In 1961, then FCC chairman Newton Minow described the state of American television preogramming as "A vast wasteland." One can only speculate as to what he would think of it today.

Christopher Westfall's experimental short subject is comprised entirely of sounds and images recorded off of cable TV. It is a disturbing statement as to the material that Americans consider to be entertainment.

Warning - may contain spoilers

The inspiration for this piece came somewhat obliquely. I was watching the evening news, and as part of a story on non-lethal weaponry they showed a boxing mannequin being pelted by projectiles that knocked it back and forth. I found the image captivating. At the time I was able to record video from my Tivo onto my digital camcorder and import it into iMovie on my iMac. I was in the practice of doing this to save off clips and shows in iTunes to sync to my iPad for keepers to watch later like on an airplane or something.

I captured the clip of the boxing mannequin just because I found it to be visually alluring. It was only a couple seconds long. After mesmerizing myself with it for a bit I decided to play around and see if I could do anything with it. I slowed the clip down, made a copy of it, reversed it, and pasted it on the end of the original. I copied this back & forth pair and pasted it multiple times to form a repeating loop. I grabbed some audio from whatever else I happened to have on the Tivo at the time, just cherry picking things that sounded provocative. I pasted the audio clips over the looped video and wound up with a one minute and forty-seven second experimental video that I titled "Skin Shot."

It was a fun exercise, and I was happy with the result, but it was really nothing special. However after I watched it back a few times I began to think that I could do more with the concept. The provocative nature of the audio clips that I selected was effective. Just a handful of clips taken out of context and thoughtfully sequenced created a sketch of a disquieting narrative that grabbed the viewer's attention on an emotional level. I thought that if I used more video clips, many more, and juxtaposed them with a variety of audio clips, that I could create something with greater artistic merit.

I started accumulating a collection of clips. When I was just watching whatever I happened to be watching, if I saw something that looked like it might be useful, I saved it off to my iMac. I had the advantage of eclectic and offbeat tastes in what I watched on TV, so there was a rather wide variety to choose from. But it was a laborious process. Each and every time I saw something, I had to pause the Tivo, turn on the camcorder, record the clip, wake up the iMac, open the iMovie software, and import from the camcorder. This went on month after month as I built up an extensive compilation. When I got to the point that I was pushing the boundaries of this early, somewhat unstable version of the iMovie software, and when I was honestly fed up with not having been able to watch much of anything in peace on and off literally for years, I finally capped it off and set out to make something out of the raw materials that I had collected.

At first I had no idea of how to approach the final product. I had such a huge number of clips covering such a wide variety of subject matter that I just didn't know where to start. I began by solidifying the concept. Much of what I had recorded was disturbing, and yet it was all from vanilla broadcast programming. It made me think of how television had long been characterized by critics as "a vast wasteland." I decided to use that as the title of the piece, and leverage shock value as the overall aesthetic.

I categorized the clips broadly into drug culture; sexual desire, vanity, and perversion; geo-political strife; and death. After an introductory segment to grab the viewer's attention, I segued from one category to the next, attempting to imply how one fed into the other. I mixed and matched the images and the audio, sometimes keeping them together, and other times switching them up to create contrast or synthesize a concept from disparate sources. I used the boxing mannequin footage to bookend the piece, adding the haunting audio in places to indicate to the viewer that we were circling back to where they had been before. It was a hugely laborious process. I thought about how digital editing made it feasible at all. The whole endeavor would have been next to impossible with traditional analogue editing techniques, which were uncompromisingly linear by nature.

When it was all done I thought it came together really well. I wrote up a description that summed up the "wasteland" nature of the message I was trying to convey, even quoting 1961 FCC Chairman Winton Minow who originally coined the phrase. I got it all packaged up and sent it off to MIX. Having enjoyed a 100% acceptance rate up to this point I assumed I was a shoe-in. Unfortunately that was not the case. They rejected it. They didn't give a reason. They never do. I didn't really understand this at the time, but the truth of the matter is that it's not so much a rejection as it is the absence of acceptance. That is to say that if no one on the screening committee picks it up, then it doesn't get accepted. It just happened to be that this video didn't resonate with anyone on the committee, or at least not enough people for it to get placed into a program.

I would later get accustomed to my submissions not being accepted, but this first one really stung. For starters it was just the surprise of it. Each and every video I had submitted to MIX up to this point had been accepted. I had garnered a fan base at the festival who would tell me how excited they were to see that year's production. It had become a foregone conclusion that I would screen every year. This project had taken more effort than anything I had produced before by a factor of 100. I considered it to be very strong thematically and as a composition. I thought it was right up their alley, focusing on media and making a critical statement on the nature of mainstream programming content. What made it all worse was that the timing really sucked. I was just about to embark upon a personal adventure (mid-life crisis?), and bringing my new love interest from our home base in Palm Springs to attend the screening in New York City was going to kick off the epic in style. It was a real let down. And I had no way of knowing it at the time, but it wound up being the start of a creative drought for me that would last for years.

Postscript

After the video Wasteland being on YouTube for many years, they suddenly removed it for its "violent or graphic content." I guess they didn't get the memo that this was all recorded off cable TV, and the whole point of the piece is that this manner of violent and graphic content is considered to be acceptable for American viewing audiences.