On Leighton Pierce’s “He Likes To Cut Down Trees”
October 20, 2009
Leighton Pierce was introduced to me in my experimental media class. We were being shown examples of different sort of rule based film experiments that follow strict guidelines devoid of creative influence. One such piece was Pierce’s, “He Likes to Cut Down Trees”, which follows a man cutting down a tree over time from one side of the tree, around to the other in a full circle. It was intended to be edited in camera, however, it ended up being edited into a sort of rhythmic style, with some repeats of shots. What I liked is that he started initially with the goal of making a film devoid of personal feelings or intentions, to be completely left up to the mechanical structure which leaves the meaning of the film up to chance. This gave the film strict parameters, however, he eventually broke them. His decision to increase editing towards the end of the film worked, because, it seems that he is influenced by the structure of film and was developing new meanings out of the structure which would go onto influence his editing, which i found to get increasingly violent towards the end.
Leighton Pierce has other work, that he works on until this day. Another work of his entitle “Number One” is a beautiful abstract piece which juxtaposes nature alongside movement and sound. It’s beautiful in its visual structure and in that the motion on the screen sort of goes against each other the screens different frames. It seems to be almost about nature, from the perspective of something very close to nature, as there is little commentary on it, it just seems very natural.
