Phil Patiris, Modern Television, 992 Valencia St. San Francisco, CA 94110 $25.00 (American) for home use only $80.00 for public performance.
Phil Patiris came to Toronto last February to partipate in a panel and screening of his film, The Iraqi Campaign at the National Film Board. He also visited my media class and in , a hastily planned session, talked to a small group of Toronto media teachers. These events were all a resounding success.
Phil is a genial, San Francisco video artist with a wry sense of humour; it is easy to see that his dominant artisitic inclination favours the satiric. A tape maniac, he has a huge collection of videos. He knows that favourite TV series, the Miss America pageants and the superbowl half time are bound to turn up something interesting, from arresting images of American ideology and military hegemony to revelations of women's roles in the 1990s. Enter the Persian Gulf War and by the end of that six week mini series, Phil was armed with a hundreds of hours of tapes to be edited and his Amiga toaster by his side to do his graphics.
The Iraqi Campaign is a brilliant 17 minute pop culture collage mixing actual footage of the war with TV commericials, and shots from old films and TV series such as Lawrence of Arabia, 1984 and Dallas.
This showdown in the gulf, a "network storm" as Patiris subtitles it, is both hilarious and chilling. The Gulf war ended happily for the Americans and the video gives the audience a surreal, post-modern, televisual experience of the events, a pop culture ground in against which the players in the war are placed . The desert sands become a sight of struggle for meaning through excerpts from Dune ,the motion picture, car commercials (a new Nissan races sensuously over some dunes); Lawrence of Arabia in which Peter O'Toole lights a match followed by a Preparation-H commercial – "Hemeroid flareup." It starts with an itch...juxtaposed with an American soldier exclaiming that the sand reminds him of west Texas. This is just one among several patterns that emerge in this brilliant work. The video's fast pace, razzamataz, busy graphics( CBS prefaced all its coverage with the same introductory montage of tanks and soldiers moving across the screen), correlate with the chauvinistic outbursts from citizens comments on the return of the troops and President Bush's acknowledgement of applause from the congress. The mood and structure of video is so characteristic of mainstream television that we have become used to, that is only on reflection that we can see where Patiris is heading with his material.
When Whitney Houston begins to sing her stirring version of the Stars and Stripes at Superbowl 92, we hear dubbed over screams of babies. It is in scenes like this that Patiris takes us beyond the slap stick and comic to the darker, uncomfortable regions of Swiftian satire. We may not like it but it may be that only through using television's intertextuality will we be able to see what this media hyped military exercise was really all about. Most media teachers have a short film or video which they know will guarantee to provoke a strong response from a teacher group or a class of students. In the last two years, The Iraqi Campaign wins hands down.