John Menick's Blog » Interviews

Melvin Moti in Art In America

John Menick — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 22:13:33 +0000

My feature on Melvin Moti appears in the the latest (June) issue of Art in America. You’ll have to go to the nearest newsstand to read it, but if AiA isn’t sold in your orbit, then this interview might keep you satisfied in the meantime.

Interview with Melvin Moti in Art in America

John Menick — Wed, 13 May 2009 16:38:33 +0000

I have a new interview with Melvin Moti published on Art in America’s website. From the intro: As film slips into obsolescence, it has increasingly found a home in the visual arts. By ‘film’ I don’t mean the general culture, but the actual thing: 8 through 70 millimeters, that slow, expensive medium wound in tight [...]

Interview with NYFA

John Menick — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 04:27:40 +0000

Last week, the New York Foundations for the Arts published an interview with me as part of their “Meet a NYFA Artist” series. (I was a video fellow last year.) Thought I might reproduce the interview here: Please tell us what are you working on and what’s coming up for you. There are usually several [...]

Three Questions for Shelly Silver

John Menick — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 04:35:04 +0000

© Shelly Silver. in complete world, 2008. Video still. Courtesy Shelly Silver John Menick: Rather than begin with photo or video, I wanted to bring up the third medium What I’m Looking For deals with: the Internet. More specifically, the video uses social networking sites in order to produce its narrative. Could you describe how [...]

Herzog in Antarctica

John Menick — Wed, 20 Dec 2006 15:32:55 +0000

“[The harshness of the place is] a perpetuated sort of image since the days of 1903 or 1910 or 1911, when Scott and Amundsen and Shackleton were out here,” he said. “Now you have got a cafeteria, you have got the barber shop and the TV station. You've got the ATM machine, so what else can you ask for?”

Another bunch of random links and quotes

John Menick — Wed, 20 Dec 2006 02:04:03 +0000

* "Shoot all scriptwriters," he wrote in his popular, long-running Village Voice column, "and we may yet have a rebirth of American cinema." * "The original plan for the film was that every shot would be digitally placed over archival footage. So that literally, the film would be "shot" in 1945 Berlin; the actors would be green-screened over archival. There was a scene in a butcher shop, for example, and I had to find every camera angle we needed in a butcher shop in 1945 Berlin. If there was a scene outdoors, a destroyed park or a zoo, I had to find those camera angles. There was interplay between the writing, directing, and archival research: what I could find that was in Paul Attanasio's script, and whatever else I found in my research that might work or that piqued Paul's interest, or Steven Soderbergh's... A colleague of mine in the art department, Joanna Bush, created an amazing database of all the footage I'd collected. It was organized based on the geography of Berlin. So that on Steven's computer, he could click on a map of Berlin and it would find all the archival footage that I had gotten on a particular plaza or a particular street or a particular location, and pull up all that archival footage and all the stills. Steven could know where he was situated in Berlin, and the art department could recreate a particular strasse. We'd know the ruins and we'd know how much that area was bombed out and all that." More... * "My first exposure to the subject came in a book by another medical anthropologist, Margaret Lock, whose Twice Dead (2002) is a brilliant comparative anthropology of Japanese and North American attitudes to brain-death as the criterion of death. Hence the title: a person is ‘once dead’ when technical criteria establish that the brain has stopped, while the body is still ticking over quietly on a ventilator; ‘twice dead’ when the heart is stopped and the organs harvested." * "What, he wondered, did we want to do? Did we want to eat, to drink, to fuck? Uh, dinner sounds cool." * And last, but not least, the Athanasius Kircher Society 2006

Video of Raoul Ruiz at the University of Aberdeen

John Menick — Mon, 27 Nov 2006 16:17:27 +0000

The lecture is from June, but I can't tell when the video was posted. It also looks like volume 2 of the Poetics of Cinema has been published in French.

Zizek in Sophie Fiennes documentary “The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema”

John Menick — Sun, 05 Nov 2006 23:47:09 +0000

Kenneth Anger Interviewed by Time Out London

John Menick — Wed, 25 Oct 2006 01:09:09 +0000

Here.

Interview with Yvane Chapuis from Les Laboratoires

John Menick — Wed, 04 Oct 2006 23:26:15 +0000

An interview with curator Yvane Chapuis about my short video, Occupation.