For the record, in retrospect, I may have been blinded a bit myself by having been exposed to so much just-starting-out video work years ago, so what I was responding to — perhaps too quickly — was less the potential indulgence of this material and more how I could immediately slot so much of it into specific categories of just-starting-out…tropes.

But, thinking a bit further, I’m not sure that’s such a great spirit of critique, vocalizing that sort of cringe of recognition (including, I should admit, some self-recognition).

I mean, would that be like someone ignoring all that’s utterly great about, say, When All You Have is a Hammer…, in order to cringe at what a cliche it is for someone (particularly someone starting out?) to make a platformer out of rectangles? I feel pretty strongly that would be a ridiculous, probably even insulting, comment. So maybe mine was, too.

In any case, this is a tricky one! At least of what I saw so far, the voice over is so much more…successful than the video, with a couple exceptions in either direction.

But it’s difficult to put that critique into precise words. Maybe it’s that the video content makes me think I totally understand where it’s coming from, what sort of impulses led to it being shot (or, for the more miscellaneous material, assembled), and so I just don’t buy it as anything but Juvenilia, a young artist being blinded a bit by his own power of creation. (I should add: I thought the elevator shaft footage was a notable exception, for example.)

And on the other hand, I thought almost all of the voice over was genuinely fantastic, genuinely…sophisticated. By which I probably mean that it reads to me as in control of its affectations in a way I don’t think the video is.

And yet, I’m excited to see someone reaching toward this sort of work. Hence trying to write up a reaction like this despite not yet being so taken by this particular instance of it. I hope there’s more to come!