by ELMORE TERADONOVICH, Alternate Reality News Service Film and Television Writer
The ennui of the 20th century seems to have given way to the frantic connectivity of the 21st. Jean Baudrillard (a simulacrum of his former self since his death) would have shrugged his Garlic shoulders (he could never resist the snails at the Lookit That S Car Go! Cafe) and commented that we have passed through simulation (much as feces passes through the intestinal tract of an Anseriforme) and arrived at Boston cream pie, the ultimate American colonization of the world’s hunger for dessert.
Paul Dinning, creator of Videos for Cats to Watch: AWESOME One Hour of Birds Coming and Going, reveals that behind our desire to be driven to distraction (because walking to distraction is too slow for modern technology), the ennui is waiting, lurking, killing time like a badger in Chernobyl anxiously watching to see if you’re going to finish that chocolate croissant. Or, a taxpayer desperate to know if you’re going to finish that war. It’s the 21st century, buddy, a time when American metaphors, so puissant, so verkrumlichkeit, so…American, dominate the cultural landscape.
THE SCENE: A wooden bar bisects a verdant country road (in an homage to classical actor Gwen Verdun), stretching from the immediate foreground into the distance. In that immediate foreground, a mound of seeds. The beginning of a good idea? The beginning of destruction? The beginning of a pumpkin that will make a most excellent pie? No, the seeds are none of these things: they are there to feed birds. But, of course. The obvious is made manifest, both obviously and manifestly. It’s there right in the title, people! As Freid (a distant cousin of the famed psychologist) once said, “Sometimes, a seed is just a bird’s way of having dessert.”
Videos for Cats to Watch: AWESOME One Hour of Birds Coming and Going aspires to the static clinginess of Empire, the camera lens mimicking the behaviour of the human eye…of somebody who is a living statue. Or, perhaps, immobilized in a deep sea diver’s suit set in concrete. However, unlike Warhol, Dinning gives in to bourgeois sensibilities and uses subtle edits to ensure that the screen is ariot with vividly flapping wings and pecking beaks. (One can only wonder what Wim Wenders would have done with the same material in 3-D – oh, look: I’m salivating at the thonbcxxxxxx – sorry, my keyboard shorted out and had to be replaced.) In this way, the ultimate distraction from contemplation forces us to contemplate the very nature of contemplation.
The title of the film might lead one to believe that it was made primarily for cats: I would argue, though, that it is bursting with truths about the worst impulses of the human animal. Big birds push smaller ones off the wooden rod in order to get to the seeds. Big birds fill their mouths with seeds, leave, then return for more (previous sentencing when necessary). All of the birds knock seeds off the stand in their hurry to stuff their beaks, a wry, if hammy (mmm…that reminds me that I should get some lunch, soon) commentary on the wastefulness of modern capitalist consumption. Marx, a big bird-watcher, couldn’t have portrayed it more eloquently himself (although he definitely would have expressed at much greater length).
The seeds are quickly depleted, then magically replenished (I’ve always considered the crossfade to be the most mystical of scene transition methods), not unlike manna, or bar nuts, enacting the transition from scarcity to post-scarcity often enough to make the viewer unschooled in economic unsubtlety cross-eyed. Competition for seemingly scarce resources is an illusion, but a damn good one created with the latest Chomskyan CGI.
In an interview in PANtS!: The Journal of Cinematic Luminousity, Dinning has said that, “Housebound cats often get into trouble. They knock over houseplants. They stage running gun battles for control of a corner of the den. They reenact the sinking of the Andrea Doria using common objects found in the home. I made Videos for Cats to Watch: AWESOME in order to give them something to distract them from such mischief. I don’t know that people would be all that interested in it, though – I imagine most people would be bored silly, actually.”
Well, precisely. As Videos for Cats to Watch: AWESOME One Hour of Birds Coming and Going amply proves, under conditions of wooden post-capitalism (not to be confused with Emily Post-capitalism, which was relevant to the 1950s through to 1974 3/4), it’s badgers all the way down and nobody gets their just desserts.