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Experimental Eliot Rausch

Birth Pangs

From influential filmmaker Eliot Rausch, an experimental video work that expresses apocalyptic dread.

Play
Experimental Eliot Rausch

Birth Pangs

From influential filmmaker Eliot Rausch, an experimental video work that expresses apocalyptic dread.

Birth Pangs

Directed By Eliot Rausch
Produced By Stink Films
Made In USA

What do artists owe to the current moment? We ask a lot of them in the best of times: to be our critics and our consciences, to serve as mirrors, but lead as prophets. At the same time we reject hubris, tasking them to know their place and be modest in their aims. Art must engage with the world around it, but heaven forbid that it be strident and straight-forward about it.

Yet an apocalyptic fever seems to once again have gripped the American public as fundamental cultural and political divides seem poised to rip apart the social fabric in twisted and dark ways. The magnitude of the collective pessimism feels wrong for half-measures. What is the role of an artist in the face of a moment this big?

For influential filmmaker Eliot Rausch, it is to take big swings. Birth Pangs is his response, a 13min highly experimental film that is freeform and impressionistic, yet remains admirably blunt and uncoded. Rausch dares to express his feelings on the enormity of our ills, asking in his director’s statement Are we at the end of the world, a last gasp of the collective ego, a human race finally confronting its demise?” He attempts no less than to contextualize the degradation of the individual in a globalized hypermedia society, while railing against commodification of just about everything sacred. It’s an angry screed, leavened only slightly at the end by an optimism in rebirth. 

It is, to me, a brave film—mostly in the sense that is sincere, and sincerity is easy to mock. Birth Pangs topic is too big, and the politics are too sophomoric. Its truths are not novel, and there is that conviction in the way they are presented that just riles up the jaded among us. It’s an eye-roller for sure, and a lot of you who press play are going to quit before it’s through.

Rausch has never been afraid of sincerity however, it’s been his calling card for one of the most interesting and unique online film careers of the decade. As an emerging videographer, Rausch struck viral gold with his tear-inducing documentary short Last Minutes with Odenwhich won the Grand Prize at the very first Vimeo Awards in 2010. The hits kept coming and the next 6 years saw Rausch collect more Staff Picks than any other director. His work has become highly influential visually, as he is a pioneer of the cinematic docu-style that now feels ubiquitous. But it is Rausch’s sincerity, his openness, and the ease in which he forges connections to his subjects, that has unlocked a career built on evoking emotion in audiences. This specific skill more than others has lead to a highly successful commercial career that includes award-winning ads for Samsung, Facebook, and Adidas, as well as a steady output of personal work that seeks to highlight marginalized communities. 

Birth Pangs has that same magic too, and you can feel it if you let it take hold. It requires patience—for me it came in the back half of the piece. I had to repress my cynical eye-rolling for a solid 6 minutes, and shake the feeling that I was listening to an undergrad with a bookbag full of Naomi Klein and Chomsky. Yet in the hands of a gifted image maker and storyteller, when the cacophony of images start to ramp up, the visceral rush of the dark mirror Rausch is holding begins to overwhelm the more patient and analytical brain. Rausch’s technique of of combining suggestive stagings of horrors, alongside found footage and quick interstitials of video-filtered clips, produces an angsty rhythm that keeps you unnerved. The quicker you can get to a place of passive reception the quicker, and deeper, the piece’s apocalyptic overtones will sink their claws into you. Rausch has made a career of evoking emotion, and the feeling of despair, of injustice, of overwhelm, that Birth Pangs inspires is truly perfect for these times.