8-Bit documentary review...
Mar 28, 2007 10:38:51 GMT -5
Post by savagepencil on Mar 28, 2007 10:38:51 GMT -5
(you can see a description of the documentary here: www.originalalamo.com/downtown/frames.asp?b=/online_tix/show_details.asp?show_id=4385 )
I went and saw 8-BIT: A Film about Art & Video Games last night. I had high hopes for this, as I had eschewed it at GDC in order to see Suda51's talk on making games "punky style". I'm glad I did this, because the documentary was abysmal.
It should have instead been called 8-BIT: A Film About My Asshole Musician Friends Who Spent $30 For a Gameboy Flashcart and Downloaded Some Shitty Software and Think They Are Gods, because that would have been a lot more accurate. I couldn't believe how angry I was getting during the documentary, which seemed to either not address or dismiss interactive (and even graphical) uses of the old technology as modern art.
The interviews were brainless and self-serving (one of the directors featured his NY art gallery constantly), and it really presented these people to be pioneers of the amazing. Their facts were off, and nobody said a damn thing very interesting, you just had vapid fools who (at most) made a terribly shitty Unreal level or used a SID chip once in their lives. It wasn't the typical artistic pretension, it was the fact that the people making these things weren't at all special and weren't doing particularly special things with the hardware.
All of this with the exception of Treewave, who opened before the screening. He should have been the real star of the thing, because he completely embraced the message and had both interactive and non-interactive visual backdrops to his music, as well as forcing a dot-matrix printer to eke out music. I think he got about 30 seconds of screen time.
The worst part of the film was towards the end, when the cops came to a bleep-blorp party and told them to shut up because they were too loud. At this point, they had just tried to make themselves "rebels" and "martyrs". Yeah, dude. It takes a lot to throw a loud party and get shut down by the cops. Your rebellion ranks right up there with the Brighton beach riots and 1968 Paris for your "movement", bro.
After the screening, there was a palpable sense of "did we just get ripped off?" from the audience. The speakers mumbled some half-hearted answers, claiming they were banned from Britain because they didn't address any of the British demo scene. Damn right, I guess the British have taste.
Finally I couldn't take any more and asked why they had ignored so many other visionaries (Jeff Minter, Zach Simpson, many others) and they just mumbled their way out of it. They didn't address my question about "why no games?", and I even brought up Super Columbine Massacre RPG, to which they replied "well, they used a game maker program for that." How is that different than someone getting a flashcart and downloading stuff off the internet?
I went and saw 8-BIT: A Film about Art & Video Games last night. I had high hopes for this, as I had eschewed it at GDC in order to see Suda51's talk on making games "punky style". I'm glad I did this, because the documentary was abysmal.
It should have instead been called 8-BIT: A Film About My Asshole Musician Friends Who Spent $30 For a Gameboy Flashcart and Downloaded Some Shitty Software and Think They Are Gods, because that would have been a lot more accurate. I couldn't believe how angry I was getting during the documentary, which seemed to either not address or dismiss interactive (and even graphical) uses of the old technology as modern art.
The interviews were brainless and self-serving (one of the directors featured his NY art gallery constantly), and it really presented these people to be pioneers of the amazing. Their facts were off, and nobody said a damn thing very interesting, you just had vapid fools who (at most) made a terribly shitty Unreal level or used a SID chip once in their lives. It wasn't the typical artistic pretension, it was the fact that the people making these things weren't at all special and weren't doing particularly special things with the hardware.
All of this with the exception of Treewave, who opened before the screening. He should have been the real star of the thing, because he completely embraced the message and had both interactive and non-interactive visual backdrops to his music, as well as forcing a dot-matrix printer to eke out music. I think he got about 30 seconds of screen time.
The worst part of the film was towards the end, when the cops came to a bleep-blorp party and told them to shut up because they were too loud. At this point, they had just tried to make themselves "rebels" and "martyrs". Yeah, dude. It takes a lot to throw a loud party and get shut down by the cops. Your rebellion ranks right up there with the Brighton beach riots and 1968 Paris for your "movement", bro.
After the screening, there was a palpable sense of "did we just get ripped off?" from the audience. The speakers mumbled some half-hearted answers, claiming they were banned from Britain because they didn't address any of the British demo scene. Damn right, I guess the British have taste.
Finally I couldn't take any more and asked why they had ignored so many other visionaries (Jeff Minter, Zach Simpson, many others) and they just mumbled their way out of it. They didn't address my question about "why no games?", and I even brought up Super Columbine Massacre RPG, to which they replied "well, they used a game maker program for that." How is that different than someone getting a flashcart and downloading stuff off the internet?
