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| Features | |||||||
| Written by Noralil Ryan Fores | |||||||
| Monday, 23 July 2007 | |||||||
 When I first saw Phil Davis’ short animation Cord in the fall of 2005, I was instantly taken by his acute eye, his willingness to critique the world with a playfulness that belied serious commentary about social habit. It was, I willingly admit, love at first frame. At the time, I was fortunate enough to study at Davis’ alma mater, Syracuse University, and though he’d already graduated, I was able to track down Miso Suchy, a professor in transmedia studies who’d taught Davis along with visual and structural artist Sarah Witt, many-time music video director for The Spinto Band Albert Birney, comic artist of The Perry Bible Fellowship Nicholas Gurewitch as well as filmmaker and comic artist Jon Moses. Suchy would later tell me it was as if these artists and filmmakers composed a generation, and after piling through the stacks of VHS tapes and DVDs he handed me as well as the comic strips I consumed religiously, I had to agree, falling in love, as I did, with all of the group’s artwork. It’s nice to know that this passion for the work is the highest compliment I can pay Davis. “It’s all about that moment of sharing your creation with people,” he says. “For me, that’s a really important thing: to get the work out there, to have people look at it, to have people talk to you about it.” And, talk Davis and I have, twice, and each time I’ve been the lucky one on the end of the phone line, and each time I’ve had some silly question to ask about his work.“In 170 Calories, how many Mountain Dews did you drink?” “I think it was eight Mountain Dews,” he answers. “Oh! Did you actually shoot that all in one sitting?” “It took like 20 minutes to drink eight, and then I edited the video after that. I didn’t feel too good though,” he says and then laughing adds, “I felt like shit.” “Then we get the Phil Davis dance on the cans, a definitive shuffle,” I say, and at this point I’m thinking of recreating that dance in my office, except, I realize, I don’t have any Mountain Dew cans, and I don’t think I can pick my knees up quite the way Davis does. I try it. I’m right. My knees don’t move that way. It’s the hips that get in the way. “There’s something really strange about doing a certain performance for a camera when you’re in a state that is obviously an altered state,” he says. “I’m more interested in these altered states, altered not by the normal way of doing things like getting drunk or smoking but drinking soda is really disgusting in a way, especially when it’s done excessively. It puts you in a different state; your body is full of sugar and caffeine. You do things you wouldn’t normally do is the idea.” For that matter, most of Davis experimental video and film work is not within the realm of ideas normally explored: say, for example, testing the limits of endurance by skating into the walls of an ice rink, or destroying a video camera by throwing it off a building, trailing it behind a car or beating it with a baseball bat. No, there’s nothing ordinary about the work at all, and that's perhaps what renders it so compelling. Davis’ has a quiet voice and forceful ideas, and that’s where we’ll start, on the phone, in the middle of the afternoon, sitting crossed legged on the bed. SM: When I’d talked to you last, you were in the middle of the camera destruction series, and I think you’d done three or four of those out of, what six, that there are now. PD: I think there are seven of them. SM: Having gone through that whole process, what have you learned from that idea of destruction of media? PD: I’ve started to move away from it a little bit. I still really like those pieces, but I have an ADD where I’ll be working on one theme for a while, get distracted, change course and do something else for a while. With the destruction pieces, I was really trying to capture something that the camera is not normally meant for. So its taking it out of its normal context as this recording device—especially the kinds of cameras I was using, which were these cheap consumer video cameras marketed toward capturing memories like birthday parties or your vacation—and turning it on its head and instead creating an entity out of the camera...You’re seeing all this destruction occur at the camera, directly to the lens, which instantly makes us form empathy with what’s going on. We become that camera when we’re watching. That was really interesting, that dynamic I could get out of that just by breaking a camera in different way. Part of it also is the build-up in my persona in front of the camera. I’m not just setting the camera up on a tripod, taking one whack at it with a baseball bat and that’s the end. There’s a build-up, and I shift back-and-forth—as I was saying with that ADD as it applies to technical construction of the pieces themselves. I jump back-and-forth between these pieces where I’ll set one up and do it as a single take where, “Here it is. The camera is turned on, and the video is over once it breaks, dies and shuts off.” The other approach is to set up a pseudo narrative for the camera before it dies. In those pieces, having this build-up, it’s not just the viewpoint of the camera that’s ready to be murdered but the viewpoint of all these other cameras witnessing this death. In that, there’s a lot more editing, and I don’t know if I would say story arc because it’s not a traditional way of storytelling—and, I don’t even know if I would lump it in as a story—but it seems more cinematic to me… SM: With all the pieces, there seemed to be a transcendence of certain themes. In watching an early piece like Little Gem and then going to Model BE-278, I noticed, and I’ll just throw big words out: obsession, a preoccupation with rhythm, particularly with sound edits and the aural experience, irony, attention to minute detail and—like you said--the preoccupation with the on-screen persona, which in camera pieces directly addresses the viewer but in the earlier pieces there’s almost no cognizance for your characters that there’s a fourth wall broken. So, I was hoping you could speak to a few of these ideas, and (sighs, laughingly, apologetically) I gave you them all at once, so let’s start with this idea of obsession. PD: I definitely have that obsession with linking sound to the image, having a specific noise on the cut that really extentuates the cut and makes it rhythmic. So, in thinking about pieces that are edited, not single-take pieces, I’m thinking about it almost as a musical composition versus a visual event. Also the second layer is the soundtrack, so that when I’m going through, editing and laying it out, I’m thinking of it in pauses, rests, the motion of the action, crescendos, the pacing of all of that, the rhythm of it all, how it plays out in time. I’m obsessed with that, and I think my obsession with that sprung out of my roots shooting on film, 16mm film where sound and image were so separated, and it was much more difficult to get things together in a final format, whereas with video it’s just inherently combined. Even with a cheap video camera, you’re always going to get sound and image at the same time. You never have to worry about sync so it frees up all these opportunities to play around then with the rhythm of the visual combined with the sound that goes with it. On top of that I layer lots of sounds with it. On Model BE-278 there aren’t any sounds actually recorded, any foley sounds. All the sounds were the sounds that came from the tape—or tapes from the multiple cameras. Then I manipulated the sounds in different ways to get the effect that I wanted. But, I think with obsession… that idea of not really “You’re life flashes before your eyes” but more just that single, solitary image “Boom!” and then it’s gone. Being able to push and reach to that point, I’m obsessed with that, yes. I don’t necessarily always know how I’m going to get to that point, which is part of why it remains interesting to me. So, yeah, there’s obsession, and there’s routine, but at the same time, there are a lot of variables and a lot of improvisation on my part to figure out how it’s going to end up, both improvisation while I’m shooting and improvisation in the editing room. SM: I was also thinking of the idea of obsession for editing combined with repetition, and we get that in the opening sequence of Mallard, for example, or in the ending sequence of Check. Then the later camera destruction pieces also use that repetition. Why do you think you’re drawn to that? PD: My newer work, my thesis for my MFA [in Imaging and Digital Art from the University of Maryland] is almost all primarily based around this idea of repetition and typical endurance. It’s an obsession with repeating something over and over again until I can’t do it anymore. That veers away from the camera being the primary subject to me being the primary subject in front of the camera, doing a performance for the camera. SM: Harkening to the mode of Burger Run #1? PD: Yeah, kind of like that. Back in October of 2006, I ran a marathon, and I was thinking that when I first started training for this marathon that I’d do it as this art project and document it. Then I scrapped that idea, and I didn’t want to make it an art project anymore. I was just more interested in the actual endurance of going through this physical trial. Then I transferred that experience to the next set of videos that I made. I made this piece where I strapped this pillow to my chest and just ran into the wall about fifteen times until my back really hurt, and I couldn’t do it anymore. Then there was another piece where I stack up cardboard boxes into a big tower, walk down to the end of this long hallway, then run through the boxes and keep doing that: run through the boxes, knock them down, build them back up, run through the boxes again…I walk that line between being funny and serious, it being ridiculous but painful to watch. SM: It’s interesting that you talk about the humor with which you approach the work on the one hand but the seriousness as well…It seems to be ironic that the two are competing against each other some of the time, but I don’t know if it’s the tension between the playfulness and the seriousness that causes the irony, or if the irony comes from somewhere else. PD: In the back of my mind when I’m making these, I’m thinking about how it can end being ironic. Doing that dual thing—where I might be acting very serious in front of the camera, or in my persona, it’s very serious and intent on killing this camera, but at the same time I’m very aware of the fact that maybe the way I’m going about it is really humorous—makes it unsettling. I like trying to find that weird place where people laugh, and then they then question why they are laughing, or they’ll be laughing and then half way through laughing, that they shouldn’t really be laughing at something like this, shifting back-and-forth in that place of nervous laughter. It’s the idea that when we’re nervous one of our immediate reactions is to laugh; for us, as humans, that somehow makes everything okay. That’s my dark humor. SM: What’s going on with your animation these days? PD: I started working on a new piece that was going to be a mix of hand drawings with black-and-white photography. I scrapped the idea, but I still have the soundtrack…For Cord all the images came first and then the sound was foley put in with the images. With this project, I wanted to flip it, so I recorded a soundtrack first, a very abstract soundtrack. Then I’d animate to the soundtrack. I got like 30 seconds of it, and then I was just too busy with other video projects, writing my these paper and also having a job. I just didn’t have time to finish it. I’d like to pick up the pieces on that again and keep working on it. It’s interesting. I keep talking to people, and there’s the sort of this insistence on, “Do you know how to use Flash? How good are you with After Effects, some other animation software, Corel Painter?” I guess I’m still resisting going over to computer animation. With the Bikini Carwash Company video (for Dinosaurs), I used animation software, but I was still doing some traditional stuff too. I want to keep doing the hand drawn, but I want to get more detailed. Hopefully now that I’m done with school, I can get into a longer piece, take my time with it and not have a strict deadline. I am actually, hopefully, in the next year start on a new hand drawn piece. Just got to find the time. SM: What’s one question about your filmmaking that you’ve never been asked but always wanted to be? PD: A lot of people don’t ever ask me how many people work on the crew. I always want to have that moment where I can say, “It was just me.” To see Davis' short films visit www.phildavis.net. Also check out the work of Davis' equally awesome half, artist Rachel Bone at www.redprairiepress.com. | |||||||
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