Clayton Cubitt: Long Portrait
Just a few days after posting/thinking about the “blank face” protagonist of Jim Jarmusch’s The Limits of Control I come across an apophenic treasure trove from my West Coast compañera, Mer. Clayton Cubitt has been creating for the past year something he calls the Long Portrait. The concept is simple: a roughly 5 minute video portrait of someone sitting still. The effect is massive. A few mental stabs:
1) I can’t help but hope/guess he’s using one of the newer HD Video-capable DSLR’s that have found their way into the market in the last year. The quality of image (even over a web stream) looks amazing and there’s something poetic about a photographer using a still camera to make a (literally) moving portrait.
2) The comparison to Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests is a no-brainer but this really takes a sharp turn off that highway pretty quick. Whereas all those Factory people looked bored, strung-out or even, rarely, cognizant of what was happening they NEVER look invested, present with the camera that was before them. I don’t know if Cubitt is intending this but in these portraits there is a dialogue going on between the sitter and the camera. They look away, blink their eyes more than seems necessary (not in a flirtatious way but rather a slightly nervous way as if they’re thinking “did I just blink?” and they blink again just to make sure) or even smile. I like how this references back to a still photographic portrait in that the 4th wall is broken and permeable.
3) Time. These pieces, of course, veer far, far away from photography through their sustained moment. I’d be remiss if I didn’t pull this back into film lore and talk about the “long shot”, Andrei Tarkovksy and Béla Tarr, two masters at that, come immediately to mind. For them the mise-en-scene was all important, how is the shot set up, where do the people move, how do they inhabit the space. Whereas others might primarily sculpt a film through editing they showed through composition. To talk about mise-en-scene with these Long Portraits would be pushing it but there definitely is a concern with how the subjects inhabit their space. Most of them are credited as artists and as having been shot in their studio spaces. At the most mundane level, it’s like you’re sitting in the room with them. Looked at from another angle, you’re being allowed hints of their own creative methodology.
Spend some time with these things. They won’t disappoint.
