Nice to METT You (Pleasure’s All Mine) from Jin on Vimeo.
I love working with found video – to my brain that’s closer to the way I photograph than generating my own video would be. There’s a variety of approaches on similar subject matter that I think I’d be incapable of generating on my own, with my single lonely head, and I’m not sure I ever want to deal with the complex lighting and physical camera support issues that video demands a solution for. But I love editing. There’s something about the meticulousness of syncing image and sound, of cadence and micro changes in duration of clips that is satisfying to no end. No really – to no end.
This weekend, I finished the first video that I’m fairly happy with. For the record, my favorite bit has to be the audio on happiness and, more trivially, the fact that the sound for that parting shot is actually the slowed down audio replay of a slap in the face. It’s rough, but even if this little piece isn’t an end in itself, it makes me want to gather up more material and make more, which is exciting.
For the record, the title’s not a misspelling. METT is Paul Ekman’s Micro Expression Training Tool, which is a package of video and interactive tests aimed at law and order professionals interested in more effective interrogation through the ability to read suspects’ and interviewees’ faces. I found the professional voice-over and the slo-mo replays of basic expressions in the training videos fascinating in an almost surreal way, especially when contrasted with the almost imperceptible blinks of the actual fleeting expressions in the practice sections. I’m tempted to post one of the full videos, but that’s probably not fair use, considering this is a commercial product. (Is putting it into an art video even fair use?)
Last Friday, the Mehserle sentence came down and the protests were in the local news. It worked itself into the video. I’m not sure at this point I can be any more articulate about what it’s “about” (let’s be clear – it’s by no means “about” Oscar Grant), but it’s a stew arising out of:
- the ugly and mildly scary efficacy of detecting and projecting emotions in the context of interrogation
- how emotionally charged the name Oscar Grant has become in Oakland
- the ambiguity of intention in such a fatal encounter, even when seen and recorded (murky cellphone footage, but nonetheless a man being shot from afar, so avoid if you’re unwilling to watch such things) by many witnesses.
- all the details we can see in slow motion that are completely lost at fast or even normal speed
- the ambiguity of non-linguistic communication, especially for say, autistics (I was reading Gladwell’s Blink at the time, which was how I learned about Ekman in the first place.)
and last but not least,
- the cheesy, almost self-help marketing of the METT tool, which involves a test that earns you a janky digital certificate (I’m an “expert”!). The FACS manual – an encyclopedia of the most subtle and minute expressions – seems much more interesting…
Part of my fascination with Ekman is that he seems to be at once a heavyweight in his field in terms of his FACS work yet also one of those popsci experts frequently seen on TV. In fact, Tim Roth’s character in fun if scientifically unsound show Lie to Me seems based on him. It took me a while before I made the connection between the two names, and I only did because, I confess I’m a mild fan of Roth and the show.
I can’t be the only one who finds all of this hugely compelling. It’s like data collection meets Gladwellian popular science meets race and politics (METT is very explicitly multi-ethnic). Meticulous categorization of facial expressions turns into a vague idea of expert lie detection bandied about on national primetime TV as it’s also being researched earnestly in labs. A few weeks ago, having to pick up an unassigned shot, I ended up listening to the better part of a panel on fMRI testing as lie detection. Turns out there are court cases where lawyers are attempting to enter such tests into evidence. The experts assembled (Anthony Wagner on the science side and David Faigman on the law side) roundly dismissed the validity of such tests (there’s almost no way to distinguish brain activity associated with lying from activity associated with memory tasks or being witness to a memorable event, especially one with a clear ethical tint), but lie detection seems to be attractive enough of an idea that services like No Lie MRI (seriously) already exist. Pay to get documentation of your truthful brain! Or, if the results aren’t to your liking, they will destroy all results and any record that you engaged their services. Good lord.
Guess this is a good argument for going to lots of events and following your random interests. Eventually they all end up tied in one knot. When it rains, it pours?
