A Program of Short Experimental Film By Caroline Koebel

The December of 1997 in Japan an episode of thePokemon anime featured a scene that depicted a huge explosion using flashing red and blue lights, causing 685 of the viewing children to be sent to the hospital for seizures. Mary Hart syndrome is the name of a medical condition suffered by a woman who was afflicted with seizures caused by the voice of Mary Hart on Entertainment Tonight. During several of Caroline Koebel's films I expected to see people falling into the aisles and convulsing. She seems to employ images repeated over and over, strobed onto the screen interminably. My own reaction was nausea and a desire to leave.
Koebel's program included The Vent:Camilla, images of a woman stabbing and slicing a knife into the air over and over again, Daddyson: The Dummy Whose people Bought the Presidency, Puss! The Booted Cat, All The House (The Haditha massacre), I Want To have Your Baby, Sunroof (Benazir Bhutto assassination), Inflorescentia, and repeat photography and The Albedo Effect. In All the House much of the time was spent showing red and blue horizontal lines moving in rhythm to The Marine Corp Hymn played on bagpipes. Repeat Photography and The Albedo Effect featured boxing scenes from Scorcese's Raging Bull repeated again and again.

Before Koebel appeared to answer questions I thought she must be a very angry and dissatisfied person, but as she answered questions she didn't seem terribly unhappy. Several times she spoke of placing disparate elements in her films to connect with other meanings, but just as some of the disparate elements didn't connect she could not connect her own thoughts to her product and explain why she placed certain elements together. She just said, "I don't remember." It made me think she just threw things together without reason.

I think I was alone in the audience in thinking this was a waste of time. Most of the questioners acted like they got it, they really understood what her work was about. And, she lavished the audience with long answers using an impressive vocabulary, but, in my opinion, not many real thoughts. In fact as she spoke I imagined my own cartoon with thought bubbles above her head that only contained the words "Blah, blah, blah."

Now that I have disparaged her work Caroline Koebel will probably turn out to be a successful and highly respected artist, but upon seeing her work I can only think of what a great salesman once told me a long time ago. "If you can't dazzle 'em with brilliance, baffle 'em with bullshit."