Kevin B. Lee: Tell me about what you do professionally (to the extent you feel
comfortable doing so). specifically, what is your background in
filmmaking and editing? How did you get to be familiar with the
filmmaking tools and techniques that enabled you to make video essays?
Joel Bocko: I do not work professionally in film (aside from some
fleeting freelance experiences years ago), though I would like to. I
mostly learned about filmmaking and editing in childhood and high
school, first when my father had a Hi-8 home video camera and later when
I was able to use Final Cut Pro in my public high school’s media lab.
In the first instance, I was as fascinated with home movies (seeing my
family on TV) as I was by big-screen films in theater. And I always saw
the two as being linked. I used the Hi-8 technology to make a sort of
video mixtape when I was about 15, hooking up wires from VCR to the
camera and editing together clips of my favorite movies in chronological
order, from
The Gold Rush to
Schindler’s List, a sort of
cinematic panaroma. But with that technique there were a lot of hiccups.
When I discovered Final Cut and digital editing, the ability to time
something to the frame it was thrilling, a real lightning-bolt moment.
Kevin: How did you become interested in producing video essays?
Joel: The
roots were probably there in those early clip tapes, but the first
self-conscious video essay I recall seeing is one of your own, maybe
around ’07. I loved the idea, which seemed the logical next step after
DVD commentaries and film-clip documentaries. Nonetheless, I kept
putting off doing one of my own. “Directed by De Palma”
was my first video essay, although I didn’t consider it one at the time
(since it didn’t have narration and had a more impressionistic than
analytical vibe), and then it was two years before I created online
video content again. In 2011, I launched a chronological video series
highlighting clips from many of my favorite movies, in 32 different
chapters. It was an extension of that VHS mixtape I made as a kid. It
was followed by another impressionistic video essay on 42nd Street,
but it was not until last fall that I finally made a narrated video
essay. I think it took me so long to turn my excitement into action
because I approach filmmaking and criticism with different mindsets, and
narrated video essays combine both approaches. It’s both right- and
left-brained and thus presents a real challenge, I find.
Kevin: Based on an admittedly small sample size of three works, I sense that
“Interweaving” is a quality that distinguishes at least two of your
works, the Brian De Palma and Chaplin videos. Is this a trait you’d say
is conscious, in terms of the way you think about how to explore films in a video
essay format, or in the way you think about films in general?
Joel: Both. One precedent for the video essays is an
experimental film I made at 21, which freely cut between old home
movies, found-footage (particularly a cartoon adaptation of Wind in the Willows),
and original content shot by myself. It was scored with offbeat pop
music like My Bloody Valentine and Massive Attack, and it followed an
autobiographical theme. So this is how I think not just about video
essays, but filmmaking—and film-watching—in general. It’s a way of
seeing art, and perhaps the world: I love diverse formats and
perspectives, but I’m not a postmodernist, at least in my understanding
of the word, so I try to find some way to tie these divergences
together, to discover their links. I’m fascinated by the infamous
Lumiere/Melies dichotomy and I think great movies contain both
approaches. This goes back to being a little kid, simultaneously
fascinated both by home movies and big-screen blockbusters. When you
find films with something in common, you’re also better able to
highlight what’s different. I do this in written pieces a lot too, for
example using This Sporting Life and Billy Liar to examine a split in the British New Wave around ’63, or comparing Felix Salton’s novel Bambi
to the Disney adaptation, which tells you a lot about both authors.
Bouncing objects or ideas (as in the Chaplin piece) off of one another
sparks more creaitivity and insight, in my experience.
Kevin: How did you get the idea for interweaving three
Brian De Palma films? Was it easy to find the points of intersection
between them?
Joel: The video was created for Tony Dayoub’s Brian De Palma
blogathon in 2009. I knew many people would be covering the films I was
interested in and did not want my contribution to seem redundant. So
for one thing, I wanted to cover several films instead of just one, and I
wanted to take a visual approach. Initially I thought I’d do a
screen-cap visual tribute, and then had the idea of setting screen-caps
to a music/sound collage like a sideshow. Eventually I abandoned the
idea of using only still images (except for the first minute or so), I
guess because De Palma‘s images are so kinetic and visceral they demand movement. Scarface was always my favorite De Palma, even when I wasn’t that keen on him as a director, Hi Mom! was a very recent discovery which led me to value him more as an auteur, and Carrie I
hadn’t actually seen yet when starting the project, but I sensed I’d
like it. Before I watched it, Tony mentioned that the split-screen would
have great visual potential in an image tribute, which may have led me
to the idea of incorporating the other films into the split-screen in
the climax. The points of intersection were turned up while editing the
video rather than being pre-determined—evidence that there are definitely
common themes and motifs running through these movies.
Kevin: There are quite a few inspired
moments of connection created by the montage (sexual shame and violent
sexual expression in both Carrie and Scarface, one very
vaginal/menstrual, the other very phallic/ejaculatory). Were these
connections you had already made going into the making of the video? Did
the process of making the video yield any unexpected discoveries along
the way for you both in De Palma‘s films and in the video essay medium
itself?
Joel: As noted above, the connections were discovered rather
than expected. It’s hard to re-trace the process now, but I remember
that in addition to Tony mentioning the split-screen, Glenn Kenny had a
piece in the blogathon comparing Robert
De Niro’s shower monologue in
Hi Mom! to what is basically a re-enactment of that scene (visual instead of verbal) in
Body Double.
That may have led me back not only to that scene in the earlier film,
which I included in the video, but also the theme of sexual shame or
jealousy. The masculine/feminine aspect arose out of the material, and
the fact that at first I was preoccupied with
Carrie before finding a way to bring
Scarface
in. Tony arrives at the moment when the sense of insecurity and
vulnerability is at its height—his hypermasculine machismo is both a
counterpoint to Carrie’s initial shyness and also its flip-side; he is
just as insecure and sensitive as she is, but has a different way of
dealing with this—a way (violence) which eventually becomes her way as
well (with the conversation between
De Niro and
Salt serving as a kind of bridge between these two gender-coded ways of
dealing with hurt and anger). Most of the specific links, the details
like the stabbing sounds and the gunshots, or the footage of the
Hi, Mom home invasion matching the security TVs in
Scarface
was discovered in the process of editing. I don’t think you can plan
most of this stuff out, you just keep an open mind and antenna up and
it’s amazing what you’ll find.
What did I discover? Working on this project really solidified for me that De Palma
was not just a flashy surface stylist, as I had once thought—his work
is full of deeply-felt themes and raw visual motifs, even if these
ideas and emotions are hidden by self-conscious film references or a
comic-baroque playfulness. As for the video essay format, and what I
discovered, that’s a
longer answer. I am a bit more conscious about overall structuring than
individual moments, and I had several very strong ideas informing the
video’s creation. One was that I had to build up to the climax, so I
wanted to take my time at first and include several long sequences.
There can be a tendency to want to put your own stamp on something when
“sampling” a film or song, but sometimes it’s best to allow the material
room to breathe and express itself in its own voice—take Carrie
walking down the stairs to her mother or the extraordinary “Be Black,
Baby!” sequence in Hi, Mom! However, at certain points, I really
wanted to mess with the footage, intercut it, and do new things with it,
to make the montage viscerally and kinetically my own, harnessing
De Palma‘s energy in an fresh way. Primarily with the ending, where all
the films kind of converge into one metamovie, all the pent-up sexual
energy finding its outlet in savage violence, against big groups of
people (all three films have a warlike climax). At that point I would
actually look for things to replace or swap out, like how you see Al
Pacino getting shot but hear Piper Laurie getting stabbed. There’s an
indescribable delight when you find two things that aren’t supposed to
go together and they just click. That’s the thrill of montage right
there, in a nutshell.
Kevin: How did you get the idea for interweaving the
words of three writers in exploring the works of Charlie Chaplin? What
was your process in sequencing their words, and in matching them with
footage from Chaplin?
Joel: That idea came very last-minute. I was assigned
Modern Times
in the comedy countdown on
Wonders in the Dark by Sam Juliano, but the
thing is it isn’t really one of my favorite Chaplins. I’m fascinated by
the themes, and I have a crush on Paulette Goddard, but I connect more
with the comedy and pathos of
The Gold Rush and
City Lights. Reading essays on
Modern Times
(beginning with Roland Barthes’, which a commentator named Shamus
turned me on to), I was more fascinated by their voices than my own and
eventually decided I should roll with that. Jeff Pike and Greg Stevens
volunteered to send me audio clips for Barthes and Otis Ferguson, to
complement my own reading of Graham Greene, literally in the middle of
the night, when I put out a call on my blog about 12 hours before the
video was due. I edited the whole thing that night, by highlighting
certain passages (Ferguson in particular lost a lot of text), linking
them in a call-and-response form so that Barthes discusses the film’s
political outlook and Greene naysays the film’s socialism and then
Barthes makes a subtle distinction between Chaplin’s consciousness and
the film. The clips were chosen because they were interesting, without
knowing where I’d use them, and once they were imported I chose
appropriate moments from my selections. The video track was cut to fit
the soundtrack for the most part, as is often the case (even in the
visually-driven
De Palma tribute, there are far more cuts in video than audio, which tends to be laid out continuously; for example, when you “hear”
De Niro firing the gun at the end, that’s actually the firehose snapping in
Carrie,
whose soundtrack provides the backdrop for most of the video’s climax).
That’s a very documentary approach, which I find works for video essays,
especially narrated ones.
Kevin: When you first made me aware of your work, you
didn’t refer to the DePalma video as a “video essay” because it didn’t
feature narration. Do you feel that narration is an essential feature of
the video essay? Or more broadly speaking, how would you define what a
video essay is and is not? What does it need to accomplish?
Joel: Good point. I think of video essays as being more akin to
film criticism than filmmaking, which means—to me—that they arise more
out of an analytical, intellectual process than an imaginative, impulsive
urge, although the best will balance both. Since the De Palma
video was created more in the way I’d create an experimental film, it
didn’t seem like a video essay to me at the time. When I finally created
narrated video essays it was really tricky to find my way around the
form. I tried to edit visuals first and then add narration but it just
didn’t work. So it’s a different game. Still, I think maybe these are
just two different forms of video essay—the De Palma
piece definitely has a point to make, an analysis to apply, it just
does so through juxtaposition rather than verbal articulation. I’d like
to experiment with the balance of this in future pieces; say, a video
essay that’s 10% non-narrated/visual, 90%narrated/analytical, or vice
versa, or 40/60, 25/75, whatever. I do think even the most heavily
analytical video essays need to give the visual track space to breathe;
it can’t just be a lecture unfolding simultaneously with film footage
playing as “background.” Which seems like a trap the form could fall
into, although
I haven’t seen enough yet to know if it’s a common one.
Kevin: How has working with these video essays changed
your relationship with movies? Has it sparked new paths of exploration
and interest for you as a cinephile?
Joel: Yes and no. On
the one hand, they tend to articulate pre-existing attitudes and
interests rather than shape new ones; in fact, if anything, they’ve returned
me to a more hands-on, formally-conscious, intuitive approach to film
appreciation which too much analytical writing can distance me from. On
the other hand, they have had a big impact on myself as a filmmaker
rather than a cinephile; after creating my first narrated video essays, I
created a short film which was, in a sense, a video essay in reverse,
applying a fictional narration to nonfiction material (in this case,
real snapshots and home movies) rather than vice-versa as is the case
with most video essays. How this will impact my future films is hard to
say, but I’ve always known that making video essays would be a step
toward making my own movies – which is maybe one reason I nervously
procrastinated so long before taking the plunge. But there’s no turning
back. I think the future of movies, both in terms of cinephilia and
filmmaking, is on the internet. One way or another video essays will be
at the center of that nexus. There’s still a lot to explore—I’ve only
begun to watch the many videos that are out there—and it’s a very
exciting time; death of cinema, maybe, but also a radical rebirth.
For me, Room 237 is more interesting as a commercial case study, along the same lines as Christian Marclay’s phenomenally successful art installation The Clock, a found footage work incorporating thousands of film clips into a functional, 24 hour video timepiece. The Clock has created a sensation nearly everywhere it has exhibited, including its current installation at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where the museum’s twitter feed posts hourly wait times for viewing. Such commercially successful applications of found footage in both The Clock and Room 237 mark a distinct shift in fortunes from how found footage art has been received in the past. 
Press Play Video Blog 