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Tim Barrus in the New York Times on the Blank Screen Theory of WritingCinematheque boys have been doing outside internships to broaden their perspective of what video can do. They've been placed all over the planet. Their work has become more experimental in that even when they post it, often it's not what they want.The end product can be elusive.So I say: then take it down and redo it so that it's more your own idea.Just because you have to take something down is not anymore a failure than having to rewrite something you struggle with.None of this is failure.Sometimes this putting up and taking down devastates the video. Other times, it only adds to it.The entire process is vibrant and alive.There is never, ever, ever, ever a lock of vision or lack of ideas. For us, the blank page is sheer mythology.I say: is that what you want. Is that the title you want. Is that the ending you want. Are those the credits you want. Sometimes there is no title. Sometimes credits get in the way. I ask and ask and ask and probe. It is what I do. Sometimes I get an answer. Sometimes I just get stared at hard. Sometimes we just begin again.They ponder, they agonize, they copy, they mash, they learn, they argue, they fail, they pound the wall with fists, they kick cans off the roof of the loft.They reconfigure. They regroup. They form alliances.As their teacher, my main focus is to NOT KEEP THEM IN THEIR PLACE. You have to let them try different masks and voices out. Put it on for size. Discover what is fitting and what is not. This is difficult.For the writers, it's about that voice. You have one or you don't.I do not believe (other writers strongly disagree but they are mistaken) you can teach it. You can't learn it either. You have it or you don't. If you have it, you can develop it. If you don't have it, don't bother chasing it. You'll end up writing for television or the New York Times.None of them at any time envision blankness; if they did, I would kick their ass back into the street, and they know it. They're making art and finding the tools they have internally to do that and in this process they confront themselves.I get a lot of shit -- flack -- from people who are jealous and who whine, whine, whine at me. Go fuck yourselves and leave us alone. You have nothing to contribute. None of us are even remotely interested in what you have to whine about. Stick it up your ass and eat me.When the boys at Cinematheque sit down to write something, anything, I stress to them that they are NOT staring at a blank screen. I attempt to make the point that they can tap into the moving images they see inside their heads; all they have to do is find the symbols and the courage to articulate them.I don't buy the blank screen or blank page theory. This is the antique version of how New York publishing sees the proverbial writer in his confusion, his lack of substance, his struggling, and his vacuum of creativity and internal process. Thusly he "needs" a New York editor to "help" him make the work "better." Fiddledeedee. This is the old thinking connected to the old technology connected to old, ancient media the book lovers scream will be stuffed down our throats forever. "Print will continue to be around..."Forever? Your concept of forever is a self-serving illusion. What the blank screen theory of how creativity functions implies is a powerlessness the writer assumes and acquiesces to where he becomes the New York footnote he has been for so very long. The book is dead.Burn the books, I say. The blank screen theory implies that the work isn't moving, doesn't have a life of its own, can't have a theme inspired by the images the AUTHOR -- NOT the publisher -- embeds in the narrative. I believe in the theory of the screen that jumps out at you.Then you write.The writing is secondary. First, the author makes the video. HIMSELF.How radical is that. No publisher-produced videos in vooks. Right. The author makes his own video. Versus appearing in an empty bookstore. Because New York hasn't had a new idea in fifty years. The video content is and will always be advertising produced by a production company. Old media wins again. They will just buy everything in sight to keep themselves and all their elite, carnivorous paradigms alive. Book lovers will pave the way. Versus insisting there are alternatives to the insipid, blank writing that comes out of New York.What images that move (the blank screen is the past) will be the advertising. Again. It is the New York reader who gets what he deserves. A litany of best-seller lists. Signifying nothing. Which is what the blank screen theory is all about. Agents won't even look at work where the narrative has video incorporated into the book.And publishing is on the cutting edge again.But no one bleeds. The kind of writing the blank screen theory produces has no teeth. Only gums and we get gummed to death.New York wants change like it wants a lobotomy. The blank screen theory keeps the writer in his assigned place. I deeply resent it. I have never seen a blank screen or a blank piece of paper in my life.Perhaps I can't get published because I'm not blank enough.The process of publishing is a morbid funeral. Unless the writer sets out to break the temple rules and rituals. Book lovers adore rituals. The blank screen is the first one supposedly inherent to the process of making the books they love to love. Breaking the Blank Screen Rules? This is rare.There is a reason why book publishing is going down the tubes. The blank screen theory says it all.The books are blank. New York is in reality a vacuum. Publishing stinks like a corpse rots to bone.The blank screen theory so fits into the mythology book lovers insist is a landscape of construction versus a romance with the viability of the book.It's held up as a transcendence that supposedly exists between the true creativity of the writer and the reaching of his audience. Which he assumes loves him, loves him, loves him. Because that is the rhetoric he hears especially by such publications as this one.Your transcendence rising like an eagle from the blank screen to ART is doomed as well. One can only hope.When the day arrives that we can overthrow the entrenched royal power of New York publishing, and that day will arrive even if we have to nuke it, there will be no such thing as a blank anything because the vitality of the voices the current New York gatekeepers are so determined to keep out with their indifference and their typical arrogance, will finally be heard. We don't have blank screens and we don't have blank pages. The idea of them is patently absurd. It is offensive.What we have are torches and flames in your Economic Empire of Darkness and images that challenge the status quo of the blankness that comes out of New York like a putrid irrelevance. Publishing wishes our screens were blank. But our visions are never empty. And we're coming. We're going to burn your houses down.Lucian.Daemon@gmail.comThe idea of the book is a dead end. Writers with cameras has a future. Publishing will go down kicking and screaming and clinging to its blacklists. But the gatekeepers will bite the digital dust. Narrative will endure. However, its images are going to move. The agents and the editors will be utterly lost, and will greet change with the usual, mean-spirited indifference. But change is here to stay. The radical writer with a video camera redefines the book. Join us! http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=210147378670http://twitter.com/vook1http://www.facebook.com/people/Tim-Barrus/100000080077064?http://vook.tumblr.comhttp://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=210147378670Cinematheque Films: Arts Education: Students are allowed access to fair use art materials and mixed media in the teaching of iconic manipulation in photographic, video and film production. Representations and facsimiles posted here are presented as teaching tools and instruments employed to instruct students in the techniques and application of mixed media art and collage. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act allows art-teaching entities the fair use of such materials in classroom and teaching-research applications.

• Release Date

  Jan 24, 2010

• Runtime

  01:03