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Perry Bard: Man With a Movie Camera: The Global Remake, after 2007ff.
The starting point of ”Man with a Movie Camera: The Global Remake”, a participatory video, is Dziga Vertov’s movie with the same title dating from 1929; the project invites people from all over the world to contribute their own sequences to the original film. Perry Bard developed new software making it possible to upload every new sequence, to obtain smooth transitions between the old and the new material and, thus, endless permutations of this movie. The aim of this project is to found a virtual community of people “hooking up” with this movie, rewriting it over and over, with today’s means. Wherever the movie is shown, the local scene is invited to participate and share their own pictures. The website is updated daily to show the various new versions of the film. Dziga Vertov’s movie not only was a milestone in the genre of experimental and self-reflexive documentary movies, it was the movie that depicted Soviet communism and a cinematic aesthetics of what a community could be. This aesthetics of the “communal” cannot be viewed unproblematic today because of its technophilia and its whitewashing of the production conditions: the countless busy hands wrapping cigarettes on an assembly line, the telephone switching girls incessantly connecting telephone lines, urban life, vibrantly waking up to another day. The remake cannot be viewed as a further development of the classic in every aspect, neither on an iconographic level nor with regard to the cutting techniques used. A great number of the new images do not have the same vigour as the old ones. The split-screen method, however, perfectly conveys the difference between the former and the present state of our societies: it’s no longer all the women with their typewriters in an open-plan office we’re confronted with, now it’s the single person with his or her laptop on a coffee table in the living room. The most important aspect of the project, however, is the fact that on the production level an aesthetics of the “communal” is achieved that conveys equal importance to everybody and everything.
http://dziga.perrybard.net
http://www.perrybard.net
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im/possible community