Artist Post-David Ellsworth

For my artist lecture, I wanted to do my post on David Ellsworth and his video work that was displayed to us in class. I wanted to go outside of the traditional artist lectures that are given on campus and focus on a more prominent artist that we are surrounded by each day. A little bit of background information, Dave Ellsworth lived in New York for some time before moving down here to Maryland. He worked as a film and TV editor at Broadway Video, Inc., which he says wasn’t the best job but it helped him learn the business. Working primarily with super 8 films, Dave says that Susan Sontag and her writings heavily influenced him. Although I’ve read many Sontag writings before, specifically On Photography, I always found it hard to understand and connect to, so it was interesting to hear that such a philosophical and theoretical writer influenced him.
One of the first videos that Dave showed us was a music video he had done for a band called tortoise. The video shot in 1998 incorporated a lot of repetition of images and it was all set to the rhythm of the music. One specific thing that I remember about this video is the humanoid feel that was presented to such manmade objects. I think a lot of this had to do with the pace of the video and how it seemed choppy and stop animation like. The second film that we were able to watch was a sort of documentary of a junkyard with moving machines and its general daily life occurring. Being about 20 minutes long really allowed me to see how much footage has to be edited down to create such a long movie. It makes me wonder about longer films and how people create 3 plus hours of footage. Being in the junkyard felt really machine like, not only because of the giant machines moving around but because of the sound. There was no real dialogue in the entire film except for when a worker starts to give a quick, short demand to another co-worker. All of the other sounds are the grinding and scraping of machines against metal, which can be a bit disjointing. I had never seen a short film like this before and I thought that it worked really well with the subject matter that was being recorded. Something like this isn’t too interesting to normally view, but in this context it seemed to become a way of life for everyone and everything around there. Later in the discussion David explained to us that this area is heavily involved with steel and other metal and the steel mill life in general. It really makes you see the area for what it is and how rarely we see areas like this.
One interesting fact about his work is that for the second movie we watched, he only used one mic and one camera. He had to move the shotgun mic around the area to capture the sounds from each direction, which allows for some footage to be pretty muted and other footage to be really loud. Also, he told us that to get into this area, he simply emailed the company and asked it he could do some footage. Surprisingly the company said yes as long as he wore the protective gear (hardhat.) This is a reminder of how if you simply ask someone if you can produce artwork from or out of his or her place, how easy that can actually happen. Overall, I think that Dave’s work is extremely interesting. I’ve never experienced film like this before and it really gave me inspiration to finally start experimenting with my own film. Being a photographer, I find it really interesting to see the movement behind all of the still prints that occur within life, and it seems like video is the one medium that can help capture it.


From his film Time, and the River.