„I feel more comfortable describing my own works less as “creations” than as “creative viewings.”

A Conversation between Alejandro Bachmann and Kevin B. Lee, published by Found Footage Magazine in 2016

The short films of Kevin B. Lee (b. 1975) can be interpreted as a contemporary response to Raymond Bellour’s “dispossession of the object” of film by its transfer into language or writing. Crowned the “King of Video Essays” by the New York Times, Lee has been producing critical-analytical works on cinema since 2007 – at first via his blog shootingdownpictures, and now also as contributions to New York’s MoMI and, on a weekly basis, to Fandor. His body of work has come to include more than 300 pieces, encompassing analyses of individual films, artists’ portraits and essayistic reflections on the relations of cinema, technology and society.

Alongside Lee’s precise examinations of films (invariably guided by personal preferences), a specific aesthetic of analysis comes to light in his work. By means of moving images and sounds, Lee scrutinizes these very forms of expression – giving rise to works that also represent a poetic form, creating their very own island in cinema. Lee’s remarkable Transformers: The Premake, for instance, was screened in the avant-garde section of the Rotterdam Film Festival while being celebrated as one of the best “documentaries” of 2014 by Sight & Sound.

Alejandro: Talking to a film critic and video-essay maker in the context of a magazine dedicated to the art of found footage films might be a little surprising at first, which is why I feel we should maybe start our discussion by outlining where your work on video-essays could be thought of as a form of found footage and also in how far it differs from it. I feel there are two aspects that could be worth talking about - one being the artistic process, the other being a historical perspective that looks at your work in the context of a tradition of found footage filmmaking which - as some argue - would go back as far as Joseph Cornell’s ROSE HOBART in 1936. Tom Gunning says about found footage films that they recall „the most fundamental impulses of artistic awareness: an impulse that collaborates with the world of material to make it expressive, rather than simply impressing a creative will and technical skill onto indifferent or resistant ‚stuff‘“. Taking this as a starting point, placing your work in that tradition seems fully plausible…

Kevin B. Lee: I am intrigued by Gunning’s distinction between collaborating with the material and “simply impressing a creative will and technical skill.” In this collaborative mode, the artist functions as a receiver of the material as much as a shaper or producer. In other words, the artist retains a position of being the audience for the material even while acting upon it. We may thus adopt this mode as a way of understanding a certain mode of found footage film and media practice, as a way of giving creative expression to one’s “audienceship” in such a way that the audience state itself is understood to be one of collaborative exchange with the work. What better work to illustrate this than ROSE HOBART, a work that stands as a shrine not only to the title figure, Cornell’s object of infatuation, but also to the act of viewing as an act of creation.

I don’t suppose that all found footage works espouse this particular dynamic between the viewer/creator and the material. In the ever-expanding field of video essays, and I see plenty of works that use preexisting media as sort of indexical vocabulary to make an argument, or to produce new forms of audiovisual spectacle. Not all of these works show consideration for the act of viewing the material they appropriate; and even when they do, they may do so in different modes, from the explanatory to the exploratory.

ROSE HOBART might be considered the progenitor of the contemporary YouTube fan tribute video, and yet it remains in a class of its own. I admire it too much to feel comfortable placing my own work in such company, so I hesitate to claim to be part of whatever tradition of found footage one assigns to it. However we want to describe this tradition, it goes well beyond the realm of fan tribute videos or even a creative remix. More crucially, it is about the articulation of a state of viewership at its most engaged, exploratory and creative. Along these lines, I feel more comfortable describing my own works less as “creations” than as “creative viewings.”

Alejandro: So what you have in common with a film like ROSE HOBART is that you both start of as „creative viewers“. But there is another aspect in Gunnings statement that I feel to be relevant for your work on video essays and that you slightly touched upon with your remarks, namely the aspect of „collaboration with the material“. This implies that there is an ethic involved, that takes the material from which the artistic process is developed seriously. Maybe these ethics could be described as the framework of the „creative viewer“. „Seriously“ then, is a quite fluid term in that context and I wonder if you could expand on that. What form of „respect“ or „ethics“ would you say apply to your work? In how far would you say that an analysis of any given film through one of your essays tries to be respectful of the original artwork and in how far would you consider the work as a playground that allows you to play with the material? To me, this does not seem an easy question to answer in general terms if one compares – for example – you video essay TARKOVSKY’S CANDLES to, let’s say, DECEPTIVE SURFACES: THE FILMS OF CHRISTIAN PETZOLD?

Thinking on respect, ethics and collaboration with the work, I wonder if my own dealing with these matters is less directed at the work than at the experience of the work. TRANSFORMERS: THE PREMAKE might be the most vivid example of this, since it is only nominally about a TRANSFORMERS film, and one that wasn’t even released when I had finished my work on it. It is really about the ways of encountering this work in its pre-released stage, and what issues of ethics, respect and collaboration arise from these liminal encounters.

I also wish to mention another video I made appropriating several films by Michael Haneke. It was originally titled HIJACKING HANEKE because it was about wresting control from someone whom I consider one of the most controlling directors working today (even as he espouses the need to “deprogram” viewers from their default mode of passive spectatorship). I later retitled it HACKING HANEKE, perhaps due to an emerging awareness of new media and digital culture. This difference in word choice, “hijacking” vs. “hacking” certainly connotes differences in ethics and respect for the work, both centering on this issue of control. “Hijacking” puts more emphasis on opposing the almighty auteur and his control of our experience. I think “hacking” is a more open term, it’s not so much about wresting control from the maker as it is about opening up new spaces to engage with the work.

HACKING HANEKE is a series of experiments in creative viewing. One of which, the segment on 72 FRAGMENTS OF A CHRONOLOGY OF CHANCE, clearly laid the seeds for TARKOVSKY’S CANDLES, using the same premise of having all the shots from the film play at once. The use of this technique isn’t arbitrary in either case: with the Haneke piece I took the film’s title literally and displayed all the shots as fragments playing in simultaneous time; with Tarkovsky it was taking the visual motif of the candle as a metaphor for regarding the shot, as a temporary manifestation of light. I’d say TARKOVSKY’S CANDLES is less about Tarkovsky’s NOSTALGHIA than it is about what it means to watch this film in the age of post-cinema, where films are experienced as clips and shots on digital screens more often than they are as discrete filmic experiences from start to end.

One can argue that this is a sure sign of disrespect and violation to the film as it was originally intended to be experienced, to take a movie and dismantle it into each shot, and have all those shots play simultaneously. But the fact is that these new forms of viewing are increasingly prevalent, and I am interested in accounting for these forms of viewing. I am more interested in this than I am with exploring what makes a film like NOSTALGHIA worth our attention in the first place. There are plenty of video essays that do this, presented in tones of reverence in celebrating the genius of auteurs and the greatness of cinema.

Of course I make these reverent video essays myself, as I do with the Christian Petzold piece. But I also note that with that particular video essay, the nature of my praise for Petzold’s work has much to do with how his films create relationships between the archetypal narratives, forms and gestures of classical Hollywood cinema and the issues of contemporary life that concern him, and how these two dimensions do or do not square together. One might say that the real material being worked on is not the thing being encountered, but the act of encountering itself, what happens in the space between.

As someone who has made over 300 video-essays and who sometimes publishes a new one each week, I would pressume that the aspect of „finding“, which is so central to the concept of found footage, differs from a normal viewing experience. In how far are you already searching for something and in how far do you manage to let go of this need to produce a video essay and actually just watch the film and be sensitive to the experience of watching it?

I can appreciate the underlying sentiment of this question, to watch something without feeling the need to produce something from it, whether it be a video essay, or a written review of appreciation, or these days, a .gif or a screenshot to post on social media. This distinction draws critical attention to contemporary viewing experiences of cinema and media as a new form of labor, as opposed to leisure, as we might typically understand past forms of film and television viewing.

This collapsing of labor and leisure takes place in the factory-playground of social media, where companies like Facebook and Twitter profit from employing an unsuspecting workforce of billions engaged in the constant, casual production of media. It's a form of labor that many of us find addictive, in that we are continually in a state of self-reflexive curation of our lives, so as to produce the most desirable representations of them to share with others. This includes our experiences of the films and media we watch. Just as we may enter a state of meta-awareness of our lives for the sake of packaging it for others’ consumption, we do the same these days with movies and media.

I confess that these days a lot of my movie viewing is tied to the production of video essays, and it is often the case that I might not watch the entirety of a film, but scan it for segments to give special attention, if the purpose is to find material to produce a video essay on say, a visual motif that appears in different films, or an actor's performance tendencies. I wonder if this is so wrong, when this mode of producing new insights into movies results in the production of new approaches to viewing (both in the making of the video and in the audience’s reception of it). I think this is endemic of how new modes of viewing emerge from new norms of media culture.

I do occasionally “just watch the film” when there’s an (increasingly rare) opportunity to do so. Given the prevalence of this kind of labor-intensive viewing, it may be that the act of watching the film simply to watch it without the need for it to be “productive” might be the more radical gesture, at a time when work’s increasing encroachment into our leisure activities ought to be drawn into question.

That word „scan“ you use is quite interesting: A scanner can only find what it is told to look for. But finding also implies to stumble upon an image, to accidentally find something and thus generate ideas starting from this. The act of scanning as an artistic process becomes very visible when one watches a video-essay such as THE TARANTINO DEATH TOLL, an assembly of death scenes from Tarantino’s films. But works like WHAT MAKES A VIDEO ESSAY GREAT or THE HOUR OF THE STAR seem to hint at a far more poetic or open artistic process, as if there are images that stuck with you at one point in your life and that you came back to at a later stage, because they seemed to fit. This seems to imply that you are finding images in your memory, in your own archive which developed from a deep and passionate interest. Could you elaborate on these two different concepts of finding?

One might say the difference between these two modes is one of analysis versus contemplation, of study versus reflection. To the first mode of “scanning", it is generally a more regimented approach; one might say scientific, in that it is inspired by an easily definable hypothesis, i.e. “What would we notice if we put together all the death scenes in all of Quentin Tarantino’s films?” Incidentally, this seems to be a very effective mode for introducing students to video essay techniques (or as the academics call it, “videographic scholarship”). I recall that for your university students in Vienna we investigated what we might learn by putting together all the scenes of one character’s bedroom in THE ROYAL TENNENAUMS. The first videographic assignment for my own students was to take a scene from Hitchcock’s REAR WINDOW and separate all the shots to understand how they organize Jimmy Stewart’s act of spying on the apartment building across from his own. I find it amusing in this instance to use “scanning” techniques to study a movie character’s scanning activity.

There’s a similar type of scanning going on in those works you describe as being more “poetic” or “open.” WHAT MAKES A VIDEO ESSAY GREAT? could be summarized along the lines of the aforementioned hypothetical approach: “What would we notice if we put together all the major video essays of a given year” Granted, the final form it took does much more orchestrating of movement between those essays than a straightforward compilation, but there’s still an accumulation of examples and implicit comparison between those examples.

Sometimes I use it without even knowing, as in THE HOUR OF THE STAR, where I find connections between the 1980s Brazilian film of that name and my own personal situation at that time. The act of watching that film somehow triggered a montage of reflections based on contrasts: the daydreaming of that film’s child heroine with my own; my childhood dreams compared to my present realities; my present realities compared to that of a friend who had actually achieved stardom. Though it is more associational and stream-of-consciousness in its progression, one can find a scanning quality, as if these discrete ruminations were placed on an editing timeline to be linked in a sequence through finding the most evocative connections.

It might be worth going back to that initial question of what relationship found footage work enables between the viewer/creator and the material, and I find myself torn between two possible ways of describing what is going on. Sometimes I feel my video essay on THE HOUR OF THE STAR did a disservice to the film, since it is essentially a projection of personal significances upon a work that had no intended bearing on those matters. Much found footage work, especially those of a subversive nature, can be said to work in that direction. But could I not say also that somehow it was the film that found these things in me? Was it the film that looked at me, and projected itself upon me? Or perhaps it is a mutual projection upon each other.

I understand. And this mutual projection could be thought of along the lines of finding: The film finds something in you and you find something in the film. A last thing we could talk about in that context then, is the fact that your video essayistic work has hardly focussed on Avantgarde filmmaking in general, and – in this context – on found footage films specifically. Our conversation clearly marks your interest in that line of film history, so I am wondering why it hardly comes up in your work? Is there a specific complexity in making video-essays in the mode of a creative viewer on works that are themselves these manifestations of creative viewing?

I am reminded of one aspect of my video essay work that puts me in a distinctly different position from many of my peers. Most of my videos have been produced for Fandor, a website that for most of its existence has been dedicated to showing specialty cinema, such as independent, international and avant-garde films. I have made quite a number of video essays on avant garde films and filmmakers. Specifically regarding found footage filmmakers, I have made video essays on the pioneering found footage animation artist Lawrence Jordan and the celluloid found footage mixmaster Peter Tscherkassky. I have produced three video essays alone on Mark Rappaport, whose essay features in the 90s to my mind should be considered a major progenitor of contemporary video essay practice, every bit as much as Marker, Godard or Farocki. It’s wonderful that he has resumed making video essays and at such a prolific rate, because they maintain a standard of artistry, insight and a profoundly personal engagement with cinema that makes other contemporary output seem utterly dispensible (including much of my own).

Those examples aside, it is true that I haven’t made as many video essays on found footage artists. I could take on the likes of Joseph Cornell, Bruce Conner, Martin Arnold, or Craig Baldwin. Historically speaking, these works take up an admittedly small percentage of all the existing moving image works that one could possibly explore. But in this century, found footage is now a normalized, popularized practice through fan videos, remixes, and video essays. It makes more sense than ever to engage with these major figures as a means to reassert their relevance in the present.