REAL TIME LIVE: Improvised Cinema.

So last night the University of Southern California (in Los Angeles), through their Visions and Voices Arts and Humanities Initiative, presented Finnish auteur Mia Makela's (aka Solu) piece entitled REAL TIME LIVE. Makela has been to many festivals including: Sonic Acts in Amsterdam, Sonar in Barcelona, Transmediale in Berlin and Transitio_MX in Mexico City. Her narratives are often dream-like with minimal abstractions. This genre of performance is named "live cinema." She has written and lectured on this emerging art form.

Basically Makela mixes sound and moving images live in a semi-improvised experience that develops in real time. It's sorta like watching her create a short film in front of us, with only one shot at it. Its interesting. The problems lie in the apparent: there is no story line. Well none that is concrete. You can argue that her images of a woman standing in a field has a plot, but it lacks tangibility. Another issue is the lack of collaboration that makes arts (and especially film) fascinating. The bringing together of many ideas for one product. Also, when one considers improvisation, one finds the first rule (to always say "yes") to be of the utmost importance. And without an ensemble, the improvisation is one-sided and lacking alternative impulses other than the one auteur. While I personally find multimedia experiences to be poignant and unique, this was very high-brow and lacked accessibility.

The key moment (and frankly the most interesting part of the whole evening, in my opinion) was when she wrote the credits (yes wrote, because the film was all made in front of us). She misspelled the word, "audio" and had to go back and change it. Like I said, it certainly is interesting and a valid choice for filmic expression, however the missing collaborative collective really made the evening one sided and even a tad dull. Is there a place for this art in our future? Sure, but it still needs some tweaking to make it collaborative and a bit more accessible.