Nomad No More: Casualties of Digital Anarchy

BRAINTRUSTdv interviews Antero Alli

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Antero Alli has been writing, directing and producing original intermedia theater works since 1975. In 1977 he founded ParaTheatrical ReSearch, an ongoing process of group ritual dynamics sometimes formalizing in public performance. In 1990, Alli began writing and directing his own videofilms. From 1992 to 2002, Alli co-produced the Nomad VideoFilm Festival (Seattle and Berkeley). Alli continues to work in digital video, exhibiting his work primarily in the Bay Area.

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BRAINTRUSTdv: You have an extensive theater background. Tell us when and how you started working with video.

ANTERO ALLI: My start with video literally sprung forth from a theater project. In Seattle of 1990, it seemed important to document a live performance we (ParaTheatrical ReSearch) produced and I directed using Rilke's epic lament, "Requiem For a Friend" as the primary text. I didn't want to shoot the performance itself as I felt it would've interfered with the audience's experience and so after our run, we rented a sound stage, a three-camera unit (Pro 3/4"SP video) and edited most of it live in real time with a switcher and four video monitors. That was thrilling. I also shot additional footage of the actresses (Kia Sian, Camille Hildebrandt and Jadina Lilien) separately in different locations as cutaways which I inserted later into the final product. "Requiem" was my first video project.


BTdv: What was lost or gained when you adapted "Requiem" from live performance to video? Did it feel comparatively stilted or contrived? Did the performances benefit from the cutaways?

AA: What was lost was the immediacy of live performance. There was no audience in the studio and so, the performers were responsible for generating their own energy. The entire set-up was contrived to start with and it was up to the actresses to make it appear otherwise, which I believe they did. The set was a massive black wall about fifty feet across and fifteen feet high. In this wall, we cut out three very large windows through which we could see each performer portraying three aspects of one woman—artist, mother, and a soul torn between—isolated and fragmented at first and then unifying together at the end. Rilke's text articulates a kind of ritual lament, and that was what we created. I think whether it felt contrived or stilted may have had more to do with the viewer's immediate need for lamentation. It's a slow-moving piece with considerable stillness at its heart, and I can see how some viewers might grow restless and perhaps find it stilted and boring.

BTdv: Do you see your theatrical aesthetic—the elements that govern your paratheatrical research—as distinct from your video aesthetic? Has Jerzy Grotowski influenced your video aesthetic at all?

AA: At their extremes, I don't see much overlay between what I do in theater and what I create in a video product. The visceral immediacy of theater and the non-linear audio/visual depths of video/film can be antagonistic to each other—like water and oil. But there are intriguing ways in which both mediums can act on each other to incite new visions, artistic hybrids, and ways of seeing. My films contain theatrical elements like costumes, masks, dramatic lighting design, and my theater often has this cinematic quality in its pacing, soundtracks and the outright use of moving images on a large screen to depict the memories, dreams, and hallucinations of the characters. Regarding Grotowski's influence on my video aesthetic: only very indirectly. Since 1977, the work and writings of Jerzy Grotowski have inspired the ongoing development of my own paratheatrical group medium which continues to act as a kind of lab for testing seed theatrical ideas and cinematic visions, most of which never see the light of day. However, there is that ten percent—an unforgettable story or mythos or archetype—that emerges and deeply informs the infrastructure of the next theater experiment or stage play or feature screenplay. In this way, my best ideas and visions tend to erupt from instinctual sources, rather than the dusty attic of intellect.


BTdv: Explain some of the ways in which your paratheatrical group can be used as a lab to test cinematic ideas.

AA: This would, in all honesty, take an entire book and so I refer readers to my paratheatrical workbook, Towards an Archeology of the Soul (Vertical Pool, 2003). Our process of exploring group ritual dynamics is actually a training process, a vigorous discipline both physically and spiritually demanding. It's difficult work and certainly not for everybody. After enough training in this medium, the individual and the group are better prepared to engage sources of energy in the body itself to animate movement, gesture, sound, characterization, and mythic development. It is in the latter and more advanced stages of the training that participants are able to distill from deeply subjective experiences those elements expressing universality from which art, performance, and even cinema can be based.


BTdv: You cite some of the most visionary celluloid filmmakers as having "transformed your perception"—Tarkovsky, Cassavetes, Bresson, Cocteau, Fellini. How much of this celluloid heritage can be successfully translated into a video aesthetic? Do you feel you've applied any specific techniques you've learned from these filmmakers?

AA: None of that heritage can be successfully translated into a video aesthetic. Why would anyone want to try? None of those filmmakers would approve of anyone trying to copy their style anyway, even if they could. They were all rebels and rebels create revolution not copies. We can learn from past masters up to a point but if you get too enchanted by their magic it can act like its own kind of trance of gorgeous oppression. The techniques I've learned have come through a lot of shooting practice, making a lot of mistakes and then trying to correct them on the next shoot. I look forward to making mistakes in that way. It's been trial-by-error-by-success all the way and hopefully will continue that way as long as I am creating this stuff.


BTdv: If they were working today, do you think any of the aforementioned filmmakers would embrace digital video technology?

AA: I think Cocteau would have tried DV. He seems to have been the kind of artist that would try just about anything if it expressed his intentions effectively enough.


BTdv: You once said that "each frame of Tarkovsky's films breathes with so much exquisite gloom it almost brings dying back into style." In the same interview, you refer to your own work as "glib and arch." Do you find that the filmmakers you most admire don't necessarily influence your work?

AA: What I referred to in that interview was how humbled I was in the face of Tarkovsky's films and that a part of me dies every time I endure one of his several masterpieces. What makes me think that Tarkovsky influences my work is chiefly the comments of others who say so. I'm not trying to emulate the genius. However, if my perception of cinema has been catalyzed and transformed by experiencing his work, it's probably going to show in some way. Rilke has a similar effect on my writing. I don't think I write like Rilke, but there's a tone sometimes that comes through expressing his impressions in me.


BTdv: You've also said, "I've been known to sign up six months of my life for a new technical challenge, such as an opportunity to edit on equipment I've never used before." This reminds me of Antonioni's remarks about video technology in the early Eighties. "The electronic system is very stimulating. At first, it seems like a game. They put you in front of a console full of knobs, and by moving them, you can add or take away color, meddle with its quality and with the relationships between various tonalities." Do you feel that working one's way through a technical challenge or experiment can be artistic and not merely academic?

AA: Technical challenges can stimulate artistic development if the newly learned techniques and skills allow greater access to one's creative and spiritual sources and then, enable greater dexterity and articulation of those impressions, muses, and emotions without crimping spontaneity in the process. That's the trouble with work that is technically perfect yet arrives dead on arrival. As an artist, I tend to side with energy over form, even though there's a part of me that wants everything to be perfect. And I think that's the promise, the seduction, and the danger of over-reliance on advanced technology to create art. Who was it that said the only thing that is absolutely perfect is death ?


BTdv: There's a remarkable amount of poetry woven into your video work (Rilke, Plath, Neruda, etc.). Can you tell us anything about how you came to integrate the two forms?

AA: In my videopoems, I use poetic text as an oblique narrative—meaning, I don't read the poem as someone reading a poem but as someone reading a story. I choose the visuals and the music on the basis of what might enhance the spirits evoked by the spoken word itself. I find my inspiration in the text itself and, maybe more essentially, in how it acts on my consciousness. Words are drugs. They trigger chemical reactions in the brain, sometimes subtle and other times dramatic. Yell "fire" in a crowded theater and see for yourself.


BTdv: Film Threat magazine ranked "Lily in Limbo" (1996) one of the top ten movies of the 1990s and called it your "finest film to date." How do you measure the success of your work? Which work would you consider your finest?

AA: Success to me is totally subjective. It's nice to get good reviews and hype about my work because it greases the publicity machines which get people into the cinema but other than that, I measure success by the degree to which I have made the movie or theater piece that I wanted to make. Zero compromise is my idea of success. My finest work? Hopefully my next one.


BTdv: What video technologies did you utilize prior to the advent of DV?

AA: Before DV, I used digital-8, Hi-8, 8mm, 3/4"SP, SVHS, VHS, pixelvision (Fisher-Price camera) and super-8 film.


BTdv: What was unique about each of these formats? Do you miss anything about analog video?


AA: The only format I miss is the pixel-vision camera which I will probably utilize, again, at some point. I still use digital-8, mostly for shooting location tests or auditioning actors. The other formats mentioned I don't miss yet, though there was a warmth to the 3/4"SP that always surprised me. I sometimes manually edit my videopoems onto my Panasonic 1970 SVHS deck with my Panasonic MX-12 mixer.


BTdv: What did you think of Michael Almareyda's work in pixelvision?

AA: Sorry to say I am unfamiliar with it.


BTdv: When did you make the transition to DV?

AA: I made the transition to DV in 2000 with the production of my first DV feature, Tragos, though I continue using super-8 film and digital-8 video often in the same work.


BTdv: How did you initially respond to the arrival of DV? Were you eager or skeptical?

AA: Kind of like when CD replaced tape, I felt both eager and skeptical. My initial response was positive when I started thinking in terms of how DV would look in black and white and then, contrasted in post. Tragos was posted almost entirely in black and white.


BTdv: What equipment and/or software did you use to achieve the look you wanted in Tragos?

AA: That was shot with the Canon XL-1, with extensive attention to indoor lighting, and edited on Final Cut Pro. We used the wide angle lens on the entire shoot, always in progressive scan or "frame" mode with most of the DV feature shot on a tripod. The lighting was used to build high contrasts to develop a noir tone. Tragos is a cyber-noir witch hunt story involving an urban tribe of techno-pagans who practice their religious rituals in a VR realm until one of the tribe succeeds in using the device as a suicide machine. So we were creating a modern tragedy and needed a claustrophobic and shadowy look to support that conceit.


BTdv: What do you think about the prevalent disloyalty to specific tools, the perpetual upgrading? It seems to be forced on everyone working in this medium.

AA: Like any new technology, it's 1) inevitable 2) exciting and 3) a pain in the ass. The way I work with and around it is to not emphasize the technology but rather slave the tool to the given job or vision that I want to accomplish. If I can do that better with a fifty-dollar camera than a thousand-dollar upgrade, I'll go with the [original] camera. It's a matter of perspective really.

To me, the vision comes first, my cast and crew come second and the technology comes third.


BTdv: Explain the "asocial ritual of cinema" and why it's important to you.

AA: People gather for all kinds of reasons and most of them reflect social needs. We gather for emotional support, to court and flirt, to discourse, to satisfy our needs for belonging and status and so forth. A cinema house presents one of many unspoken asocial rituals that we enjoy immensely. Here's a chance to gather in a large, dark, cavernous space with a group of complete strangers to share a common vision together, one that everyone sees projected onto the screen yet interacts with quite differently. We all see the same movie, and nobody sees the same movie. Is it a social event? Sort of but not really. Yet it furthers the cultural imperative of interacting with ideas, emotions, imagination, fantasies, and perspectives that can potentially inform our lives and even shape our destinies. Remember the last time a movie changed your life.


BTdv: What was the Nomad VideoFilm Festival, and how did it start?

AA: In Seattle of 1992, me and five friends went in on a 36" NEC video monitor and a PA system with the subversive intent of setting up surprise screening rooms every two months at nightclubs, bars, cafes, sports clubs and any place that would let us show a series of short experimental videos that came to us from across the country. It created the illusion of many little film fests popping up all over town those two years. By 1995, we outgrew the bi-monthly format and I raised the bar to create the Nomad VideoFilm Festival as an annual west coast touring venue. Between 1995 and 2002, the NVF grew as rapidly as the video revolution was expanding as we toured arthouse cinemas in San Francisco, Portland, Seattle and other small towns in between. We received about one hundred fifty submissions each year and about ten percent of these got selected into the show. What made Nomad unique and why we attracted so many innovative mediamakers to us was the prize we offered. Winning entries received hand-written responses from audience members from each city we toured through, which meant that artists could be reading anywhere from two hundred to five hundred index cards praising and condemning their work in terms as honest as they were anonymous. I don't know of any other festival that does this. It was a lot of work compiling all those remarks but well worth it in the end.


BTdv: That seems like a sound template for an artist-oriented festival. Maybe someone reading this will be inspired to follow your example. It makes me wonder, though: did you ever feel a conflict of interest in being the organizer of an event which featured your own work?

AA: Not as much as others seemed to have. We first began Nomad as a vehicle for the video work of the five of us who started it and then, it expanded from an inhouse/arthouse event to include outside work until it was almost all outside work with maybe one or two of my own shorts showing each show. I have never claimed any kind of objectivity or expertise in my curation bias which, as the Nomad vision statement says, is adamantly subjective.


BTdv: Why did Nomad come to an end just as video technology began to gain unthinkable popularity?

AA: For that very popularity. Nomad was what's now called a microcinema, and by 2002 everybody and his brother was starting a film or video festival or microcinema. The market was flooded and swamped. This advent of unthinkable video popularity also came with a tsunami of insufferably bad videos. In our final year we received two hundred submissions but only two percent of those got into the festival. So we dug into our archives and produced "The Best of Nomad" tour, a great show that doubled as our epitaph.


BTdv: What brought you from Seattle to Berkeley? Is there a strong community of DV artists and storytellers in Berkeley?


AA: As much as I loved the place, by 1996 I found myself outgrowing my niche in Seattle and craving the company of more talent and skill. I was ready to be challenged artistically and needed to be around a deeper talent pool to do that. The next logical step was the Bay Area, where I lived between 1972 and '82 and where I had some of my most meaningful theater experiences. Eight years later and I've made four features, a two-act dream play, numerous shorts. Add to this good fortune an ongoing interest in the paratheatrical labs that help regenerate my energies, visions, and inspirations.


BTdv: You have expressed reservations about the "over-saturated film festival circuit and their prize of questionable distribution deals." What do you think of the innumerable minor DV festivals which have emerged in the past few years? Do you think the traditional film festival model can benefit DV artists and storytellers?


AA: Sorry to say I don't think much of it. That's not to say they do not serve an important community function because they obviously do. How else could they multiply like rabbits? I just don't believe quantity can ever make up for quality. The bright side is that some of these festivals are led by more free-thinking individuals who will inevitably reject traditional film festival structures and values and go onto reinvent themselves based on more cutting-edge perceptions of what is not being done or said or shown.


BTdv: You said that the entries Nomad received for its final installment were of inferior quality to those of preceding installments. Do you think that these new digital festivals and microcinemas are less discriminating? Do you think the quality of the average DV production will improve with time, or will increasing market saturation lower everyone's expectations?

AA: My personal theory is that a lot more people with a lot less talent have access to video technology and are enchanted by the glamorous prospect of making their own movies. It's part of a modern epidemic of mediocrity married to the simulation of fame. With a thousand bucks, anyone can create the illusion now that they are on TV or "in the movies" and fall under the spell of their own self-importance without regard to the hard work, care, inspiration and talent it takes to earn that status.


BTdv: What do you think about non-commercial Web-hosted DV festivals or commercial sites featuring DV shorts?

AA: I'm anti-Internet webcast and streaming of my work as it trivializes the asocial ritual of cinema to a keyboard and a computer monitor. I don't watch films on the web myself and so I don't have much more to say about it.


BTdv: Otherwise, how does the Internet figure into your work ? Do you find it frustrating or convenient, hegemonic or indispensable?

AA: It doesn't figure in my work yet though I may be forced to fit it in some day. I do have a few clips posted on my filmography webpage from some of my DV features but that's only because someone else did it for their own business purposes as my editor. For now, Internet streaming of my work is dispensable and despicable. I'm a bit of a neo-luddite this way.


BTdv: What do you think of the Dogme 95 movement?

AA: I think it was a really good idea because it got mediamakers thinking lo-fi and low-maintenance again. Whether or not you made a film in strict concordance with Dogme 95 rules or not was not as important as the idea of doing more with less. The spirit of Dogme 95 is a very healthy one in the face of increasing media over saturation and addiction to technology.


BTdv: What do you think of the recent appropriation of DV technology by mainstream filmmakers—for instance, George Lucas' last Star Wars movie?

AA: I don't care for most mainstream movies, DV or film. If Lucas is having fun with his toys and making some money, what's the harm? I don't think there's a mainstream bone in my body and so there's a very large area of society that I cannot take seriously or simply fail to relate with. Call it a cherished character flaw.


BTdv: Earlier this year, Forrester Research, Inc., reported that Internet downloads would soon replace DVD purchases. The International Recording Media Association has contradicted the Forrester report, saying, "From the current annual level of 2.7 billion discs produced worldwide, by 2008, annual factory shipments of DVDs globally will approach 7 billion units. Adams Media Research projects DVD players in 91% of U.S. homes by 2008." What do you think of this debate?

AA: Yes, and someday the human body itself will become obsolete when we learn to live completely soulless existences as disembodied entities making homes in VR programs custom-designed to maintain the illusions of a reality we lost touch with decades ago. Perhaps a solution to over-population but tragic nevertheless...


BTdv: I can understand that you don't have a stake in the outcome since your intended market is small theatrical venues, not home formats or the Internet. You've already mentioned your opposition to the idea of Web-hosted cinema, but do you have a DVD player? Do you find yourself watching the work of Tarkovsky, Cocteau, Cassavetes, et al, on home format?

AA: I do have a DVD player but I don't watch Tarkovsky or the other great ones on the small screen. I wait for them to come around to the local arthouses—Pacific Film Archive, especially. What I watch on DVD in my home are films that tend to work and even work better on the small screen, like Repo Man or Laurel Canyon or documentaries. Some films simply demand the big screen to ignite while others seem to do almost better on the monitor.


BTdv: What do you think of marketing minor digital video endeavors on DVD for the home market without pursuing traditional exhibition?

AA: I believe this is already happening and as more people—consumers—outgrow mainstream entertainment values, a strident marketplace for subversive visions will emerge that starts out as minor digital video endeavors and builds, as any effective revolution can, to rule the world. Or at least die trying...


BTdv: No matter how far-fetched, tell us what you see as the ultimate long-term goal for digital video technology in terms of distribution, exhibition, and public reception.

AA: The ultimate long-term goal for digital video technology rests in the hands of mediamakers and producers who are making more media than they are consuming. This is my wish for the future. I want people to get out of their homes more and into the streets more, so I vote for more urban venues and less investment in home media entertainment systems. If advanced DV technology ends up isolating us more, let's call it a failure and start over. Tools are meant to be put down after you use them and if any new language can't help us communicate better amongst ourselves, it's not a language, it's a virus.