Medien Eating Fruits

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Eating Fruits (2004) describes a quite different gaze, one that penetrates into things, even if in a similarly disinterested and casual way.
In short takes, the video shows close-ups of fruit, melons, strawberries, cherries, grapes, peaches, grapefruit, apples and oranges, that all lie in the grass. All of the fruit have been cut open or bitten into. The soundtrack offers the noise of eating, such as someone biting into an apple, someone chewing the succulent flesh of a fruit or spitting out the pips. Now and again, a half-eaten grape or strawberry falls into the grass to join the other fruit. In some shots, you can discern ants eating away at a cantaloupe. The bold colors and the suggestive impact of the close-ups of the ripe fruit lend the video images the character of a Baroque still life.
The vanitas theme of enjoyment and decay typical of that style is strongly present. The sounds of chewing and spitting rob the still life of its solemnity, but at the same time intensify its sensory strength. What is decisive is that the camera does not rest calmly with the things, as the gaze does in painting, but rather the flow of pictures is defined by regular editing. The cuts and the sound of biting produce a unique rhythm in relationship to each other. Here it is as if the camera is the one eating, as if the joyfully fascinated gaze physically devours the object.
This consumption of things by the eye has a special character, in that the fruit are not actually "devoured by our gaze", but only bitten into and half eaten. The casualness of the camera’s gaze, which in Illuminated seemed to express a cautious restraint toward things, is transformed here into decadent negligence.
Biting into things becomes an allegory for a gaze that consumes the world but in the typically negligent way a consumer behaves, availing himself of everything on offer but not becoming enduringly interested in anything and not really concerning himself with anything, instead just tasting things, and, in the final instance, in so doing consuming everything there is.
At the end, nothing remains untouched, i.e., without being bitten into or looked at.

(Quelle: http://www.sunahchoi.com/index.php?/texts/jan-verwoert/)

Kategorien: Film und Video

Produktionsland

DE : Deutschland

Produktionsjahr

2004

Ton

mit Ton

Format

4:3

Farbe

Farbe
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