A QUICK RANT ABOUT FILM AND ART AND EVERYTHING IN BETWEEN

Why does film and video art exist?

The language of film gives us a visual encyclopedia with which to tell stories. Sure this is enough to satisfy and entertain, but formulas of representation, like language, have limitations although they are key to our understanding of film in its general structure.

There is always an unspoken element to how we experience the world, but it's no less important to communicate it.

Usually film or video art can be described as obscure or cerebral or, worse, ephemeral. 

If anything, film and video art explores the spaces in between objective reality, and brings form to otherwise fleeting or uncanny observations.

Good film and video art makes use of the way light works and captures atmospheres and subtleties that are usually only observed by the eye (and often not consciously).

Jonathan Crary comments in "Techniques of the Observer" that the break with traditional modes of representation and composition at the beginning of the nineteenth century was more than a change in the appearance of art, it was a rupture of the old way of composing and interpreting the experience of the visual. 

At the same time, the critic Jean-Pierre Geuens has said that because we can experience film so readily, and manipulate an edit via technology, we take away "the vitality of the experience which we would otherwise access in ways more relative to our visual experience... [and] as film becomes absorbed into the humdrum of daily life, it inevitably loses its ability to open up a space that is radically different from where we are."

So there are 3 things working against each other and a fresh experience of film. 

One is over-saturation of filmic experiences via technology and the other is an undefined mixture of clear modes of traditional representation and obscure deconstructural pieces masquerading as story.

The remedy is direct intention and the communication of that intention without dictation.

And that's where film art lies, between story and not.

And Werner Herzog said it really well when describing his role as a film maker in an interview with Kristine McKenna:

...articulating the things that are inarticulate in many of us is my duty and my profession. 

M