Chris Milk’s “The Wilderness Downtown” is an interactive play where your home and past are offered and yet remain out of reach. The film requires a few more steps before your viewing pleasure: if you don’t have Google Chrome or Safari as a browser, please download one of them to view this experimental and interactive film. And I would suggest, for this week, reading this commentary as an afterword. Let your experience of the interactive film come before mine.
Two weeks ago Numero Cinq Magazine‘s “At the Movies” presented Milk’s music video for the Gnarls Barkley song “Who’s Gonna Save My Soul.” But Milk also does experimental work. “The Wilderness Downtown” is an interactive music video Milk made with the band Arcade Fire for their song “We Used to Wait.” To begin you have to enter the address of your childhood home. The video then develops a montage using images of a hooded, faceless man running, a flock of birds, and images it pulls from Google Earth of your childhood home. The resulting film hangs in multiple windows, creating a hybrid montage / collage. Montage usually relies on one image following another and collage implies something static; here we have the collisions of montage happening side by side and the effect, I’d argue, shares the randomness of dream logic, a narrative choice that encourages us to be more associative than strictly interpretive, calling up our own memories rather than seeking to understand the artist’s intention.
