Owen Pallett: “Lewis Takes Off His Shirt” - Directed by M Blash
While I like his music enough, I wouldn’t say that I’m a big fan of Owen Pallett, but this M Blash character, who’s been directing his videos recently, is starting to grow on me. I forget when and where I stumbled across his work, but I will say that it didn’t have much of an impact on me at first. He’s not someone who makes films and videos that succeed because of high production values or clever editing - at least not in standard commercial terms. He is someone who’s able to use what tools he has to produce stories and images with unexpected beauty. He seems not to try and force “low budget” means to perform in typical high-budget ways, or to tell typical hollywood stories, but he makes images and tell stories that are best told using whatever means he has available.
I’m not saying that I think he’s consciously thinking “what story can I tell that will work with the tools and the locations and the people that I can access?” he just seems to have an innate sense for finding this balance. Add to this, the palpable spontaneity in his work, both in the shooting and in the editing (not to mention the very plain treatment of mystical themes and subtexts), and it makes sense that his work produces a strange and unsettling feeling that even the most cleverly conceived and “properly” executed films rarely touch.
In this interview with Aaron Rose (Alleged gallery founder, and “Beautiful Losers” curator), Blash talks a little bit about his process, and about a couple of his newer/lesser known projects (See the “Oh Pioneers” spot, and the Will Oldham footage. For someone who can spend hours upon hours perfecting a graphic or a poster, the thought of being able to conceive, shoot, and edit a video in the span of a few hours sounds extraordinarily liberating, regardless of how bent the truth of his process is.
