YTV

Four Films by Mark Titmarsh

It is a question of instrumentation, ways in which the work of art achieves its distributive efficiency ... What must be mimicked is the sublimity of the media those aspects that make it sublime, seemingly infinitely extensive... These aspects are speed and spread that is a sense of instantaneous access to limitless information, a sense of eternal flow of information which can be dipped into at will, and given a momentary shape by the spontaneity of that will.  — Donald Kuspit

Q. Why do you persist in using fragments of broadcast television in your films? Isn’t it a form of industrial film making that totally denies the idea of immediate personal expression inherent in your field of art/experimental cinema?

A. I feel more a sense of fraternity with television than I am threatened by it. I adore it for its massive inclusiveness, its sense of humour and particularly its great archival power that has made the history of cinema available and accessible albeit in a slightly degenerated form. In Sydney at least, it’s the best repertory cinema around and through TV I have come to appreciate directors like Vincente Minnelli, Douglas Sirk, Delmer Daves and so on. Other than entertainment it provides me with information, sometimes called news that in its turn becomes more and more like entertainment. Or “infotainment” as Jan Bruck puts it. News programmes have very recently exploded into every part of the day and evening, confidently competing with the movies and serials. My favourite of all these is Today hosted by the gracious Jane Pauley and Bryant Gumble. Each instalment is entirely non-narrative and crammed with items and events that are momentarily held in suspension by a notion of contemporaneity, “This is Today on NBC”. The news world is quite simply a fascinating place and every day the world seems to prove itself a place stranger than fiction. So you see TV is for me a field of intense speculation. In this way I use TV and eventually make it work for my own particular aims and it repays me with inspiration. So I don’t feel denied by TV but aided and abetted. But then of course my films are not made up entirely of favourite moments from television! TV only provides fragments, tableaux and dramatic phrases that I force into association and cooperation with the other elements that make up the completed film. At the outset, I draught the film by compiling notes taken from books, television, things people say and my own private visions. So my way of seeing configurations in television, in choosing a story line across a sea of dramatic moments together with all those other inputs I’ve just mentioned becomes a personal style. To differentiate oneself from TV all consuming freneticism it then seems important to develop a certain austerity in style, to be a disciple of television and an ascetic at the same time.

Mark Titmarsh

PROGRAMME 2   :   YTV

1.         NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD l4mins

2.         IMITATION OF LIFE 15 mins

3.         SHOCK CORRIDOR 4 mins

4.         LEGION          l6 mins