I recently went to a "theatrical screening" of Sharon Lockheart's film, Lunch Break. The film was shot in a factory somewhere in Maine. The entire film is one shot. 80 minutes, one shot. Which sounds like one hell of an accomplishment, really. However, this one shot consisted of a super-slow motion dead-pan down one corridor of the factory during the worker "lunch break." Sitting in a crowded theater, watching this film had to be one of the hardest 80 consecutive minutes of my life. You cannot even tell, at first, if the shot is moving, it is going so slow.
After the first 5 minutes, when the lady sitting on the bench's hand finally reaches her mouth, I thought to myself, "cool, I get it." This is the "American working (wo)man," a majority of people in the country, yet completely and utterly overlooked, unseen, and unappreciated. Bravo Sharon, thank you for forcing me to look at this woman, not just to look at her, but to really fucking soak her in. In the time of glamorization of celebrities and the utter fascination with the bourgeoisie, she is a modern example of an American proletariat; this calling attention to her is almost a revolutionary act.
Once we reach her, and the film goes on, I start to move around in my seat a bit, I'm looking at the hallway, and its long, and I'm finally realizing, "you know what... this is what the whole film is going to be." 80 minutes, trapped, with the filmmaker and her cohort in the theatre with me. After 20 minutes, I began to play a game, I would pick a point in the middle of the screen, and once it had reached the foreground, I would draw little circles on my arm for a minute. I would spend the rest of the hour doing this to myself:
I walked out of the theater with a forearm cheetah sleeve. This film, is not for theatrical viewing. It would make an excellent installation piece, where a viewer would have the ability to walk away from it. Subjecting an audience to a theatrical screening of this film was borderline torture. It was rude. I kept thinking to myself, somebody say something! Do something! Walk out, laugh, scream, say "are you Fucking kidding me?" And then I realized what was going on. I was right in the middle of a group of proponents for what I call the "new avant garde." Avant garde used to be about pushing the boundaries of what is accepted as the norm or staus quo, primarily in the cultural realm. It was often pretentious, inflated, grandiloquent, but always exciting to observe. The "new avant garde" seems to be about whether or not a viewer can stick it out. Being "hard" to take, hard to watch. As though, if you did get through it, you get it. You, my friend, are an artist. Well, I refuse to be a part of the self-congratulatory league (my colleague aptly entitled circle-jerk) going on in the art world; hey emperor, put some clothes on.
The ironic thing here, and I think most important to remember, is that the subjects of the film, these "research participants" (don't get me started on the fury that comes with the knowledge that 2 years of ethnographic research went into the making of this film, along with a hefty endowment) would never sacrifice 80 minutes of their life to watch a film like this. I'm willing to stake money I don't have on it. Not just these subjects, but the entire group of marginalized blue collar workers in this country that they represent, would never choose to watch this film over spending quality time with their families.
cheers
Dewey, John. 2005. Art as Experience. Perigee.
Lunch Break (Sharon Lockheart, 2008)
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