i will off to ireland it just a few days to shoot a documentary on gaelic games. the documentary is sponsored by an at&t “new media” fellowship and was organized by the watson institute at brown. i’m thrilled to be off to ireland (it is a birthright trip in many ways) but i am almost more excited to be a given a chance to dig into the practice of media humanism that i have been playing with on a personal philosophy/production side. inspired by that and the arrival of a sweet hd canon vixia, i decided to a shoot a ton of stuff in newport this past weekend and edit it all together. the result, i hope, reminds of both man with a movie camera, and jazz on a summer’s day, an underappreciated documentary on the newport jazz festival.
the kino-eye (an early soviet film collective) believed that the camera could supplement and augment the vision (and thus perception) of the human being. i found this to never be true in watching film, but in producing it, it does seem present. in reviewing my clips, i found my perception augmented and expanded. why? because captured in a reviewable format, the moment was given many lives and almost a certain immortality. barthes of course talks about this through camera lucida, but he did not stop to consider how much moving pictures complicate the capturing of time. siegfried kracaeur did. an his theory moves from the film as a photograph made several in tracing the cinema’s unique ability to vivify what is only promised as living in static photographs.
anyway, with these things swirling about, i captured a few days of video of newport life, then cut it all together. included is the newport bermuda race, a nice bonus!
newport, a summer day from Zachary McCune on Vimeo.