Sunday, June 7, 2015

Learn to Skate with NG


Learn to Skate follows a set path; a clear narrative, but at the same time is an attempt to subvert the narrative structure and even the documentary structure, if you want to take it further.
Whether or not Learn to Skate successfully subverts two very established structural pillars of film culture is not necessarily important, but hopefully it at least leaves a viewer wondering what the point was, and why they watched it, and what the pretty parts were supposed to mean. Documentaries, narratives, they do something, but they're not always much to do with a life. Learn to Skate is -- it's about disappointment, struggle, ephemerality, vapidness -- it has some of what's really going on in it.

"Technology moves towards the functionalist distinction and in that way transforms everything and transforms itself as well". De Certau is talking, to some extent, about the practice of writing in the passage -- writing as a self-containing technology, which separates increasingly from reality as it is practiced. Learn to Skate, if anything, is not separate from reality, despite my acting, despite the way people react to the camera. Everything in Learn to Skate really happened.

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