Film
In 1970 during the construction of the jetty, Robert Smithson wrote and directed a 32-minute color film, "Spiral Jetty". The film was shot by Smithson and his wife Nancy Holt, and funded by Virgina Dawn and Douglas Christmas.
The film documented the construction process and also formed an ancillary artwork. Smithson combines his interest in geology, paleontology, astronomy, mythology and cinema, stating that he had an interest in documenting "the earth's history". In conjunction with filmed sequences of the jetty, Smithson incorporates footage of dinosaurs in a natural history museum and the ripped pages from a history text. During this scene, Smithson refers to the institutions of history: "the earth's history seems at times like a story recorded in a book, each page of which is torn into small pieces. Many of the pages and some of the pieces of each page are missing". Smithson's narrative supports an alternative view of historical discourse and the art object's placement or production outside of the museum institution. His writings also indicate that the helicopter film sequences over the jetty were a method of "recapitulating the scale of the jetty". By visually disorienting the viewer, Smithson is able to negate a time and place for the materiality of the artwork or create what he calls a "cosmic rupture". Through this state, the viewer is meant to be unable to categorize or classify the site, and will be left in a state free from the dialect of history.
Read more about this topic: Spiral Jetty
Famous quotes containing the word film:
“The woman’s world ... is shown as a series of limited spaces, with the woman struggling to get free of them. The struggle is what the film is about; what is struggled against is the limited space itself. Consequently, to make its point, the film has to deny itself and suggest it was the struggle that was wrong, not the space.”
—Jeanine Basinger (b. 1936)
“His education lay like a film of white oil on the black lake of his barbarian consciousness. For this reason, the things he said were hardly interesting at all. Only what he was.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)
“The obvious parallels between Star Wars and The Wizard of Oz have frequently been noted: in both there is the orphan hero who is raised on a farm by an aunt and uncle and yearns to escape to adventure. Obi-wan Kenobi resembles the Wizard; the loyal, plucky little robot R2D2 is Toto; C3PO is the Tin Man; and Chewbacca is the Cowardly Lion. Darth Vader replaces the Wicked Witch: this is a patriarchy rather than a matriarchy.”
—Andrew Gordon, U.S. educator, critic. “The Inescapable Family in American Science Fiction and Fantasy Films,” Journal of Popular Film and Television (Summer 1992)