Director: Joelle de la Casinière & Montfaucon Research Center
Year: 1984
Time: 9 mins
Music: Jacques Lederlin & Joelle de la Casinière
Eye of Sound: Video on Channel, of which The Sound of Eye is presenting a short excerpt, was an innovative and visionary project in the early 80s. Lead by legendary creative maelstrom Joelle de la Casinière, the project invited several video-artists to produce twenty short pieces of three minutes each. Its central concept was to collage video and TV footage according to a simple rule: the screen would be split in two or three parts, two thirds being reserved for video and one third for TV. More, these pieces had to follow a series of geometrical rules in the splitting of the screen, so that the same distribution of the visual field would be repeated over and over again. Finally, a TV channel, a magazine and a radio broadcast were associated to the project, probably making Video on Channel (Vidéo à la Chaine) the most multimedia-oriented work ever produced at the time. The excerpt presented here features three pieces, entitled "Fast Food", "Video Catalogue" and "Video Art". The first one juxtaposes footage of hamburger-related activities, rap imagery, sports, explosions, etc. Jacques Lederlin reads a poem by Casinière in which sentences are constantly rearranged to make a statement on the relation between fast-food and video, both recently introduced in Europe by then. Lederlin's voice is given a rhythmic flow that makes it resemble a faux-rap, all the more displaced due to a cold sample-based instrumentation that sounds like Dreyblatt trying to enter Grandmaster Flash territory. The other pieces feature Casinière's voice set against samples and rhythmic structures that strongly recall Ikue Mori's works of the 90s. In "Video Catalogue", Casinière's poem shuffles what seems to be a video-shopping advertisement for lamps, while the screen contrasts images of sports and fauna with expensive-looking design chandeliers. Finally, "Video Art" juxtaposes the concept of video art with surveillance cameras, producing an almost Farockian comment on CCTV as "art on art" and "double entry art".
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Very nice videos, thank you again! Casiniènere is sadly uncelebrated as a pioneer in so many areas... I guess that if she were an American she would be as famous as Brakhage... Also, I think you are absolutely right about the last film. The only difference is that Farocki doesn't have a sense of humor :)
ReplyDeleteThanks again and I love your blog!
That's a very good point, FL78. Being famous or recognized as talented has a lot to do with "external" factors, nationality being one of the most important.
ReplyDeleteYour point regarding Farocki's lack of humor is also correct, though I'd say that he seems to have become bleaker as he became older.
Cheers and thanks for your always sagacious comments :)