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H. Paul Moon
H. Paul Moon An artist's statement
In the first half of the 20th Century, a massive diesel engine in Copenhagen, Denmark was the world's largest. Still preserved and working, it fires up monthly. "Simple Machines," as a short
visual study, takes this occasion to explore the notion of human machinery: not just what we create, but circling back to the systems inside us, before us, and beyond us. "Simple Machines" also lays homage to communication in culture, especially our printing machines that so recently and vastly accelerated civilization. R. Luke
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DuBois' electronic score, much like his visual work, combines programming process and creative inspiration into an evocative, motoric result that is at once organic and digital. "Simple Machines" debuted at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in concert
with the 21st Century Consort, and subsequently screened at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond, and the Imagine Science Film Festival in New York City.
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An interview with
H. Paul Moon The notion of human machinery is the starting point of Simple Machines: a 20th Century diesel engine in Copenhagen becomes in your hands a powerful metaphor of human systems seen in a post- Deleuzian way, we daresay. How did you come up with the idea for this work? Moreover, your B/W cinematography reminds us of Guy Maddin's early films. Can you tell us your biggest influences in art and how they have affected your work? H. Paul Moon
With many in my generation, I was deeply influenced by the Qatsi films of Godfrey Reggio, who combined non-fiction cinematography with a fully integrated original music score. Not quite documentary, and not quite "music video," the intention always seemed primarily philosophical, obsessed with a battle between humanity and technology. I liked its evolving epiphany: thinking that machines might be our enemy, then taking a view from high orbit, and realizing that we are really machines creating machines -- something we often forget. So the meta- behind the physics of our existence could be depicted as a chicken-andegg problem, asking who is the creator of things. In Simple Machines, thought it would be interesting to visually disrupt that sequence, by cutting back and forth between human and engine, microcosm and macrocosm, without allowing the order of things to clarify. And when the diesel engine presented itself in Copenhagen, with its extraordinary mass and visual brutalism, I found a meaningful archetype of "ghost in the machine," through a vision of man-as-god. To that aim, I applied visual effects in moderation to those human operators, who become relatively divine with flares of light. By framing all of this within a black and white aesthetic, I exploited its ability to suggest
H. Paul Moon
universal time. As the film progresses, more machines than the diesel engine also appear, from a museum trove of communication inventions, adding a notion of input/output over time: we are always creating new ways to communicate our thoughts, more the matter of machines creating machines; while the speculative treat for me is to imagine any machine creating an output beyond the command of the machine who created it. Those micro-organisms shown in the film can relate to such a demon birth, and inevitably there is an environmental intention here too: saying that the human machine is destroying the Earth machine as a whole. The audacity of that. At the end of the film, our sun flickers away. Prior to your interest in filmmaking, you were a playwright and a composer of incidental music for theatre. Could you describe your In what manner your work
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as playwright has influenced your shooting style?How has your production processes changed over the years? My creative experiments started in dramatic theatre at college, firstly composing incidental music, then writing plays. Some say that the dramatic stage is dead, and we only want to watch movies now. There are ugly truths behind that exaggeration: but even partially to agree, it must be said that there are some things you can only learn from the stage, as a filmmaker. For me, they included the architecture of the proscenium, which enforces formality where cinematography can lose discipline: when a visual space is fixed, the scenarist needs to obsess upon organizing motion inside of it (no farther), to express a world of ideas and scenes and feelings. Meanwhile, the audience faces in that direction only. This compares to the ceaseless mobility of panning and tilting and roaming
cameras. Many filmmakers are restless in that capability, really lacking the mindset of the stage scenarist. As I grow, I continue to try and find new ways to keep my camera faithful to a self-imposed architecture, like the audience in a theatre who spends long stretches of time looking at just one scene, searching for nuance. A filmmaker working within that mindset has an important responsibility, to deliver nuance, under a proscenium. Lately I am drawn to attending live performances of formal ballet, as an especially intense exercise in this choreographic mindset, where little gestures need to communicate large ideas. As for the influence of having composed music too, it manifests in my basic value system finding it the conjoined twin of visual art in any film. One of them cannot make a move without the other (silent or singing). For Simple Machines, well beyond my limited
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ability, the extraordinary composer R. Luke DuBois created the sound score, and it was a hardcore accomplishment: he personally sampled the sounds, constructing the work from fragments of objects, from found to household. After it was done, he joked that
his cat, mortified by all that noise he made at home, gave him the silent treatment for a week. Thanks for sharing your time and thoughts, Paul. What's next for H. Paul
Moon? ? Have you a particular project in mind ? I am heading back into editing and finishing my long-form documentaries, that are already shot, about diverse subjects: an American
composer, cowboy poetry, sound artists, and a Communist spy. My website is at www.zenviolence.com.