audio/video ~ 12:06
4th collaboration w/ Michael Fleming
from Michael:
What does it mean to be a self-conscious animal? It means to know that one is food for worms. We emerge from nothing, we have a name, an excruciating inner yearning for life and self-expression and with all this yet to die. Man is out of nature and hopelessly in it: he has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with a towering majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order to blindly and dumbly rot and disappear forever. It is a terrifying dilemma to be in and to have to live with. ….Tik-Tak. ×
see audio below
Michael Fleming’s jarring tour-de-force takes its title from the film’s final image—that of a cartoon clock “ticking” as it counts away seconds in a steady rhythm. The work itself is concerned with the inevitable passing of time and the existential weight we all carry in knowing we have a limited amount of it in this world. Cut together from a wide array of cinematic sources—feature films and trailers, educational films, commercials, discarded film leader, and home movies, just to name a few—Fleming’s work loosely follows the course of a human life from birth to childhood to maturation to death, with its flurry of images evoking the physical, emotional, and psychological facets of each phase of life. Moreover, the physical qualities of its 35mm and 16mm film source materials are on full display, showing the framelines, sprocket holes, soundtrack, physical deformations, and other artifacts of the film-objects Fleming and collaborator Onno Petersen have scanned to create the work. This foregrounding of the source films’ materiality further emphasizes the visceral and immediate nature of the work’s themes. Aaron Michael Smith’s discordant musical score further accentuates this sense of unease and distress, crescendoing in a sequence in the work’s latter half depicting portrait photographs in varying states of decay, intercut with images of maggots, crime scene photographs, and other momento mori. Ultimately, Tik-Tak is itself a kind of collective portrait of the human experience collaged from many different forms of visual materials. It reminds us of these materials’ own existential fragility and, concurrently, our own.
SCREENINGS:
Cut Frames, Captured Pixels: Found Footage Film & Video @ Florida State University Museum of Fine Arts (curated by Dave Rodriguez, filmmaker and librarian at Florida State University)
January 12 – March 18, 2023
January 12 – March 18, 2023
Festival Int'l de Cinema Experimental, Rio de Janeiro, Brasil, September 2020
Curtocircuíto, International Film Festival Santiago de Compostela, Spain, October 2020
2nd Kinoskop Festival, Belgrade, Serbia, December 2020
Analogica Festival 10, Bolzano, Italy, December 2020
Alternative Film/Video Festival, Belgrade, Serbia, December 2020
Florida Experimental Film/Video Festival (FLEX Fest), Tampa Bay, Florida, USA, February 2022
Jury notes:
"A film that stands out for its intoxicating pace, craftful editing, and masterful use of found footage. Tik-Tak takes us through the journey of a life-cycle, delivered through thrilling juxtaposition and groupings of moving images." (Kim Kielhofner)
"An intelligent downer. One direction: decay = erase. Smart and it smarts. Crushed spider. Sound stripe is seen and not heard. Dynamic music. Fitting subject/action groups. Just the right scanning frame. A clear story that hurts/hits real." (Sandy McLennan)
"An intelligent downer. One direction: decay = erase. Smart and it smarts. Crushed spider. Sound stripe is seen and not heard. Dynamic music. Fitting subject/action groups. Just the right scanning frame. A clear story that hurts/hits real." (Sandy McLennan)