Dallas-based video artist Paul Slocum's experimental work "You're Not My Father" loops a dramatic moment from "Full House" and includes several other actors' interpretations of the scene, creating a haunting cross-section of the scene's formal properties. With a gently hypnotic soundtrack, it isolates the stilted, generic nature of a sitcom performances and somehow gives it depth and even poignancy.

The video has a strangely beautiful rhythm, which comes from the precision of various amateur performers copying a stereotypical confrontation between Joey (Dave Coulier) and DJ (Candance Cameron). Slocum spent years going through submissions from various people and narrowing down his options. The project was completed thanks to funding from New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc. for Networked Music Review, and it screened at numerous locations (including Anthology Film Archives, New York's haven for avant-garde cinema) before catching the attention of influential bloggers and steadily gaining attention on the web. In a series of e-mail exchanges with Stream, Slocum discussed his intentions and the reception the short film has received.





Were you a "Full House" fan when the show was on the air?

I watched it, but not regularly enough to call myself a fan. I probably watched it more in reruns.


Do you think the Internet offers a good venue for avant-garde filmmaking?

In some cases. It's interesting when something like this becomes lightly viral and is exposed to a massive number of people who are not art (or) film nerds. To some extent the piece became another iteration of what it was about. This viral thing has happened to other artists I know too. But then again, I'm not sure how well Stan Brakhage would do on the Internet.

How has the web suited the needs of your specific project?

Since my work is usually about the Internet, it's more like my projects suit the needs of the Internet.

How many views has the video received? Did it take time to get noticed?

Because I got a commission for the piece, it isn't hosted on my site so I'm not sure exactly. Somebody grabbed the Quicktime and uploaded it to youtube, and that video has 19,000 views. I think the ones that really got it going were (videogame writer) Jeff Gerstmann, The Onion A/V club, Fark, and this USA Today blog. It took a little while to get noticed. It was launched in January and was just posted on Fark a week ago.

My friend found this in the Onion A/V club comments, and it's my favorite user comment so far:

"I WAS HOPING FOR SOME SORT OF TWIST ENDING...
by Grico
Sadly I was disappointed. If M. Night Shyamalan had done this I would not have been disappointed in this way."


Have you made any money from the project?

Not yet, but it looks like I will be selling an edition of the video from a show I have right now in New York. I received a commission to do the project but all of that was spent making it.

What's your next project?

Among other things, I'm working on making a DVD from scratch. It's a DVD made with no video or DVD authoring software, with the MPEG2 and DVD spec files generated from the ground up. I'm not sure how feasible it is since the DVD spec is so complicated, but I'm currently disassembling a DVD using a hex editor to understand more about how it works.


Who are your colleagues? Are there other filmmakers doing work similar to yours that you'd care to single out?

I've been working a lot with Kevin Bewersdorf lately. Other artists doing similar work to this project that I'll mention are John Michael Boling, Guthrie Lonergan, Cory Arcangel. But most of the people that I know and work with aren't normally associated with the film world since we also do a lot of other kinds of artwork -- except for Kevin who does quite a bit of film-related work.

This is only the second "live action" video work I've made. Most of the other stuff I've done is more closely related to hacking/computers, the Internet, or music.

How do you choose to interpret "You're Not My Father"? Does it achieve your original intentions?

I don't like to give too much of my own interpretations of my stuff because I feel like when people come up with their own personal interpretations, they're usually better than anything I'd say about it. It's influenced by composers Steve Reich and Alvin Lucier. And it's maybe a bit of a farewell to a previous generation of pop art as it becomes less relevant today. I'm happy with how it turned out.

Has anyone involved with the original production of "Full House" seen it?

Not that I'm aware of. I'd like to know what Dave Coulier has to say about it.