popcorn
One of the guests of this year’s Popcorn was Ian Kerkhof, a director from the Netherlands, who through his knowledge of film technologies, explores film as performance art. He has, among other achievements, made a digital video feature called “Wasted!” which he blew up to 35mm. Kerkhof is a cutting edge filmmaker who perhaps encapsulated the more alternative edge of Popcorn by arriving with an experimental documentary about the likewise experimental Japanese musician Merzbow. “Beyond Ultra Violence-Uneasy Listening by Merzbow” is an uncomfortable portrait of a man who concentrates on making sounds to which few would ascribe the term “music”. The video is a muddle of images and sounds that sets out to give you a feeling, not the whole picture, of a man who innovates the future. Ian Kerkhof wanted to make a video as rich and layered as Merzbow’s work and says that it would be nonsense to make a BBC-style documentary about him. A scene where a girl cuts her stomach open leaving all her entrails on the floor certainly makes the video less accessible. Some fainted, some threw up and a few chose to trash their Popcorn card after the screening, deliberately provoked by Kerkhof.
Kerkhof also contributed a short film called “popcorn” about the digital filmmaking seminar that Popcorn held last year. The seminar had turned quickly tiresome and Kerkhof reflected this by showing a mass of faces from the audience mixed with close-ups of a urinating girl. According to him, it states everything he has to say about digital filmmaking.
Still, Kerkhof ended up making some vital points about digital filmmaking: 1.): if you want to make 35mm film then you should not use digital video to simulate it. 2.) You should try to explore the new possibilities the media has. 3.) Instead of regarding it as filmmaking, see it as digital video making. Being pro-digital, according to Kerkhof, does not mean being negative towards other film formats. It is only important, he contests, to be media specific. If you’re working for a final result in the cinema you have to work cinematic, but if you know your work will be stuck on a monitor, stick to a video aesthetic. So the distinction between the different formats doesn’t lie in the way they are made, but in how they are meant to be screened. One should, according to Kerkhof, be very accurate and clear about what one does. Otherwise, says Kerkhof, it’s just meaningless.
this article first appeared on indiewire
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