The Origins of Video Art Response

“Video was the solution because it had no tradition. It was the precise opposite of painting. It had no formal burdens at all.” (9)

Why do I watch Fight Club over and over again? Is it for the soundtrack, the wardrobe, or Brad Pitt? No. It’s because of the amalgamation of every aspect of the experience. The narration, the ambient sounds, the story line, the cast, the camera’s cuts, angles, etc. I watched Fight Club when I was a junior in high school and fully immersed myself in the movie watching experience. Next, I read the original book by Chuck Palahniuk summer after sophomore year in college. Almost four years later, I consumed the story in an absolutely new way and had an incredibly different experience. Like any book turned into a movie, the original narrative is warped in order to fit the new media of cinema. However, after reading the book and watching the movie once more, I have more appreciation for the movie as opposed to feeling like the movie is not faithful to the book.

There is no formal burden of cinema. One can argue rules that directors must follow, but in the end the combination of multiple mediums to create one solid freestanding piece of media is incredible and so intense that it cannot and should not be confined to any tradition. The tradition is the magnificence itself. When the Lumiére brothers created “L’Arrivé d’un train en gare de La Ciotat” it was every single aspect of the moving image that made it incredible. Man learned to control film, audio, and eventually everything was reprogrammed in the digital. If we look at the history of film – of media in general – we see that there are literally no bounds. Whether it is the utilization of the audio, the narrative, or the camera techniques there are an unlimited amount of possibilities.