Money and Power
(2010)
makers: Ned Considine, Roland Hoffmann and Glenn Patton.
No credit sequence, no link from the screen, and so a thoroughly anonymous work. Archival footage, good to see, but no credits for this. An interface that sort of wants and tries to be a visual tower, reflecting the critique the work wants to think it is about, but it tends to make the work more strident than it needs to be, which is exacerbated by the textual descriptors that lie either side of the main video window. Here a lot I think could be gained by making your argument not by yelling (which is in effect what this combination of things does) but by showing and persuading - after all yelling is as dogmatic and monocultural as the consumerism that the project wants to critique. The intent of the work is interesting, and different to many of the other projects produced, looking outwards to a politics, idealist and naive in equal measure. However, what underwrites, or weaves its way through here, is more a sense of angry young men than documentary, argument, or truth claims. Think about letting the clips breathe more, letting the thumbnails do their thing but not so that they compete with everything else, and think about the design and presentation of a work as having a rhythm, a flow, so that some bits need to be louder than other, and some bits can say just as much, if not more, if they are quieter. This means where they are on screen, and how large, lets you build an expectation and experience, because at the moment "Money and Power" is much like WRITING LIKE THIS ALL THE TIME AND NOT REALISING THAT IT IS YELLING AND BECAUSE IT IS ALL YELLING ALL THE EMPHASIS YOU THINK YOU ARE CREATING IS lost AMONGST THE NOISE.