Bas Jan Ader

There was a beautiful humanity to his silent films. Falling... is something that is highly metaphoric. The videos revealed this giving into the force of gravity. Since he made the conscious choice to fall on purpose, it was this willingness to fall into the strongest natural force we know. His piece, "too sad to tell you" I don't actually remember if that was the exact title, but the placement of that piece within these pieces about falling... it altered the metaphor from the force of gravity to the more common metaphor of emotional collapse and took the conflict to the internal. I think that was something beautiful about the piece. There was a clear metaphor, both external and internal and both conflicts were represented in each other. Like... the internal conflict was shown through the external and the external conflict was shown internally, so they just built off each other. Yeah?
The thing I really enjoyed about Bas Jan Ader was the discussion he stimulated in the classroom about the necessity of an audience and what it means to perform and be performative. There was this blatant honesty in his work... but... it was a performance, and we knew it was a performance... and it was filmed... which takes us away from the performance even one more layer... I DON'T EVEN--