, we don't know what it will be, we just know that it is cool". The further cutting back and forth between Fassbinder as Steve Jobs is meant to highlight the idea that the CEO of the big companies, that develop and invent all of this cool high-tech, aren't themselves sure what they're dealing with. Further down the line it's this "anomaly" or "excess" that bothers them - oh it must be "human error" - how could this computer be "superior" to me? Of course many people realise this possible advent of Artilects, but what is there to be done? Mitchel Heisman would go as far as argue that Jews and Christians would subconsciously anticipate the idea of The Singularity (entertained in God) and that would propel post-biological evolution, supra-biological values etc.. So it really has been an age-long process, and capitalist competition, along with the Law of Accelerating Returns will guarantee that as long as humanity doesn't blow itself up, such high-tech as depicted in the later stages of the short film will be developed on Earth to the point where it can self-reinforce, all the more making people incapable of fully understanding what's going on or having the possibility to stop it, to eventually become inferior to the machines or alternatively meshed with cyberspace or virtual reality or a higher-Singularity-sort of consciousness. Bostrom's Singleton is also prospected, with all the security measures and assemblage of the human DNA, with the computational capacity to store and identify it and hence pinpoint where that exact human is, together with a global network of cameras, TV, radio. Opposition from hackers, cyber-anarchists, reactionaries and Terrans in general is obviously expected, but those will not prevail.


It's really hard to distill all the themes and allusions made in this short. It seems so trivialising to do it. Let's just be swayed by its magnificence and complexity.

it leaves me with the impression that I have just watched all those other films
Definitely.

Brilliant stuff, of course. I think this is my favourite of hers.

I remember she also did a good one on robots:




And last but not least, I don't know why, but I have been reminded by this, here's is an A.I. composed Christmas Song to cheer everyone up!

[Perception de Ambiguity]

Just wanted to let you know that your ICM link leads to I'm Not There and IMDb link to Serial Experiments Lain.

I have seen links that lead to Vincenzo Natali's 'Nothing' before so... either PdA is just bad with films or maybe the titles are meant to mean something

[Perception de Ambiguity]

Avalon

Keyboard, computer, smartphones.
Hacking, Information, Cyber-Identities.
Social media. The pioneers. Fundamental uncertainty.
Scanning, passes, genetic code. Control.
Excess, Anomaly. Singularity?
Fusion. Virtual reality. New generation. Time bending. Violence in cyberspace. Layers of mind and


I personally find the first images already daunting, since those are the objects and machines I interact with right now, so the film immediately puts a cautious, self-reflexive mood. But obviously there's a progression meant in this film too - from the presently-available to the future stuff so extravagantly high-tech that man loses himself within it.

'The Social Network'-Mark Zuckerberg-Jesse Eisenstein says that "we don't even know what it is yet, we don't know what it is, we don't know what it can be, we don't know what it will be, we just know that it is cool". The further cutting back and forth between Fassbinder as Steve Jobs is meant to highlight the idea that the CEO of the big companies, that develop and invent all of this cool high-tech, aren't themselves sure what they're dealing with. Further down the line it's this "anomaly" or "excess" that bothers them - oh it must be "human error" - how could this computer be "superior" to me? Of course many people realise this possible advent of Artilects, but what is there to be done? Mitchel Heisman would go as far as argue that Jews and Christians would subconsciously anticipate the idea of The Singularity (entertained in God) and that would propel post-biological evolution, supra-biological values etc.. So it really has been an age-long process, and capitalist competition, along with the Law of Accelerating Returns will guarantee that as long as humanity doesn't blow itself up, such high-tech as depicted in the later stages of the short film will be developed on Earth to the point where it can self-reinforce itself, all the more making people incapable of fully understanding what's going on, to eventually become inferior to the machines or alternatively meshed with cyberspace or virtual reality or a higher-Singularity-sort of consciousness. Bostrom's Singleton is also prospected, with all the security measures and assemblage of the human DNA, with the computational capacity to store and identify it and hence pinpoint where that exact human is, together with a global network of cameras, TV, radio. Opposition from hackers, cyber-anarchists, reactionaries and Terrans in general is obviously expected, but those will not prevail.


It's really hard to distill all the themes and allusions made in this short. It seems so trivialising to do it. Let's just be swayed by its magnificence and complexity.

it leaves me with the impression that I have just watched all those other films
Definitely.

Brilliant stuff, of course. I think this is my favourite of hers.

I remember she also did a good one on robots.

And last but not least, I don't know why, but I have been reminded by this, here's is an A.I. composed Christmas Song to cheer everyone up!

I know...'Avalon'...just for you. My options given by Web 2.0 were limited, it was between either this or making out in 'TRON' world.

Right, she somewhat recontextualizes the 'The Social Network' scene because Zuckerberg only talks about Facebook, at most he talks about social media, but within the context of Vaude's film it can be interpreted as a statement about computers at large.

Interestingly this piece doesn't actually go into artificial intelligence. The final shot (which is the Red Queen from 'Resident Evil') is an A.I. whose holographic image is modeled after the head programmer's daughter, which I think is significant because this A.I. could be considered to originate from organic life, in other words a fully digitized human being.. Of course Vaude already dealt with the issue of artificial intelligence largely in her 'Blade Runner' film, and in a different way in 'Robots et cinéma', so no need to get into it again.
She seems to be good at not repeating herself, both in this one and in the robot one it would be obvious to use footage of 'Blade Runner', but she has already covered it, so there is no sign of 'Blade Runner' in those.

Originally I actually had her robot piece mentioned in the OP, but later replaced it with her work on time travel when I found out that I preferred that one back when I first saw them, and I wasn't crazy about mentioning that video anyway because the subject of robots is similar to the subject of this one. I rewatched it now and it's great, but I lack much of a connection to the subject of robots, it's too speculative to provoke much thought, and too theoretical to provoke much emotion for me.

Your favorite, really? I don't know which ones you have seen but now that you have just seen the first two 'Mad Max' films I recommend checking out her piece on this trilogy, maybe my memory of them has just paled, but right now I would say that her 'Mad Max' piece is even more exciting and badass than any of the films themselves.

That Christmas song looks like right out of 'Portal 2', I think that one had the computer sing a Happy Birthday song. This also reminds me of that one time - since I happened to have the instrumental tracks for Rammstein's "Sonne" and Dr. Dre's "Forget About Dre" - when I let good old Microsoft SAM on Windows XP sing/rap/talk those lyrics and recreated the whole songs with SAM's soothing voice as accurately as possible.

[Cynical Cinephile]

Just wanted to let you know that your ICM link leads to I'm Not There and IMDb link to Serial Experiments Lain.

I have seen links that lead to Vincenzo Natali's 'Nothing' before so... either PdA is just bad with films or maybe the titles are meant to mean something

You're a fan of Serial Experiments Lain and you feel that it should've been included in Vaude's montage, but it wasn't, therefor I'm Not There, as spoken by Serial Experiments Lain. Or, maybe you're just saying that you don't have an ICM profile. I'm grasping at straws here.

[Carmel1379]

A simpler explanation would be that the short (as others in the past) didn't have an imdb or icm page, hence when one clicks on the link it leads to "Nothing" or "I'm Not There".

--

Mad Max par JV - Now we're talking. I was even reminded of Rammstein's 'Benzin':
(...)Doch Dynamit und Terpentin
Ich brauche Öl für Gasolin
Explosiv wie Kerosin
Mit viel Oktan und frei von Blei
Einen Kraftstoff wie Benzin
(...)

Gib mir Benzin

Es fließt durch meine Venen
Es schläft in meinen Tränen
Es läuft mir aus den Ohren
Herz und Nieren sind Motoren.

The first two (still need to see the third), for me at least, fail in evoking that sort of quality. "Fury Road" obviously did it much better. I'll be seeking out more High Octane Steam- and Dieselpunk in the future, and I'll give "Beyond Thunderdome" a chance.

I saw 'Voyages dans le temps' for the first time just now as well. It feels like it's her fastest-cut film yet, among others fast-forwarding selected storylines in films to give this feeling of passing and stressing the importance, as well as failure of memory.

A(nother) great thing about the way she makes these audio-visual phenomena is that even if the film is "bad", she manages to extract qualities from it and place them in conjunction with the masterpieces. Or even entirely recutting something like 'Mad Max' such that one doesn't even have to see the original ones, since it's presented in its best, distilled format here.

[Perception de Ambiguity]

Gib
mir
Ben-ziiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiin.

The first two (still need to see the third), for me at least, fail in evoking that sort of quality. "Fury Road" obviously did it much better. I'll be seeking out more High Octane Steam- and Dieselpunk in the future, and I'll give "Beyond Thunderdome" a chance.

I saw 'Voyages dans le temps' for the first time just now as well. It feels like it's her fastest-cut film yet, among others fast-forwarding selected storylines in films to give this feeling of passing and stressing the importance, as well as failure of memory.

A(nother) great thing about the way she makes these audio-visual phenomena is that even if the film is "bad", she manages to extract qualities from it and place them in conjunction with the masterpieces. Or even entirely recutting something like 'Mad Max' such that one doesn't even have to see the original ones, since it's presented in its best, distilled format here.

There’s certainly a reason why an alternate title of the “Mad Max” piece is “The Smell of Gasoline”. I’m not sure there ARE any other “High Octane Steam- and Dieselpunk” movies aside from the “Mad Max” franchise.

What I particularly appreciated about “Voyages dans le temps” is how it doesn’t just go for time travel movies in the literal sense, but incorporates films that deal heavily with memory (which is the main thing that many time travel movies at their core are about anyway, especially the introspective ones, as I already said in that "Arrival" discussion). So along with the obvious stuff you also get films like Vertigo, Memento and even stream-of-consciousness stuff like The Mirror or The Tree of Life in there, and they all perfectly fit into it. Because of the fast-forwarding technique I didn’t feel like it was particularly rapidly edited. You don’t have to register all the images there to keep track of what the piece is getting at.

Exactly, one doesn’t necessarily have to like the film for the footage to shine just as much as the rest, visually or intellectually. Obviously not liking a film doesn’t mean that you think it doesn't have any qualities, and she brings out those qualities - like with me and ‘Avalon’, for example – I don’t watch this montage and think “meh, Avalon footage”, I think “Avalon clearly is fucking dope”.

[Perception de Ambiguity]

The latest Blow-Up work from Johanna Vaude and again she takes no prisoners. I recommend to crank up the volume (and to prepare for glory).

Chargez !

[Carmel1379]

That was great (again). While I'm sure that placing only one charge leading to a culminative eruption in the end would be satisfying as well, I like the idea of one charge, then a cut-to-black, followed by a second build-up leading to an even more fast-paced and bloody cracking battle. One could even see the first part as a dream of those soldiers, after which they're quickly woken up to repeat the exact same actions. And 2 battles is of course enough to stress the possible iterative levels of dreaming. Or maybe as opposed to dreaming / waking up, the cut-to-black indicates that you died, and find yourself awakened in an afterlife where you have to continue fighting. But these two ideas can be synthesised thanks to 'Inception', where shared dreaming with dying being equivalent to waking up, was used by the soldiers to improve themselves. It's also like in a video game - you repeat the battle again and again, hoping to improve your side and strategies. An 'Edge of Tomorrow' reference is needed here. Πόλεμος πάντων μὲν πατήρ ἐστι πάντων δὲ βασιλεύς.

Other than that I of course appreciated the rapid rhythmic indigenous drums and historical aspect of it -- more ancient, peripheral and proxy wars -- we don't get to see any modern technology, trench or 20th century warfare (eschewing 'Lawrence of Arabia'). So it's really a human, and I should emphasise man(ly) brisk confrontation, with often one strong leader speaking to an army multitude, pumped up to charge.

[Perception de Ambiguity]

I think it just mirrors how those war battle movies tend to be strcutured. There may very well be more than two battles but essentially there tends to be the one big battle that the film builds up to, making everyone think that this is the one to end it all, the enemy is deafeated and the soldiers who survived can go home. But this alone doesn't fill a whole feature...



...and they now need to have a sequence that tops the earlier battle, so the unit has to fight another battle with decimated numbers and the cards stacked against them, like a sports movie with our team being behind in points before the final round. Of course aside from this just making for an effective 3-act storytelling structure it does also often make a point about the nature of war and life in general; there is no battle to end all battles, it isn't over until it's over, the only end to the struggle of perfection and to human stupidity is death. But it's nice that you went more meta on it with your reading.

Good observation about the historical aspect. Somehow I wasn't really consciously aware of that.

[Carmel1379]

it does also often make a point about the nature of war and life in general

Yeah, and to make the point even more comprehensive and extensive, there's a lack of binary distinction between friend or enemy, or any sort of connotative weighting between anyone. The way the short is edited there's no way of seeing "the other side", the opponents. We only ever get to see one side charging against the other, and when it does smash into the other there's again no way of differentiating the fighters - only chaos and bloodshed. With different types of armies, in various historical periods, you also get a sense of the idea of time anomalies, and warfare over extensive time periods. Perhaps from the contexts of the movies we can recognise those are colonisers, those the indigenous peoples, the Spartans, etc., but we're not explicitly told who's fighting who, such that it's one general war encompassing everyone.

Sports movies - Good analogy, war films often tend to be formulaically structured this way as well.

Historical aspect - Horse-riding was surely one of her big bulletpoints while composing this, so it makes sense to favour the older forms of battle. You do get shots of LOTR, a fantasy film, but that was again to show off the horse riders and pre-advanced technological ways of fighting, and not the orcs.

[Perception de Ambiguity]

[font=Monotype Corsiva]"Si l'on n'est pas sensible, on n'est jamais sublime."[/font]

[Carmel1379]

[Perception de Ambiguity]

Don't let the mundane title fool you, it's about the Streets, and it's tough out there.

[Perception de Ambiguity]

When Johanna Vaude calls forget what you think you know about monsters.



Another quality work by Vaude, yet again the distillation of a (sub)genre in its narrative structure and its themes, which in its visceral effect reaches the heights of the best of the examples of its genre with every beat, but not without feeling fresh in its cinematic exploration.
The film begins with people...

Spoiler

...answering the call that let’s them unleash their inner monster, which, once it grows to inhuman proportions, gets restrained. As a musical symphony the film opens with tempting calls that awake a desire, consequently bringing out pain that unleashes a roaring anger and strikes screaming fear into whoever bears witness, resulting in a crescendo of hysteria that reveals a profound kinship of pain, anger, fear and death.

The world that now has learned of the existence of a monster uses the thing as a stepping stone to learn from it, firstly how to control the monster but further how to utilize the findings made from analyzing the monster and how to harness its powers to use them constructively within the existing system or the agreed upon reality. But the unknown thing doesn't let itself be restrained permanently, let alone quantified for our purposes, and after all the scientific attempts made on it the monster returns as a mysterious force in the world.

The film ends where it began, with the calls of the monster, but not without the story having gone through a crucial thematic evolution; whereas the beginning still suggested a Human versus It dichotomy this distinction has been dissolved by the end, the monster, we have come to realize, is the Unknown, a force that is both out there, waiting to destroy our reality, as well as within, waiting to awake and become real. After eternal nightmares in which the Unknown has made itself known to us we again wake up in our sweat, until the day that we wake up inside the eternal nightmare, knowing that we are the Unknown.