Story Without End (and Three Other Films) (review)

Music videos for mash-ups are rarely as enjoyable as the audio originals—the pleasure of the sound collage is the simultaneity of clashing spaces, where visual montage makes us choose between one space or another through sequence. The Web is awash in video cut-ups today; giddy editors take advantage of bountiful source material in online archives, easy desktop editing software, and mostly free distribution through video.google or youtube.com. Surrealist film technique is the stuff of late-night television comedy, as each day's presidential speeches are cut up and re-arranged for comedic effect.

This explosion of montage only highlights the differences between sound collage and video pastiche. Multi-track recorders, turntables, samplers, and sequencers give us densities no film editor could dream of. Yet sometimes film collage carries a more obviously political impact: visual juxtapositions seem to jar more directly.

Into this dynamic steps the singular art of People Like Us. At the controls is artist Vicki Bennett, a masterful and prolific sound-collagist whose works in video have been recently released by the Sonic Arts Network on DVD. Where traditional montage makes us choose between one cut or another, Ms. Bennett's meticulous work relies on compositing, masks, and mattes to create a visual simultaneity every bit as dense as what we hear in her music.

Through four works, completed between 2002 and 2005, Ms. Bennett has extracted various subjects from their backgrounds, and backgrounds from their contexts. Recombined, these artifacts occasionally grow synchronous with sound, but always stand out in contrast to each other. As in some of the more jarring mash-ups one might encounter on Ms. Bennett's radio shows for WFMU, the seams are far from hidden. A boy sets a toy house down upon a giant circuit board; later, we see him again laying out his little town on a pump-kin patch.

Opacities and edges blur to give way to various cohabiting characters: a man peers into a screen to reveal another composited world, even as he's oblivious to the third one above him, or the beetles crawling over the screen on yet a fourth layer. Narrators stand above it all, promising all sorts of things to come. Ms. Bennett introduces each new element as she would a new loop in her sonic compositions, and lets us hold it all in our head for a moment (or sometimes far longer—she loves repetition) before moving on to something else. It's a happy marriage of pastiche in sound and video that helps demonstrate the musicality of vision—the work is more Dziga Vertov than Sergei Eisenstein.

All of this makes Story Without End a welcome and rare addition to the lively world of the cut-up. Ms. Bennett's films offer much more than this, however. After all, as the narrator of The Remote Controller tells us, "mixing is so simple, a child could do it."

Directing the artist's deft and patient hand at the mouse is a very specific sort of curiosity, and a particular approach to human creation and action. These films are the result of countless hours of sifting through the archives of various digital and physical collections. Specifically named in the credits are the collections of Rick Prelinger at The Internet Archive (www.archive.org), Skip Elsheimer's avgeeks.com, and London's Lux collection of avant-garde film. Except for some footage of Ms. Bennett's own screen desktop in We Edit Life, none of her source material appears to be self-generated. She even borrows from herself, recycling audio or video from old works in new.

The result is a very specific kind of collection. Though individual elements within a frame are composited to remain estranged from one another, the ingredients add up to a whole that's from a particular...