Textures of Voyage on the North Sea

I tend to focus on the readings rather than the films on my blog posts so today I decided to write about the short film Voyage on the North Sea. The first thing that struck me about the film is its use of texture as away to lure the spectator to keep watching. I tend to be drawn to texture and even use it in my phtography ( texture both in what is photographed and in the grain and dust of film). I found the texture in this film particularly interesting because as a conceptual film I'd imagine that the materiality of the medium itself to take a second place from the ideas that the film is trying to convey. Sure, the film's "ideas and concepts" may be exactly that, the textures and materiality of the media that it is filming, that of painting, photography and film itself. Even the frames with "nothing" on them look texturized as the reel moves forward, the first photographs of the sailboat have a texture of its own that is completely different from the texture of the painted sailboat. The close ups give us, even for a few seconds, the satisfaction of looking closely at the lines and ridges yet at the same time do not allow us to really feel them or inspect them closely; the image changes a few seconds later. The canvas is closely filmed and photographed, we know it is a canvas because it's images are contrasted against that of the painting. Maybe this is the montage effect. Painting is photographed and therefore becomes it; the photograph is undistinguished from the painting. As Krauss says, the unspecificity of the photograph, the fact that it can be about anything an be stripped from meaning allows it to do this, to take on the characteristics and meanings of other mediums.