this is a bit like that
i'd be interested to hear what you all think. absolutely embracing the cringe, the public/personal thing completely exploded all over the place
I’ve been fascinated by this guy for ages, everyone please watch at least a bit of this.
His whole career has basically been iterations of the same type of film, autobiographical documentaries starring him and his neuroses. For the most part they’re very low budget and horribly revealing which tends to strike people I’ve shown them to as heroic or repulsive. One of the recurring balancing acts is between the extensively honest “unfiltered” accounts of some of his most uncomfortable personality defects and desires, and the structured editing process that his sincerity can mask, which could throw a lot of the chance aspects and socially redeeming effects of the films into question.
He’s filmed loads of curious things like making his dad take ecstasy and pestering Will Oldham to take a higher dose of mushrooms. One interesting example is the film he did called I Am a Sex Addict, about him being a sex addict. As you might expect he does not come across particularly well in many respects, but I got so caught up in the candid presentation and the feelings stirred by that kind of ostensibly sheer self reflection and representation on a permanent record that I didn’t really notice. I watched it again with a friend, who incidentally had worked with a sex worker advocacy group, and they hated it , thought it was self indulgent irresponsible crap. Which I thought was missing the point , but it is not for everyone.
Does it work for you? Is it too grubby and self indulgent? Is this kind of confessional work a lowly ambition when making any cultural product?
And aside from Caveh, is there a time and a place for this kind of work, if you’re living through a period where there seems to be more currency in “just saying all the racist things were all thinking”, is this kind of work a Bad idea ?
I think he’s brilliant, there’s a bit in the William Blake show, on the heaven and hell panel where he says something about the physical printing process , chemically burning the plates being formally symmetrical to the themes of his work, how there is a structural analogue to the mythology in the literal nuts and bolts process of depicting it, and how he can expunge the idea that man has a soul separate from his body through the correct layers of production. I think there is a similar kind of formal symmetry with cavehs films, they’re the perfect way of expressing what he’s trying to do but at the same time undercut the reliability of it.