Mike La Burt – Great Negator

Mike La Burt’s mind is unlike other minds. Like the sword of Alexander the Great, it is happy only when cutting through the Gordian knots of logic, belief, philosophy, religion, science and all other, so-called “human” values. Instead of a sword, La Burt uses a camera, and little is exempt from its gaze. After watching one of his films, viewers may be left wondering what they have just seen. They would be fools to try and figure it out.

If he wasn’t making movies, La Burt would probably be a psychopathic personality; as it is he is merely dangerous. In the context of his still-evolving film style (which is neither documentary nor fiction), it’s easy to believe that La Burt (as his character in The Last Man on Earth claims) is indeed the beginning of a new species. La Burt seems inspired by the perversity and delight (as well as the despair) of being a self-created, self-destroying phenomenon. His gift is a chaotic imagination informed by a searing intellect, all wrapped up with a sense of self-importance so grandiose it can only realize itself, finally, as self-satire. What apparently drives La Burt is an unquenchable thirst for new experience, new perceptions: making digital video—specifically the quasi-documentary format he has more or less invented—ideal to suit his purposes.

La Burt’s filmmaking is obviously an exploration of his own troubled psyche for which the final work seems to be no more (but also no less) than a by-product. La Burt’s aim is to create fictional scenarios in the process of living and to make a documentary record of his experiences/experiments. In other words, he does it for his own amusement. In a sense, his work is anthropological, except that he is dealing with values that don’t pertain to the human—much less social—realm at all, but to that of consciousness itself. La Burt’s negation of human values is part of a greater, undeclared affirmation, however: by negating beliefs, he affirms his own right (obligation?) to fill that void. He affirms the existence of a frame of reference in which neither belief nor self (much less self-belief) are needed or even possible. What appears to be a negation is then revealed as merely a question, albeit one few people ever dare to ask.

To say that “God is dead” is really to ask what we mean by “God.” It is a challenge for God to show himself or to move over and be supplanted.
Whatever his game (and at times he seems less interested in making films than in setting a new precedent and daring others to follow it), La Burt is in a great tradition of revolutionary thinkers who seek God through their own navels and who turn themselves inside out in order to get past the limitations of skin and “self.”
Beyond his obsessive bid for self-transformation, La Burt’s quest necessarily includes an exploration of the medium itself, an attempt to push it beyond its apparent limits, and see what film is really capable of. Despite using an apparently documentary style, La Burt is attempting to use the camera not merely to record events but to create them, as if the act of filming was itself enough to transform reality. Another way of saying this would be to say that La Burt exploits the camera’s largely untapped capacity to reveal the hidden nature of things—both of the psyche and the environment—rather like a scientist uses a microscope or an X-ray. Of course, it’s inevitable that to some extent the camera will alter reality by filming it. But the next step which La Burt is trying to take is to turn this into a conscious, interactive process and not merely a passive one.

Perception shapes experience, experience shapes perception, and all we experience is the act of perception itself. In which case, watching a movie is as real (or as unreal) as any other experience: it is merely a more indirect way of experiencing (whatever has been filmed). In both film and direct experience, events occur not externally but in the mind (and eye) of the perceiver. The art of filmmaking—documentary or otherwise—is to discover the means by which we come to grips with our perceptive capacities and tap a hidden power of consciousness to shape reality. What has until now been an unconscious process can then become a conscious one.
La Burt rejects the contrivances of fiction film, of scripted, “directed,” and acted scenes. But he also rejects the looser form of documentary in which the camera is merely an observer. Instead, he seeks to map the area between the two, not merely towards a fusion of the forms but to create a new form, a new methodology. His goal is to free up the fiction film and bring it into the realm of reality, while at the same time tapping the dramatic content of so-called “reality” and revealing it as fiction: “myth.” As a director, he isn’t interested in getting actors to play ordinary people but in guiding ordinary people to the realization that we are all actors, caught in a mythic drama beyond the scope of everyday awareness. Almost as an afterthought, he invites the audience along for the ride (i.e., serves the experiment up as a finished film).

La Burt apparently doesn’t have time for the tired old philosophical questions such as “What is real?” He asks rather, “What does it matter what is real, if reality is whatever we can get away?”

The question then becomes, not “What is reality?”—much less “What is cinema?”—but “What do we dare to make of it?”

Jake Horsley, 2008

The Creatures from the Outer Space A MLB short