CELEBS GO BOATING //|\\ CLBS BTNG
“The coat's price comes from its history, the history of all the people involved in making it and selling it and all the particular relationships they had. And if we buy the coat, we, too, form relationships with all those people, and yet we hide those relationships from our own awareness by pretending we live in a world where coats have no history but just fall down from heaven with prices marked inside. "I like this coat," we say, "It's not expensive," as if that were a fact about the coat and not the end of a story about all the people who made it and sold it.” —Wallace Shawn (The Fever)
Celebs Go Boating, in its simplest form, is my attempt to sedate an episode of reality television. Each shot from s6e1 of the show Celebs Go Dating has been replaced with one frame and held for the duration of the shot. 69496 frames were cut down to 1413 unique images. I took on this project because I thought it would be funny and distract me from more meaningful projects. It was something I could do with my hands, like knitting. As soon as I started cutting Celebs I called it, “the artistic equivalent of a spreadsheet.” This was the kind of work I was craving at the time.
Is there such a thing as meaningless work? I started cutting Celebs partially because I knew the final product would not be worth the time I spent working on it. I should have logged my days but I think I spent 45 hours editing these videos over the course of a month and a half. I did not believe this film would be very good, but I thought it might heal the original television episode. By removing the loud and explosive editing style, maybe I could enhance the shows watchability and draw some connections between experimental filmmaking and reality television. I questioned whether my work would be more important than the original show. I planned to write about lightness and weight: “Does making Celebs Go Dating into a film increase its weight by giving it an ending, locking it into place as a piece of art? Or have I made it lighter by removing 68083 unique frames from the original episode?“ Ultimately I thought the completed film was just as stupid, if not worse, than my starting point. I wasted my time on purpose.
While visiting London in late December I went to the real Celebrity Dating Agency. I was deeply unnerved by the experience. Maybe because the street was so quiet. I associated the location with the loud, bombastic and deeply annoying sounds of the original show. The “Celebrity Dating Agency” plaque was removed from the door. Had the show been cancelled? I didn’t bother to look it up. I was drawn to Celebs Go Dating because of its deep banality. It was built on the flimsiest definition of celebrity. I had no idea who any of its stars were. Why did I make a pilgrimage to its original shooting location? I was disturbed by the places this supposedly meaningless work had taken me.
CLBS BTNG brings back the intensity of the original show. Each shot from Celebs Go Boating is now just a single frame. The audio was sped up to match new runtime. I like this version a lot more. While editing it I kept thinking: “This is a tableau on modern life.” Which probably isn’t true—but it felt good to think it at the time. The existence of a CLBS BTING probably means the original experiment failed.
The credits are left intact in both versions, to pay tribute to the hundreds of people who put thousands of hours into a episode. I’m sure most of them didn’t care about Celebs Go Dating or even like the show. Mind you, they were (mostly) paid for their work and I wasn’t. But the hours spent on set, hours spent combing through hundreds of hours of footage, trying to form a coherent narrative out of it, mean significantly more than the time I spent looking for a decent shot, clicking “frame hold,” extending the shot and moving on to the next one.
“Light/darkness, fineness/coarseness, warmth/cold, being/non-being. One half of the opposition he called positive (light, fineness, warmth, being), the other negative. We might find this division into positive and negative poles childishly simple except for one difficulty: which one is positive, weight or lightness?” —Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being)