(or: Engaging With A Korsakow Project)
Talk With Your Hands Like An Ellis Island Mutt (2015)
By Steven Wingate
The best way to be informed about how to make is to consume, right? You watch films to be informed in your cinematic practice; you read to improve your writing; you struggle with a Korsakow film to figure out who/why/what/when and, most importantly, how – right?
This project took a while to really click for me, and even then I’m not sure just how much it did click. From the Korsakow homepage, I went to Showcase and click on the thumbnail that seemed the most interesting — a loosely arranged 3×4 grid of photos of a man, laid across a black background that reminded me in some weird way of the Letterboxd cover for some Stan Brakhage film we watched way back in Intro to Cinema.
Steven introduces his idea – he knows that he talks with his hands, and how people have reacted to this behaviour, but he seems interested in why, and what this says about him both as an individual as a part of a family. The title is introduced, laid out across the screen in horizontal and vertical text, as other gif-like videos of Steven pop up and bounce back and forth, with varying effects.
From here, you are given an array of options as your first choice, a non-linear way of engaging with his ideas. When you click through, you are dropped straight into one of the surely hundreds or thousands of possible, unscripted paths — fragments often pop up again at other intervals, and whether or not the fragments you are prompted with each time are different each step of the way I am not sure. It’s kinda easy to see how modularity plays into this.
The further you click through, the larger the scope becomes — what begins as a man talking to himself about his own hand gestures eventually forms into a larger narrative about immigration in the United States (no spoilers — you’ll get there). Whether or not this is an effective way of engaging with a story is TBD — when it’s not lagging to death (tried on various internet connections) and giving you the same frustration as a buffering stream, it seems cool, though requiring a lot of dedication both on part of the creator and the consumer.
Steven’s narration often complements the effects in each fragment — him saying “slow down” in a sentence may also be reflecting in the looping of a video, or his wavering identity represented through a scrolling through of colour effects. It’s these moments that break the project from seeming like one of those already ancient-looking museum installations that beg for your attention through a monotone voice reciting dates and timelines. At times, Steven’s narration seems removed from the video — “Here, I was probably talking about…” he says on different occasions — he often feels in crisis. Fragments range from gif-like videos of Steven, talking about something or showing something; to black and white images of his ancestors; to single words — all of which are expanded upon in the narration, through only in small pieces.
Actually engaging with the software is helpful in figuring out just what the heck we can do for this next project — the possibilities that come through non-linear modes such as this. How can arrange smaller parts into something so much bigger?