Reel Time (Campany Instructions 2)

For as long as anyone can remember, theater and film productions have not operated in real time. In fact, it is a rare moment when we see that happening. Sometimes, even conversations that, to us, last three minutes, three hours have passed. We are supposed to imagine that the conversation took a lot longer than that.

We see this conversely as well: Moments that would have actually lasted mere seconds slow down into the slow motion shot so that we can see that "SUDDENLY" moment, the moment of trauma or the punctum moment.

Tarantino states that there is anxiety present in these moments of real time. He says, "Neurotic anxiety has changed in our hands into realistic anxiety, into fear of particular external situations of danger .... we ask ourselves what it is that is actually dangerous and actually feared in a situation of danger of this kind" (34).

Hollis Frampton relates that there was a woman who wanted to video tape every moment of her life in real time. This is a production that will never be watched again in full, since it would take another person's whole life to watch this person's lived life, and that's really not fair. But for the moment, I would like us to attempt this. Multi-part instructions are below:

Instruction 1: Take a video that's sped up (May I suggest tutorial videos on youtube) and attempt to slow them down to real time. This may be difficult, of course, because many people choose those moments to cut their video, but attempt to do so. If there is a gap, attempt to put the gap in there.

Instruction 2: Videotape yourself doing something, anything. Washing dishes (like Jeanne Dielman), or driving to school, or whatever. Can you watch it all, start to finish? What does it mean that you can or can't? What happens if you speed it up? Slow it way down? What do you notice that you would not have noticed otherwise? Do you feel the time that it actually took to do whatever it was you did in the video (often, for instance, when we're waiting for something to happen, it seems to take forever)?

Gaensheimer states that "through the extreme slowing down of the movement, the greeting between the women seems to become divided up into a wealth of individual elements: each look, each movement, each fraction of a facial expression is released from the overall context of the story and stands out as meaningful," yet Miriam Rosen, in her interview by Chantal Akerman, states that, when she's filming, she doesn't want  it to "'look real', I don't want it to look natural, but I want people to feel the time that it takes, which is not the time that it really takes" (71, 195). These are two different kinds of times -- of the many that can be looked at -- that I want to investigate here through these instructions. Ultimately, how might they relate to the bigger picture project of Electracy?