To this day we have raped the movie camera and forced it to copy the work of our eye. And the better the copy, the better the shot was considered. As of today; we will unshackle the camera and will make it work in the opposite direction further from copying. Out with the weaknesses of the human eye.

ABOUT the only "weaknesses of the human eye" that filmmakers have altered in the last 50 years are those they've corrected with technology-sophisticated lenses, filters, and film stock. Nobody (at all) has made any farther inroads against the realist cine-spectacle, since Vertov, on the level of challenging cinematic Illusions of illusions, mystifying reproductions of the already mystified surfaces of "reality," (Godard has only recently begun to struggle on this front.) Slickness aside, the film industry still continues to bring us the same instant replays of real or imagined events, somehow oblivious to all the movements against literal representation that have already occurred in other art forms. Worse still than this aesthetic consequence is the political one: not only do these films record our life-processes; they also process our lives. Guy Debord says: "The spectacle is not a collection of images but a social relation among people mediated by images."

In his first feature film-to be shown publicly for the first time tonight-Kevin Burke attacks the authoritarian cinema and seeks a new relation between people and their images by sustaining a consciousness of filmmaking as just another life-process. Available Light restates the problem posed by Vertov in new language, exploiting a melange of sophisticated techniques-surfaces of incredible richness and variety (shot by Ralph Thanhauser), lighting of immaculate control-in order to demystify their manipulations and to dramatize their limitations in creating recreating livable meaning. From the very first image-a Mobil Oil sign, the ultimate plastic and reified object-documentary "reality" overlaps with a manipulated fiction, and uncertainty governs our reaction to the determination of every fact: an ambiguous dialectic threatens the conception of our own credibility as a fixed value. The filmmaker explains that his original project was a Mobil commercial (a few establishing shots ) but unquestioned appearances don't add much to understanding. So instead he decided to invent a 79-minute dramatic structure for analyzing images themselves.

WHICH IS: a fictional film about a young photographer about whom a fictional film is being made. This conception is close to-although more advanced than-the form-within-a-form principle of David Holzman's Diary, the quasi-existential journal of a filmmaker who tries "to make sense" out of his life by collecting private everyday images (and sounds) which, we discover in the final credits, are really just made-up banalities (as opposed to "real" banalities), scripted, acted, shot, and directed by Jim McBride and several other people. Available Light, by contrast, reiterates the factual relativism of every image, explicitly calling attention to the manipulative process going on, forcing us to constantly redefine our relation to the screen. Are events staged or accidental? Scripted or "real life"? And how significant is the difference, given that we see them as celluloid anyway, slowed down, cut up, and re-assembled on the editing table? Whereas McBride's self-revelation is a final emotional statement of futility, Burke's self-conscious (yet ambiguous) narrative frame invites analysis-in fact demands it-of what the images actually succeed (and fail) in telling us.

Available Light puts emphasis on the exploitative nature of photography, which isn't a new idea exactly, but which serves an interesting function in the film's formal structure. On the narrative level we are told that financial pressures forced the filmmakers to sell a particular sequence of the photographer and his girlfriend (Tom and Amy) as a White Rain Shampoo commercial. The film process itself exploits light, of course, and Burke emphasizes the fact by cutting between various means of exploitation-black and white, color, video, red darkroom light, silhouette effects-all of which deliberately modify objective surfaces for various ends. The obvious effect of these conflicting images is to encourage a careful scrutiny of the ends for which films are manipulated. A hysterically banal aesthetic argument from Vincente Minelli's 1956 B-movie, Lust For Life (shot off TV via video tape and transferred to film), represents the Nixon-Paramount form of exploitation within Available Light. Speaking to the point of images questioned, Anthony Quian (Gauguin!) answers Kirk Douglas (Van Gogh), "I paint it flat, 'cause I see it that way," the Hollywood realist-humanist rationale for manipulation. For the more conscious elements of image-makers, the rationale is of course more problematic. "I don't know how to see you," Tom says to Amy, manipulating.

The story-line concerns the way the filming overlaps (and interferes) with their lives. Burke maintains a strict flatness of characterization (for better thematic manipulation) with actors who play to the camera rather than to each other and remain generally inexpressive (for avoiding existential schmaltz) in dramatic situations. Strangely, however, he chooses to resolve the conflicts the film has built up theoretically, on this, the fictional level, with a lovers' quarrel over the public exploitation of images. This limited (and counter-productive) issue of personal privacy dominates the last part of the film, neglecting political answers to the problems of how images should be manipulated and how thoughts, feelings, human relationships assume visible forms. But of course almost everybody else has avoided them too, and Available Light remains an exciting re-posing of the questions.