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The Thing That Doesn’t Seem Tasty
Wood Technology in the Design of Structures (or, How to Live Happily Ever After)
Eric Henry, video, 9:18, 1997
“Man did not, and does not, naturally eat wood.” So begins what seems to be an educational video on the science of human digestion, complete with pleasantly cold female narrator and intricate disco-balls of spinning molecular diagrams. But instructional texts generally teach why things are the way they are, how things work. What kind of teaching aid would bother to take as its subject a hypothetical impossible scenario (human digestion of wood) and explain why it is impossible? For that matter, what kind of science video begins with a quote from Madame Bovary (“She longed to die, and yet she longed to live in Paris”)?
But the onscreen demonstration of a certain apparatus provides a clue: it is like the mutant child of a scuba mask and a lawnmower, and we see it put to use in the loud, laboured consumption of a wooden spoon. The video and the narrator take this in stride, and when onscreen statistics show the extent to which this nature-surmounting invention has been employed by the human race, we realize what is going on: this is an instructional video from a parallel universe, one in which people have fulfilled their wood-eating desire by the hubristic application of technological progress.
For the most part, Wood Technology in the Design of Structures is a resolutely two-dimensional artifact (Henry: “the movie essentially unfolds on a giant piece of paper”1). Created on an Apple Macintosh using After Effects, it’s a reverie of textbook clippings and diagrams, still images and text, sliding past and through each other. The detailed layering invokes a sense of motion from the compositions’ mostly-static components, and a sense of beauty as the offspring of classic portraiture and contemporary graphic design.
The images’ soothing flow may lull you into a false security, confident that you have decoded this cryptic piece of video art as a satire on the misdirection of technological progress — and indeed, that is borne out by “the record down through the ages of the millions crushed, having precipitated the collapse of their own houses and apartment buildings”… but there is something more. The ghost of Mme. Bovary’s alienated desire hangs over the proceedings (as does the video’s sub-title, “How To Live Happily Ever After”), waiting patiently for the climax. The narrator then seems to lose track, spending a brief time parsing a seemingly random sentence (“I wish I liked jazz”, the onscreen words shaded so as to suggest it as a possibly deviant descendant of the simpler ancestor “I like jazz”) before proceeding to a state of ecstasy just as quickly usurped by a skepticism of the same breathless transcendence that we thought she was suddenly experiencing, that we thought the images were suddenly expressing:
Consider… that, seated next to you, I can be gripped by the acute longing to get to the room that you’re sitting in. Perhaps if one of us left the room and came back in, we would get a different result. Perhaps on the second try you would light up, I would light up, and we would both don vests made of flowers and do little dances and be racked with great sobs of joy, having shed the notion that life is elsewhere, that there is always something missing.
But something must indeed be missing; one wonders what particular void Wood Technology was made to fill. Cinema in its early days strove to either establish credentials by slavishly imitating prior arts or to carve out its own identity by isolating its differences from any existing arts. Things have calmed down since then, and we’ve accepted fairly pragmatically that neither approach makes a lick of sense, that synthesis is the necessary outroad. Experimental film and video art have undergone the same initiation rite, their supporters falling all over themselves to define their difference from cinema/sculpture/visual arts, and their detractors viewing them (or, more likely, not-viewing them) as pale imitations of the real deal. If cinema is the shadow under which video art must toil (and many would say it’s not, but to me it is, and so now you know the bias of this particular essay), then Wood Technology embraces it while working toward something unique.
What is the nature of this embrace? A clue is to be had in a sequence showing the demise of one of the “millions crushed”, staccato editing and bursts of blade-whirring leading up to a composite shot of a house collapsing. We move in closer to see a set of still-rotating blades amidst the rubble, slowing to a stop after which all is silence. The distanciation of this sequence — witness a death merely by inferring it from a tangential event , see the cause only via the effect — is a classic cinematic tactic (from Robert Bresson to Wes Anderson) newly rendered in the digital realm.
Unity of form and (dis)content is a tempting siren song; it promises perfection and in fact often delivers it. The fine print, however, is that “actual perfection may be smaller than pictured”. Occam probably got it right that entities are not to be multiplied beyond necessity, particularly in 7-minute videos, but his razor improperly wielded can shave away all the meat as well as the fat, paring videotapes down to little units as unremarkable as they are tight. Eric Henry doesn’t multiply his entities, and neither does he repeat them; he reiterates them in various styles and contexts. The spinning blades of the devourer-device’s initial appearance are very different from the spinning blades of the death-by-house-crushing, and the viewer’s range of associations is richer for it.
Most contemporary video artists, if setting out to make Wood Technology, would be content to create a fantasia of appropriated imagery, such as constitutes the bulk of the video. It is significant, however, that Henry sought to fill the remainder with images of his own creation — which themselves contain objects of his own design. It shouldn’t seem necessary to say “take heed, fringe filmmakers: he wanted to make a movie about a prosthetic wood-eating device, so he actually built one”… but it does. Misdirected and dangerous the wood-eaters’ hubris may be, but all too rare is Henry’s parallel hubris, his willingness to adopt whatever means he considers necessary and then to coax them all into the service of expressing a single theme: appropriation, animation, prop-building, location shooting, original music, sound design, and those unfashionable tools of screenwriting — even and especially the climax, which most video art shuns as though it were the bourgeoisie’s most insidious tool of oppression.
This climax offers a re-contextualizing of the video’s supposed thesis. What seemed to be a clear-cut satire on desire’s place in progress and consumerism becomes something much thornier, a parsing of desire’s syntax. Henry wonders:
How is it possible in our culture to say something like, ‘I could really try to like Jazz?’ Why would you try to like something that you don’t like? How is it that people can believe in the desirability of something that they fail to experience themselves? There’s some sort of meta-desire that says ‘must try to eat the thing that doesn’t seem tasty’.2
The desires and doubts evoked by Wood Technology put a bit of a lie to its closing argument. Why would I respond so strongly to this piece if I did not feel there were indeed “something missing”? And why would Henry have made it if he did not feel the same? The video is neither dystopian, as it seems on first glance, nor utopian, as it seems on second; rather, it’s meta-utopian. It posits that utopian dreams are the obstacles to our happiness, and that the absence of such aspirations is a necessary criterion of an ideal world. My desire to see more videos like this one would, in a perfect world, be unnecessary. Until then.
Daniel Cockburn
March 21 2005
1 from “ResFest NYC: A Conversation with Eric Henry, Director of “Wood Technology In The Design Of Structures”, Tim LaTorre, www.indiewire.com
www.indiewire.com/people/int_Henry_Eric_971024.html
2 ibid.
www.erichenry.com
Wood Technology credits:
Directed by: Eric Henry
Story/Concept: Eric Henry
Animation & Editing: Eric Henry
Photography: Jim Coursey, Eric Henry
Collage: Eric Henry
Narration: Janet Ward
Music: Jim Coursey, Eric Henry
Lighting & Sound: Keefe San Agustin
TRT 9:18, © 1997 Eric Henry