This is a video for “Dayvan Cowboy” by Boards of Canada. It recontextualizes found footage of the 1960 “space jump” undertaken by Joseph Kittinger as part of USAF “Project Excelsior.” I don’t know what it means, and the whole transition to surfing is a bit much, but I do know it makes for great music video.
How far can a poetic interpretation be taken before it lacks the expected gravitas of “proper” documentary?
Hey Graham
I think the music video works well (and the surfing adds a definite silliness factor that suggests the group doesn’t take themselves too seriously). BUT I agree with you about the risk of appropriating and de-contextualizing documentary content for mere “visual poetry.” I once attended a not-dissimilar electronic-music show on queen street where the DJ projected de-conextualized images from the NFB’s Hinterland’s Who’s Who series, reducing the images to lighthearted kitsch — although for most of us, I guess that’s what they are.
On another note, it has also always bugged me ever so slightly that Boards of Canada, a Scottish group, were appropriating the name of a venerable Canadian institution because of a vaguely sentimental, possibly misinformed, recollection of old NFB films in the Grierson-McLaren tradition. This seems to be part of a wider tendency among some outsiders towards the fetishization of Canada as a land that confers a quality of sensitivity on those who choose to associate with us. Kinda like the way Of Montreal (a fabulous group, musically speaking) are from somewhere down in Georgia.
However, it is entirely possibly that I am projecting…
I actually think this is an incredibly compelling music video, surfing included, and feel it somehow challenges high/low culture distinctions informing documentary practice and reception.
I would love to watch the totality of the original footage because there is something undeniably sublime about the idea of going through with such a plan. The strength of the video, obviously in combination with the accomplished musical stylings of BOC, is the poetic concision with which the intangible ecstasy of the space jump is expressed. It’s a moment of instant revelation, of translating the truth of what that document represents into a single phrase.
I’ve always found the name of the band a bit perplexing, and assumed it was a misguided play on an imagined sense of redundancy. But I don’t buy that. Canada’s got cache.