At this point it's been seven years, reworking the first two minutes, and a few things later on.  I think again at least for now I've solved the biggest problems I was having.

The point was always to move from overtly formal to 'formless'. After about seven minutes it's the straight footage in the order it was shot, recording my decisions, without color manipulation or correction. But I didn't wait for things to happen. I pushed record when I saw something interesting and pushed stop when I got bored with it.

Early on when I had someone else do the color work I realized he'd darkened a shot to hide the fact that someone was looking at the camera. But I realized that I'd used it on purpose.  I was cutting the first section for comedy; it made me laugh but I hadn't thought about why. The footage is full of them and I'd telegraphed them all. I was making something theatrical and also voyeuristic, as street photography is, making art out of people's lives and their annoyance is the counterpoint, the world looking back, the gaze photojournalism ignores. If I didn't have actors at least I could give the strangers I photographed without permission the chance to say fuck you. And they do.

Art is a lie, but Baudelaire was right to say that good art acknowledges both object and subject, "the world external to the artist and the artist himself."

Two, or three, very different forms of artifice, artificiality. The change as the music changes between the second and third section is clear enough. And the last two sections may get boring. That's ok.

And since I'm putting it up again I might as well repost this as well. The two films, videos whatever you want to call them, that I've completed, more or less, in the past ten years