Jodie Mack viewing notes

Two Hundred Feet (2004)

I first heard of Jodie Mack in 2014 when Dusty Stacks of Mom: The Poster Project (2013) was making the festival rounds and generating a positive buzz on social media. I've yet to see that one, but last year I had the opportunity to see Wasteland no.1: Ardent Verdant (2017) and it was one of my favorites of 2017.

I hadn't realized that many of her earlier works are available for free on her website and her Vimeo page. What follows are some viewing notes on fifteen of her films that I watched while sitting in my hotel room in New London, Connecticut.

There is an exquisite pleasure in watching Mack's form and technique evolve over the course of these early shorts and experiments. Two-Hundred Feet (2003) plays like a Brakhage film if Brakhage were fun and bright. Her work with shapes and even scenarios emerging from a primordial slop of abstraction increases in its complexity from film to film. At other times, her early works recalls for me Pat O'Neill in the way they established patterns of shapes and movement that will increase steadily in their complexity as the film goes on. The sheer joy of creation on display makes each film a treat, even the ones that feel more like arts and crafts projects.

Posthaste Perennial Pattern

Of these works, the best are those that establish clear visible parameters in the material that they are working with. Rad Plaid (2010), Posthaste Perennial Pattern (2010), and Unsubscribe #1: Special Offer Inside (2010) all indicate a finite body of raw materials that the films then abstract through perspective, repetition, and montage, which function to create movement in what is essentially still photography. My favorite of these (and of everything I watched here) is Posthaste Perennial Pattern, which juxtaposes artificial nature, handmade floral patterns on furniture, with raw audio of an outdoor spring scenario: bird song and passing cars in the distance. It's abstraction is grounded in a diagetic personal experience. While all of Mack's films are reflections of her daily life in some manner, Posthaste Perennial Pattern exhibits this without description or artists statement and contains a depth (perhaps through the audio) that moves it away from a fun catalog of shapes.

Unsubscribe no.2: All Eyes on the Silver Screen 

I was also taken by the entire Unsubscribe series, which reveals Mack at her most confident and experimental of the works I viewed. #1: Special Offer Inside makes a sub-atomic universe from junk mail envelopes (it recalled a much later/lesser film that I watched last year, Where You Go, There We Are (2017) by Jesse McLean). Unsubscribe no.2: All Eyes on the Silver Screen (2010) utilizes a stunning use of split screen images composed through practical collage effects. Something about its color and old movie fascination reminded me of Peter Tscherkassky's great Coming Attractions (2010). Unsubscribe #3: Glitch Envy (2010) continues this work of manifesting digital new media representation through analogue materiality, creating glitches through collage art and guttural human sound effects. The fourth in the series, Unsubscribe No. 4: The Saddest Song in the World (2010) is more in tuned to her musical/music video type work and recalls the queer zine girl group fascinations of Sadie Benning's bedroom films. I hope these references do not diminish Mack's stature, I offer them only as my own means of navigating her versatile style.

Yard Work is Hard Work

As of this posting I feel I need to give Lilly (2007) another spin. It was intriguing, but this and Yard Work is Hard Work (2008) were the least interesting of the films I watched. Both were created between the early proto-Brakhage experiments and the absolute mastery of her 2010 output. Something about the use of narrative doesn't quite land. Yard Work is Hard Work is perhaps the only one of these fifteen works that I didn't care for at all. It's twenty-seven minute running time didn't help (compared to three and six minute shorts), but it was shaped by my dislike of the typical Broadway musical style. The collage work is impressive, as always, but I found the overall effect to be grating and basic.

I also watched A Joy (2005), All Stars (2006), Mannequis Harlequin (2006), Harlequin (2006/9), Screensaver (2009), and Twilight Spirit (2009).