All The Mistakes I've Made

All The Mistakes I've Made is the common title of a pair of distinct performance/lecture pieces conceived and performed by Canadian video artist Daniel Cockburn.

All The Mistakes I've Made
Still image from the multimedia performance (a screenshot from Peewee's Big Adventure)
ArtistDaniel Cockburn
Year2009
TypePerformance art, anti-art
SubjectMistakes in films, film criticism
LocationBerlin, Toronto, Utrecht, etc.

All The Mistakes I've Made
Every film I've ever made seemed like a good idea at the time.

Daniel Cockburn, All The Mistakes I've Made performance in Berlin[1]

I promise to try to be sincere, and to be -- for the most part -- forthcoming about the ways in which I fail to be sincere. It will perhaps be shown that my regrets constitute a parallel body of work... It could be described as a live version of one of my videos -- in which case it is possible that the presentation will make all the same mistakes the videos have.

Daniel Cockburn, statement issued in advance of All The Mistakes I've Made performance in Berlin[2]

Content

Daniel Cockburn revisits some of his early short films and "walks the audience through the pros and cons of being a visual artist."[1] Examples include a karaoke-style revamp of Rocket Man and an overlooked element due to his having taken shots in his bedroom, the latter of which he ascribes to laziness.[3] Besides mistakes made while making films, Cockburn also confesses to misunderstanding the works of other filmmakers, and discusses works by Andrei Tarkovsky and Tim Burton.[2]

Background and concept

During an artist's residency in 2009 in Berlin,[4] Daniel Cockburn developed an anti-artist talk,[5][6] also called a "lecture-performance" about his professional mistakes as an artist: technical, aesthetic, and ideological.[7] "The art world is bursting with events where artists present an anthology of the highlights of their career to a slightly bored audience."[5] Cockburn decided to turn this idea on its head, examining to what extent his own inability to properly judge might be representative of a "negative trend" in contemporary art and cinema, supporting this argument with excerpts from his own work, and that of artists like Andrei Tarkovsky and Tim Burton.[5]

Cockburn gave an interview in Osnabrück ahead of a performance there in 2012, saying that during the programme he was half himself and half artificial persona, that it all begins quite personally but ends apocalyptically.[3]

Performances

Cockburn performed All The Mistakes I've Made from 2009 to 2013,[8] touring internationally.[4] In Osnabrück, it was advertised in German as Alle meine Fehler.[3]

On at least one occasion, he playfully retitled the performance a few minutes in, to Some of the Mistakes I've Made.[9]

Reception

Cockburn's lecture-perforamnce is described as "funny, quirky, and insightfully self-deprecating",[1] and "both playful and profound, personal and wide-reaching in its meditation on creative misguidance."[7]

All The Mistakes I've Made (Part 2)
All The Mistakes I've Made (Part 2)
Poster
ArtistDaniel Cockburn
Year2015
TypePerformance art
SubjectMistakes in films; film criticism
LocationUtrecht, Toronto, Manchester, etc.
Preceded byAll The Mistakes I've Made

Content

Cockburn begins with a look at 1990s horror movies (two 1994 films in particular, John Carpenter's In the Mouth of Madness and Wes Craven's New Nightmare), "by way of illuminating both the redemptive and destructive powers of storytelling."[10] He then takes the audience on an autobiographical journey "full of film references, over-interpretation and paranoia."[11] Cockburn also argues against finding fault with continuity errors, as he says in an essay derived from the performance:

We never would have noticed, if you hadn't pointed it out to us. IMDB users of the world: does it make you feel good to find mistakes in a world's construction? ... Film is joinery. That's what it is, what it does. So there's no point in getting indignant or superior when the joins aren't in line with what you think they ought to be.[12]

Background and concept

Sometimes also featuring a subtitle (How Not To Watch a Film) or alternate title (How Not to Watch a Movie and even How To Not Watch a Movie), Cockburn's similarly-titled and -themed performance is not, despite the titular suggestion, strictly a sequel to All The Mistakes I've Made, but rather a spiritual successor to the original performance, "an independent, stand-alone work."[13]

Reception

Like his "exuberantly cerebral, filmically deconstructionist" work in film and video, the performance defies easy categorization, located at an intersection of filmmaking, criticism, academia, performance art, and personal confession.[10] And, like the original performance, Cockburn's multimedia presentation has been met with "much acclaim."[14] Calum Marsh calls it "part scholarly monologue, part real-time essay film, and part solo theatre":

A bit like Spalding Gray with PowerPoint. All the Mistakes I've Made (Part 2) is about the cinema, and it is smart and amusing. Better still is its curt punch line, provided by none other than Paul Schrader — a sight gag worth the price of admission.[15]

gollark: What does the ”””cabinet””” do?
gollark: Troubling!
gollark: Please swap your votes such that winning may occur.
gollark: > you need to vote for both a primary minister and a secondary minister
gollark: This is acceptable.

References
  1. "Daniel Cockburn at SAW Video July 19–20". Cinemablographer. Retrieved 12 July 2020.
  2. Cockburn, Daniel. "Originalfassung #69: Daniel Cockburn". generalpublic.de. Retrieved 7 November 2019.
  3. Benedict, Daniel (20 April 2012). "Daniel Cockburn: „Alle meine Fehler"". Osnabrücker Zeitung (in German). Retrieved 14 July 2020. Das Problem ist: Ich bin in meinem Vortrag halb ich selbst und halb eine Kunstfigur. Es geht sehr persönlich los und endet apokalyptisch.
  4. Martinson, Erik (2017). "Jenna Sutela, Daniel Cockburn, Frank Heath: Nice night for a walk" (press release). erik-martinson.com. p. 2. Retrieved 4 October 2019.
  5. "Daniel Cockburn: Presentation "All the mistakes I've made"". Impakt. Retrieved 6 November 2019.
  6. "Reflexion und Einfühlung". kaistrasse10.de. Arthena Foundation. Retrieved 28 July 2020.
  7. "All The Mistakes I've Made". Pleasure Dome. Retrieved 6 November 2019.
  8. "Atom Egoyan - 2015 Lifetime Artistic Achievement (Film)". ggpaa.ca. Retrieved 13 July 2020.
  9. "All The Mistakes I've Made". YouTube. Retrieved 12 July 2020.
  10. "Screening & Live Event All the Mistakes I've Made (Part 2)". Museum of the Moving Image. Retrieved 13 July 2020.
  11. Turner, Matthew. "FilmFear: six days of horror film previews and cult classics this Halloween at HOME". I Love Manchester. Retrieved 24 November 2019.
  12. Cockburn, Daniel (9 August 2017). "Continuity Errors: An Appreciation". TIFF - The Review. Retrieved 6 November 2019.
  13. "How Not to Watch a Movie (or, All the Mistakes I've Made, part 2)". homemcr.org. Retrieved 6 November 2019.
  14. "Event Impakt Event with Daniel Cockburn: All the Mistakes I've Made pt 2". emare.eu. European Media Artists in Residence Exchange. Retrieved 6 November 2019.
  15. Marsh, Calum (4 January 2018). "In Astoria, the First Look Festival Makes Heroes Out of Unsung Film Artists". The Village Voice. Retrieved 6 November 2019.
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