Who knew? The YouTube indie-movie Life in a Day is the freaky feel-good twin of the art-world movie The Clock:
- they construct dogmatically linear narratives with staccato marches forward to metronome of sun, wave, and cuckoo
- they piece their homages-to-the-day from found source material
- compilation films both, they redirect their footage to new “trans-media” screens: from YouTube to art-house, from cineplex to museum
- triumphs of the database, they impose new logics (of narrative, linearity, causality) through montage
- false devotees of duration, they foreshorten time’s stickiness with a jittery compulsion for change
- there were lotsa clock-shots in both
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bT_UmBHMYzg&w=560&h=349]
But here the similarities end, for
- one is built from trash, finding the artful in the prosaic; while the other builds from both competent industry product and great masterpieces alike, re-locating the art squarely to the artist’s hand and mind
- one is a sappy celebration of humanity and community and commonality; the other, a high-brow parlor game for would-be cineastes
- one finds narrative pleasure in documentary’s unexpected truth (long takes are only granted for scenes of quirky, revealing, to-the-camera soul-bearing); the other disturbs originary narrative coherence through its showy and artful cornucopia of associational documentary editing techniques (color, movement, weather, feeling)
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8svkK7d7sY&w=560&h=349]
With so many images and so little time, at last dawns the era of the editor: the wife at the editing bay, not the man with the movie camera.
