I looked on You Tube. It turns out that people HAVE done video remakes if Andy Warhol's idiotic movie, Empire. Warhol falsely claimed to have filmed a single shot of the Empire State Building for eight hours. In fact, much of the footage was repeated.
One person posted a clip that was five or ten minutes long which he claimed was part of an eight hour video. Which seems wise. Just film ten minutes of it and CLAIM it's part of a longer movie----nobody's going to watch the whole thing anyway. Unwatchability seemed to be the whole point of the original.
Much of art film is conceptual anyway. All you have to do is get the idea. But, before digital video, you couldn't do it unless you had a lot of money to throw away. Now anybody can do it. Is this a good or bad thing?
Ed Anger in the Weekly World News thought it was time to replace the Mona Lisa and the Sistine Chapel ceiling because Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo may have been good in their day, but anyone with a Polaroid camera could make a better likeness now.
I have to be careful not to degenerate into an Ed Anger. I'm all for art film. Now we need to figure out precisely what distinguishes digital video from film artistically and get the most out of this new medium.
Photography became a genuine art form when it stopped imitating painting, cinema became an art form when they stopped filming stage plays.
But I'm not sure there's that big a difference is between high definition digital video and film.
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