Jubal Brown.
Sayej, Nadja
Vtape | Toronto, Canada
There may be shooting scenes from Rambo flicks and clips from
Afghanistan plucked from the evening news, but the premiere of
Toronto-based video artist Jubal Brown's 52-minute Total War (2008)
is hardly about bullets or bravado. This found-footage feature--which
lifts clips from YouTube--weaves together flashy action films,
canned-laughter TV shows, and teens in their suburban bedrooms
lip-syncing to their webcams. Naturally, the clips are flanked by
commercial breaks for Toyota and Sears.
The shock-jock Brown is probably best known for vomiting colored
gelatin on Raoul Dufy and Mondrian paintings in museums back in 1996.
Though he was never formally charged, more recently he has opted for
spastic, almost hypnotic short video collages (like his Party Tape
series from 2007). But in Total War (through October 18, 2008) he goes
the long-winded route for his first breakout work--a meandering pace
that is far more tortoise than hare. It's not really about
shock-and-awe, gut-wrenching war, but the everyday sludge of the
mundane. While some showy bits do pop like firecrackers, the film mostly
has a stream-of-consciousness style that calls to mind James Joyce.
The tension thickens between war clips and stuff about narcissistic
"tweens." Blurred together, it's like seeing prom kids
flying past in a limo during silence on Memorial Day. It was American
writer Marc Prensky who dubbed kids born in the 1990s as the first
generation of "digital natives," those who have never known a
world without the Internet. And true to form, Total War goes one better
when rugrats shamelessly exposing themselves online threatens to
overwhelm the action.
This is what fills the pages of your average high school diary:
young girls in bikinis make out with each other while boys holler for
more over the reggae booming in the background. It gets even dirtier. A
teen seen in a night-vision webcam admits, "I feel nervous even
though I'm looking into a camera on, like, a tripod," behaving
as if inundated by an avalanche of clips. Another clip shows a young
girl with a fresh coat of lip gloss singing along to pop songs, while a
boy of about 14, with sandy blonde hair and a thick southern accent,
touts: "Yes, I know this video sucks. I don't care."
Just as the characters here play their own violins, Brown has an
instrument of his own--he aims to make music with editing. Like a music
video director without the tunes, he takes a National Geographic hunting
scene and spins together the fatal gunshots to form an abrasive,
pulsating beat, like in hip-hop. But aside from flaunting his
tech-wizardry, the real orchestra of the day is composed of voices that
speak and respond to each other, intoning a cut-and-paste generational
anthem. If it's not the petty, douche bag kind of banter, then it
comes from more subdued moments that quietly speak for themselves. Even
after this whirlwind, the last line in Total War--a soldier reciting,
"I've forgotten what I'm fighting for"--is so spot
on, it might not even be necessary to say it.
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