Boringness

A popular sentiment about the content of my work is that the vast majority of my footage must be painstakingly boring, by virtue of it being an uninterrupted, rather lengthy recording of observed reality. This is usually made clear in conjunction with some sympathy for my having to spend some time sifting through the assumed boringness for hidden nuggets of the profoundly interesting. But if reality were really boring enough to elicit comment, why do the majority of people manage to continue living within it while only occasionally voicing dissent? Only the most restless, overstimulated addict will yell to all those willing to listen "this is so boring!" while going about their daily routine - most will either remain quietly content in their disinterest or physically apply themselves to the given task in such a way as to find something within it conducive to amusement.

I have observed similar reactions to the screening of my work. Some took active interest in individual components, others remained passively uninvolved - but boredom was, as far as I could tell, a minority sentiment. Putting aside the mild conceit implied in holding this assumption, it is also not as if I actively engendered entertainment in the editing process, by only selecting snippets of unusual or abnormal activity and stringing them together in a sort of artificial composite. Quite the contrary, many of the more popular (not necessarily in a positive sense) scenes were those one would assume to be deafeningly boring, mundane-in-the-extreme colloquialisms of dredged lived experience. An extended shot of Sean fastidiously (perhaps even anally) eliminating evidence of spilled coffee elicited comment from no less than three separate people watching it, judgemental tones akimbo. What does this say about how we watch and what we want to watch? Certainly it's a rejection of the Hollywood ethos of manipulation through stimulation, or at least a counter to it. I assume identification has something to say about its effect, although while we may use identification to navigate a video work, subconsciously it operates in an entirely different manner, and not one I feel competent enough to analyse in detail.