November 1999 smoking jacket by Gregory Alkaitis-Carafelli |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Get Real.
Begun in 1990, the ABC television show "America's Funniest Home Videos"
was the first network series to exploit the lucrative lowbrow market for
amateur home movies. Since the early 1980’s when the portable video
recorder -- "no, wait," she said, as I was reading that back to her,
"not even low brow, below brow. There's something to be said for
America's appetite for ball shots and babies throwing up."
Stating the obvious, yes, but we had just sated an above brow version of
that same appetite, watching two hours of people getting married, a
corpse being exhumed, jerkey travel footage, a family picnic, drugged
pets, babies keeping it real, and lots of trees -- just trees -- at
Other People's Home Movies, a project of Philadelphia's Secret Cinema
which successfully subverted the lecherous voyeurism that birthed
America's Funniest to make engaging entertainment. The Secret Cinema
screening featured original 16 mm home movie footage taken between 1925
and 1969, projected unedited, with a soundtrack specifically composed
and then performed live by a collection of indie rock musicians. "Film
is inherently much hardier stuff than even professional video formats,"
Secret Cinema curator Jay Schwartz notes, "and millions of feet of home
movies await discovery to tell the tails of their previous owners."
But what stories do these anachronistic home movies have that can
possibly match the caliber of the disposable seemingly endless video
moments culled for commercial broadcast? The competition is fierce. In a
typical America's Funniest episode, a wacky malfunctioning dishwasher
causes trouble for Dad the Repair Man, there are some golf swings gone
horribly wrong, cats do crazy funny things, optionally with or around a
small child, and a newlywed couple falls over into their wedding cake.
The humor inherent in these situations is given an extra clarifying
boost by the addition of unrelated sound effects and studio narration,
the broadcast version of what chef Emiril Lagrasse does to food a few
channels over on cable when he "kicks it up a few notches." The effect
is remarkably similar: what was at first only mildly unpalatable is now
totally repulsive, the combined result a program of private
embarrassments magnified ten-fold to be screened for an audience whose
lives are so vapid that they have to fuel up from a tank of other
people's misfortune.
In contrast, the silent 16 mm world of the Secret Cinema program was
inviting without being invasive; wry, disturbing, funny, boring --
varied enough to be utterly fascinating, yet -- with the exception of
the exhumation -- composed of quotidian events. The five-member musical
ensemble provided the screening with an immediacy that will never be
wrung from broadcast entertainment, with a striking score both erie and
fitting.
People are married, dad swims in the ocean, the New York theatre
district slides by, lit up for 1932; picnics and cruises, intrigue and
excitement (a disinterment sandwiched between travel footage from
Quebec, complete, as the program notes, "with press, police, and a brief
underlit look inside the coffin"). Broadcast television simply cannot
compete -- nor should it even try.
"I think you should write the beginning over," she said, in between
bites on a bagel. Begun in 1990, the ABC television show "America's
Funniest Home Videos" was the first network series to exploit the
lucrative lowbrow market for amateur home movies. Hopefully if the
Secret Cinema screening is any indication, the market is at last
correcting itself for the better.
|
|
·feature·
·net worth·
·ac/dc·
·smoking jacket·
·ear candy·
·feed hollywood·
·target audience·
·back issues·
·compulsion·
·posedown·
·the biswick files·
·mystery date·
·and
such and such·
·blab·
·kissing booth·
·contents·
·freakshow·
·fan club·
·archive·
copyright © 1996 - 1999 fearless media