Andreas Haugstrup Pedersen | solitude.dk

If you've been wondering what Richard BF has been up to the past many months the answer is here. Yesterday his latest project launched. It's an ongoing series of improv comedy of the brilliant understated kind. It's called Bonny & Clyde and it's a mockumentary where we follow two mastermind criminals (well, housebreakers) in their endeavours to become as famous as the historical Bonnie and Clyde.

Unlike many other fictional, comedy videoblogs this one is genuinely funny (the first episode, anyway!). I am curious to follow along to see where the improv takes the characters.

The production journal is fascinating for someone like me who've never thought about how improvised acting is done. They even promise eventual behind-the-scenes footage and with stories like the following it's bound to be good:

Apart from a fairly scary situation where we had a car with the two front people in balaclavas and the two back people (including myself) with bags over our heads, and the driver deciding to drive into a service (gas) station as a joke, the day went fairly well.

Oh, and Australian accents? Hot.

Tomorrow it will be 6 months since Richard clarified his view on photography and video. To mark the occasion I will post a quote by Roland Barthes from Rhetoric of the Image and pretend I have another 6 months to write a proper reply. Perhaps it's a red herring, a stalling technique. Hopefully it's food for thought.

[…] The type of consciousness the photograph involves is indeed truly unprecedented, since it establishes not a consciousness of the being-there of the thing (which any copy could provoke) but an awareness of its having-been-there. What we have is a new space-time category: spatial immediacy and temporal anteriority, the photograph being an illogical conjuction between the here-now and the there-then. It is thus at the level of this denoted message or message without code that the real unreality of the photograph can be fully understood: its unreality is that of the here-now, for the photograph is never experienced as illusion, is in no way a presence (claims as to the magical character of the photographic image must be deflated); its reality that of the having-been-there, for in every photograph there is always the stupefying evidence of this is how it was, giving us, by a precious miracle, a reality from which we are sheltered. […]

Yes, I had to look up stupefying. Next week: Why French authors prefer semi-colon over period and avoid commas altogether.

Richard BF just posted a blog entry called the definition of videoblogging. It's part summary, part exploration, part manifesto and completely worthwhile. I'm still not done discussion photography with Richard, but fortunately I agree with his take on videoblogging more than I agree with his take on photographs.

Be sure not to miss the video at the bottom of the blog post. Short, blue haired and unshaven; it's videoblogging incarnate.