Good, Bad and Ubiquitous

One of the shorts up for an Oscar this weekend is the French collective H5's award-winning Logorama, covered here a while back. As the trailer for the short careened across the blogosphere, opinions have differed on the video's critical agenda. Mark Webster, for example, offered a nice overview of the film on Motionographer in a piece titled "When Graphic Plays Beyond Narrative." He writes, "The film is not just a haphazard amalgamation of commercial symbols though. It is a carefully instigated scenario that took on challenging artistic as well as technical decisions." He goes on to describe Logorama as a "critique of our times," one that functions by transgressing "the graphic codes of our everyday experience, placing them within a completely different context and one that sufficiently sparks food for thought." Adrian Shaughnessy at Design Observer is suspicious of this reading though, noting in a reflective piece that the "intention of the filmmakers is unclear," in part because there is so much pleasure in the video. "It's almost as if they relish an homogenized realm of brand ubiquity." I agree with both comments - the film is carefully constructed, with sophisticated humor throughout, but it clearly revels in the visual cacophony of the branded city. The critique seems more subtle; the video is both homage and parody, and gleefully pictures the evilness of corporate power. The pleasure for viewers in seeing these corporate logos used to undo the very corporations they represent. It will be interesting to see how the Academy responds tomorrow night...