The mystery was solved a few hours later in the rental apartment though, with the TV on and ads flowing past. One caught my eye. It started with a shot of some family photos on a wall and in other empty rooms. It was quiet and deliberate, with a touch of handheld camera movement, but trying, it seemed, not to be too loud and ad-like. It cut to a succession of ordinary-looking people–a woman in a suburban front yard, a truckie in his cabin, a man in a lounge room–who were looking at or holding a photograph. The subdued music and sombre expressions soon made it clear that the photographs were those of people who were dead. Then the ad cut to closer shots of the people in the photographs, with their names and dates of death. This seemed too specific to be fiction. These must be real people who’ve really lost loved ones (surely whatever agency commissioning the ad would not toy with our emotions so, to actually name someone in full and not have it be true?) Then, the text to close the ad from the roadside billboard. This TV ad is a documentary, I realised.

I can remember a road safety ad years ago which featured a man in a pub having a drink that ended with the final-shot kicker showing him in a wheelchair. It was controversial because it was an actor playing the role. There was nothing telling that audience that it was an actual road accident victim, but people felt cheated that it wasn’t somehow. This current ad depends on this expectation of truthfulness and by giving us the victims’ names it reassures us that our emotional attention to these tragedies is grounded in reality. It also depends on our understanding of photographs as stand-ins for the dead. Photographs aren’t always the only tokens of the departed, but in this case, they serve as an economical way to signal absence and loss. It’s not simply photographs as photographs that do this here–the music and sombre expressions and even tears strongly suggest this, prior to the even stronger confirmations of the names. (I can imagine an ad with a photograph held by a smiling woman, for example, which might indicate a child overseas–when Barthes says photographs hint of death, he’s right, but not always.)

The safety campaign has a website which provides more context, telling us that a handful of families volunteered their stories. These stories, not an abstract set of road safety guidelines, are the main feature of the site. The centrality of the photographs to this campaign is clear: it’s called ‘picturesofyou‘.

[Source Code, 2011. via Video Word Made Flesh]

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[La Jetée, 1962. via The Boston Bachelor]

[Update, 29 August 2011: I've decided to take this idea elsewhere. Hello, Cinememory!]

[Image: Screen grab from TheReturnoftheSDQ’s YouTube channel, about 7min 25sec]

A one point he brings out a photograph, taken, he claims, the previous year in the gardens. She barely looks at it but later she seems to using it as a bookmark. He talks about how even this doesn’t convince her. It could have been taken by anyone, in any garden, she says. It proves nothing. We then see her sitting in the gardens, perhaps when the photograph was taken. But we never see a camera or a photographer. Later still she opens a drawer in her room to find it full of copies of the same picture. Perhaps the man has put them there in some grand and vain gesture (as if repeating oneself more and more loudly is a way of getting someone to understand something). Perhaps it’s an indication that the movie is a facade, and the character has stumbled upon the props department storage area. In any case, she lays out the photos in the same pattern as the game that some of the men play — putting objects on the table and removing them until the person left with one object loses. The photograph now is merely a prop in a game that can’t really be understood (at another point, with two men playing, the onlookers shout out a host of possibilities: one has to go first to win, or that it’s a logarithmic series, or some other obscure strategy, none of which apply).

Near the beginning of the film the characters chat in the salon and then pause, as if time has stood still. Perhaps the film hasn’t quite begun, the mechanism hasn’t quite warmed up yet. Perhaps the stagey and artificial-looking stillness is an indication that the photograph to come, the photograph that might anchor the man’s entreaties in something real, is itself fake (something the man has faked a connection to? an object about which the woman fakes ignorance? a fake prop in an elaborate pretense of a movie?) and not really proof that anything has actually happened.

(via John Gruber and Liz Danzico)

(hmmm, there are two versions)

[WORDS, posted with vodpod, Directed by Daniel Mercadante & Will Hoffman, Original Score by Keith Kenniff]

The most specific place and time in the film is the wartime North Africa of the 1950s where Bazil’s father gets killed by a landmine. We catch glimpses of the watch that the adult Bazil wears: a military watch, labelled specifically for that conflict. Aside from that, the present. Not really modern, not really 21st-century, but some world where arms dealers and powerful men can still be undone by the patched-together ingenuity of salvagers that Bazil finds company with. One of his friends is loquacious African ethnographer, an interesting character given the nostalgic whiteness that Jeunet’s earlier Amelie was accussed of portraying.

[Micmacs: à tire-larigot, dir. Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 2009]

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[I’m going to go right to the end of the story here, so if you haven’t seen the film you should probably stop reading now.]

Bazil has a bullet in the brain from a drive-by shooting, and his predicament is that the bullet might shift and kill him instantly at any moment. On a salvage run one day, he finds himself in the industrial neighbourhood of two rival arms factories, one which has made his bullet, and the other the mine that killed his father. Now he has a mission. By the end, the arms dealers have had their precious collections of cars and historical body-parts (sic) trashed, duped into fighting each other, and finally, brought to face the mothers of the children maimed by their products. The CEOs have been kidnapped, shipped to the middle east, and are given a live grenade to hold and a mine to stand on. The mothers hold in front of them photographs of their children.

This too is elaborate theatre of course, and they haven’t in fact even left the city. The veiled mothers are in fact our plucky band of scavengers and the revenge that they exact is not just the momentary terror of explosive death, but the more lingering humiliation of the CEOs’ confessions posted to YouTube. A friend of mine says that this “is the political triumph of the film – not a sermon, but a viral video.”

I wonder if Jeunet used actual pictures of real kids, now limbless from careless ordnance? It sure looks like he did; the pictures seemed pretty convincing to me, flashed on the screen as they were. Let’s say that there were real. If so, they’re doing something clever and extraordinary. The photographs connect the frivolous tale, the merry film, to reality. Inside the fiction film, and inside the fakery within the film, these photos refer to a troubling reality. The arms dealer motivation is no longer just a plot device, no longer a maguffin that motivates the action but that we don’t need to really care for to jump into the story (corrupt ministers, or secret plans, say). No, here, that short moment of reality reminds us the audience of this real and horrible thing. Like the Micmacs movie posters that appear on billboards in various shots, the presence of the photographs reminds us that it is a fiction film. But now, it’s a film that says: ‘We have these plots and shenanigans. Remember, though, that landmines are serious matters’. Even if the photos are fictions, they still point towards a world outside the film in a way that is more weighty than simply having ‘secret plans’ as a motivating factor.

As P reminds me, something similar happens in Waltz with Bashir: the animation cuts to video footage of the aftermath of a massacre. It’s abrupt and shocking. And it doesn’t turn away. But Bashir is a documentary, after all.

For Micmacs, this whimsical fiction (and I don’t mean that as a criticism), it’s a deft move. The photographs disappear from the screen, the moment of solemnity gone. The characters take their revenge, the foes are vanquished, romance is kindled, all are happy. But I’m still thinking about those pictures.

Designer and editor Liz Danzico argues, in relation to the vast store of material on the web that we navigate through, that “now we’re all ‘editors’”. “Where once editors and curators provided meaning”, Danzico writes, “now we’re providing it.” The tasks of selecting material, setting the pace of how it was experienced, and giving a logical form to it, these are jobs that we as consumers are now having to do. We all have to make coherence for ourselves and as we walk around the web we inevitably do that for others, even if those others are just the four cat-loving friends we email LOLcat links to. What’s interesting is when these impulses get chanelled into something that’s more explicitly for a wider circle. I’m thinking of blogs like My Parents Were Awesome, with its simple and sweet idea of simply showing photos of our parents’ younger selves.

Sometimes the editorial intervention is a little bit stronger, and what results is an experience that’s a bit more contained and directed. I’ve mentioned before how the themed issues of JPG Magazine provide a nice sense of coherence amid the diversity of the collected photographs from a large number of contributors. Pictory (which I ran into via Kottke.org) is a collection of images based on general submissions around a theme. Put together by editor and designer Laura Bruno Miner (who, it turns out, was the design director of JPG), the things that make Pictory exceptional are the quality photographs that she chooses, the thought that she puts into arranging and ordering the photographs, and the extended captions. Each contributor has an individual photograph, and the accompanying words contextualize the images well. They become stories, not just a collection of nice images.

The web enables this more singular control over the process, I suppose, and Miner has created a place for this presentation of work to exist organically on the screen, with a simple navigational structure and plenty of space for the photos themselves. The latest ‘London’ series, for example, takes us from the Tube to Buckingham Palace, to less familiar views, tea and sandwiches, a post-protest crowd, Camden Markets. The diversity of photographs makes for a diversity of views, but the editing gives it a good unity.
Will the iPad encourage more innovative ways of using pictures on the web? The Guardian’s upcoming app looks promising, but it seems to me the barriers to entry are higher in that arena. Pictory is a great example of what’s already possible for an individual with a defined editorial sensibility to do in a maturing and accesible web.

One of the highlights of my very partial wanderings around the visual arts program of the Adelaide Festival has been Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Morakot (Emerald). It’s an 11-minute video projection with long takes of empty hotel rooms. All is quiet, and in the air floats a haze of feathery particles. Maybe these are the souls that we eventually hear, after sitting through a long silence. Because the video is looped it’s hard to tell if my guess about when the piece begins is correct, if indeed it does begin. I quite like feeling that it doesn’t really begin, that what we’re experiencing is merely a fraction of a long moment.

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Still from Morakot (Emerald) (2007)

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The piece is an adaptation of Karl Gjellerup’s 1906 novel The Pilgrim Kamanita, where a couple of old souls tell each other stories until they eventually stop existing at all. In Morakot the voices seem to be of a trio of people reminiscing, sometimes appearing as ghostly heads on pillows, and just talking, making the empty rooms resonate with their memories and the memories of all those others who have passed through them. It’s quiet, and does what most dark video-installation rooms do in allowing us respite from the outside. But it also has us thinking about the histories of the ordinary spaces that constitute that outside world: empty offices, unoccupied hotel rooms.

The images could be stills but for the floating particles; they turn it into something in between stillness and movement. Something like breathing.

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['Insurance Company, New York City', © Steven Ahlgren]

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There is a clarity to the lighting in these rooms. It’s not a garish, hard lighting, but something that’s flat and even, generated probably by similar flourescent panel arrangements. Even in spaces that look as if they could be all part of some vast interconnected web of similar offices, there are subtle differences that mark out their relationship to the world. An insurance office is decorated with a single whiteboard on the wall and much of the floor space is taken up with random boxes that also serve as a place for the man’s coat. Two mismatched chairs face each other, presumably for passing-by co-workers rather than customers.

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['Investment Bank, New York City', © Steven Ahlgren]

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By contrast, an investment bank office has a bonsai by the window, a polished desk with some fine china on it, while an internet magazine worker sits in what looks like a cubicle set up in a corridor to somewhere else, with a kid’s drawing pinned to the wall and couple of framed photos on the computer. The insurance worker and investment banker both have ties on, but the banker seems more affluent, with his swanky office and tidy hair. The internet guy is untucked and sneakered. They’re all working on the computer, but what’s interesting is these subtle differences that Ahlgren’s careful compositions and consistent lighting allow us to see.

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['Internet Magazine, New York City', © Steven Ahlgren]

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There are other kinds on pictures in Ahlgren’s series too: shots inside elevators, co-workers talking, an empty AIDS organisation meeting room with two tissue boxes as the main props. Some of his other work takes the camera outside the office and beyond; it’s worth checking out his website for a closer look.

Amy Stein notes that, aside from the haircuts and computers, the office scenes could have been shot very recently. I wonder about the appearance of my own workspace, un-corporate as it is, with my desk pushed into the corner between the washing and the spare chest-of-drawers. The environment is quite different, but the work looks the same (though I know I’d be completely lost in any of the offices that Ahlgren portrays), with me sitting here tapping away at a keyboard. But I’ve worked in an office too, and that makes me curious about what the people in Ahlgren’s pictures make of their spaces. If the work itself looks the same from the outside, I know of course that it’s vastly different, all this construction of information. That complex and immense alternate reality that lies behind the computer screens (and the lives of the individuals in front of them) is barely hinted at by the mundanity of the cubicles that house them. And that makes me realise my own mundane thing: that I need, now and then, to get up and go outside for a run. But I’ll keep thinking about these images.

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(via “two if by see“, posted with vodpod)

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The photographic motif doesn’t end with the titles. Bingham’s conversation with his sister is about another sister’s wedding, and he reluctantly accepts a mission to photograph a cardboard cutout of the soon-to-be-marrieds, in the fashion of the globe-trotting garden gnome from Amelie. At his various stops Bingham shoots the cutout of his sister and her fiance in places like the Luxor hotel in Las Vegas and an airport terminal. It seems all in the service of a kitschy vicarious world trip that they cannot actually afford. But then at the pre-wedding gathering in Wisconsin Bingham goes to put up the fake holiday snaps he’s made, and is brought up short: the pin-up board is a map of the US, and the accumulation of images from friends all across the nation, evokes not so much bad taste as a community of support for the couple. The photographs are meaningful not for their content but for their existence.

Bingham’s journey across America and his days on the road are as a consultant who fires people. One theme of the film is the recession, and one of the things it does well is the way it shows us portrays the recession to us. The film is from Bingham’s point of view, so there are the firing sessions that he conducts (interestingly, with some of the employees actually playing themselves, re-enacting and talking about their own firing experiences). It’s an interesting photographic question, showing a view of the recession from inside the office, and, Edgar Martins‘ work notwithstanding, it’s been dealt with in a variety of other ways.

In this film, there are a couple of stark shots that convey this pretty effectively. When Bingham and his colleague Natalie Keener arrive at an office, the camera pans around the floor, revealing two or three desks still with workers present, metres apart in an otherwise abandoned space. In another scene, Bingham and Keener talk in what looks like a corner office, but it’s not a senior manager’s workspace; this office is filled just with chairs, a collection of office chairs on wheels, pushed into some ad hoc holding area. It’s the expected props of the corporate environment, but here tell us quickly and quietly and sadly of the lives that they are meant to support.

Drift, from mustardcuffins on Vimeo. (via kottke.org)

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Most videos of landscapes in stop-motion leave me a bit cold. I think people are still bowled over by the novelty of it all and are content to gape at neat visual tricks. Most videos in this genre have unimaginative soundtracks that impose an artificial rhythm on the pictures and don’t really in the end say very much. There’s something about this one that I like, though. True, there’s no real narrative (not that one needs narrative for something like this to work, mind) and it could easily have come off as just ambient visuals , but the soundtrack here, harking back to the still-camera roots of the piece, is quite evocative. And maybe I, now, am bowled over by the novelty of it all, but there’s a surreal dreaminess to these not-quite-smooth transitions that’s quite appropriate to the mood. There’s a sense that one is looking at a still image and a moving image at the same time. (It looks better  in HD and bigger if you click through to vimeo.)

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