Brandon’s movie memory

Gymnopedies (1965, Larry Jordan)
An egg floats around on different backdrops interacting with various objects, all cut-out animation a la Gilliam or Borowczyk, set to calm piano music. Feels more like a proof of concept than anything else - if there was a narrative present, I didn’t catch it. Cute, though.

Lipstick (1999, Pascal Aubier)
Single 6-minute shot beginning under a bed, unsubtitled. Family is getting ready to leave for a trip, the mother is briefly visited by her lover who comes in through the window. Aubier was assistant director on some French New Wave classics in the 60’s, now an actor and a director of (mostly) comic shorts. Liked this a lot (and not only because of the naked dancing), will have to check out more of his stuff.

Ark (2007, Grzegorz Jonkajtys)
Iffy-looking 3D animation tells apocalyptic story with a twist ending. Our guy wasn’t really the lead scientist onboard an ark of the last surviving humans searching the oceans for new land, just a crazy old man in a convalescent home. Ha! Bah.

Happy-End (1996, Peter Tscherkassky)
Found footage of a couple sitting down for dinner, toasting the camera, drinking… and drinking and drinking! Dancing, drinking, sitting, more drinking. Different days, different clothes, edited together, eventually with scenes superimposed atop each other, a haunted distortion of a French pop song as the soundtrack.

Two Solutions To One Problem (1975, Abbas Kiarostami)
Very short with narrator, two kids get in a fight over a torn book. We tally the damages then rewind, and instead of starting a fight, they help repair the book and remain friends. Nice.

Blah Blah Blah (2006, Dietmar Brehm)
Liquor bottles. Close-ups of objects with strong textures, overexposed porno, an action film in extreme-fast-forward, long pause on an ashtray, back to the liquor bottles, etc. Audio is a quietly rainy/windy day with a metronome hit every three seconds. Looks like old 8mm or 16mm color with some monochrome sections. Pretty alright, probably better in a theater surrounded by like-minded shorts instead of following up a cute Kiarostami piece.

A Girl, She is 100% (1983, Naoto Yamakawa)
Wow, that wasn’t very good at all. They must’ve thought it’d be the simplest Haruki Murakami story to film. Straightforward, with some good still photography and some bad acting by our IMDB-unknown hero, closing with some rockin’ 80’s music.

Foutaisies (1989, Jean-Pierre Jeunet)
Young Dominique Pinon with 80’s hair tells us about the things he likes and does not like. Very Amelie-feeling, with Delicatessen opening titles (and Deli’s lead actress).

The Hitman (2001, Ruben Fleischer)
Mary Lynn Rajskub decides to be a hitman, but her first mark (Paul F. Tompkins) decides not to go through with it and asks her out instead. Just your typical indie comedy short. From the director of Girls Guitar Club, whose film career didn’t take off, I guess.

What Is That (2001, Run Wrake)
Buncha funny animated business involving insects and meat and ringing sounds. Cute, but only three minutes long and pretty inconsequential… not up to Rabbit level. Guess it’s an early work.

Film Noir (2005, Osbert Parker)
Awesome, very short. Like Fast Film but slower. Some After-Effects-lookin’ animation combined with models and lots of cutouts - not trying to tell a story, just cool visuals/mood. Ahhh, the internet reveals that it was all created in-camera - impressive!

Banquize (2005, Claude Barras)
Boyer’s French Dictionary: “banquize - heap of floating ice frozen together in close masses.” Might be called Banquise, actually. Simple animation, fat kid wears his snow clothes in summer, dreams of living on banquize and playing with penguins. One day trying to hitchhike there he drops dead from heat/dehydration. Hmm.

Herakles (1962, Werner Herzog)
Herzog’s very first film, six years before his first feature. This was really good, and not like anything else I’ve seen by WH. Pretty simple structure so I’ll let wikipedia take it below.

The film relates to six of the twelve labours of Heracles. The film starts with shots of young male bodybuilders working out in a gym, posing on a stage and flexing their muscles. Each of the labours are then announced by on-screen text in the form of a question, followed by related scenes of modern challenges intercut with the bodybuilders. The audio track of the film is saxophone jazz and sounds from a gym.

The question “Will he clean the Augean stables?” is followed by scenes of a garbage dump, “Will he kill the Lernaean Hydra?” is followed by a huge line of stopped traffic on a motorway and people walking around outside their cars, “Will he tame the Mares of Diomedes?” is followed by scenes of car racing and several race crashes including a crash into the spectators and shots of the subsequent disaster and piles of bodies, “Will he defeat the Amazonians?” is followed by scores of young women marching in uniform, “Will he conquer the giants?” is followed by shots of rubble of a destroyed apartment building and men in uniform searching the wreckage, “Will he resist the Stymphalian birds?” is followed by jets flying in formation, shooting missiles and dropping bombs on training targets. The last shot of the film is of a bodybuilder’s buttocks as he goes off the stage through the stage curtains.

Matta (1985, Chris Marker)
“What I am showing here is no exhibition. It is an appeal: Come and play with me! It’s a very lively game, but nothing happens.” Simple interview with Chilean artist Matta (not surprisingly an Allende supporter), an original member of the surrealist group, talking coherently about his art and all art, human beings, dimension and meaning. Would be nice to get/make a transcript. Would be even nicer to have been able to see the Matta paintings that Marker frames him against, but my video was too low-quality to make out much visual detail.

Experimental shorts program at the Nashville Film Festival. Below in italics I’ve quoted their online program notes for each film and added my thoughts in regular text. Unfortunately my memory is very bad and I was neither taking notes nor concentrating on remembering details during the screening, just getting lost in the films, so my thoughts might be wrong or meaningless. I will say it was a cool program, a little saggy in the middle/end but mostly high-quality work, very enjoyable. Most of these were on video, but not the first few I don’t think.

Olivo Barbieri’s Sevilla (06) (Italy 2006,13 min.) is a tale about the perception of Europe in Africa…from the vantage point of an airplane.

Deceptive to call it a “tale” since it’s non-narrative. Also I thought it was from a helicopter - there are helicopter noises on the soundtrack (along with harsh electronic sounds coinciding with some edits, mostly near the beginning and end). I struggled throughout this one to tell if it was out-of-focus, if my eyes had gone funny, or if it’s just supposed to look that way. Didn’t know what city I was ever in, assumed Sevilla, Spain. Whether caused by the focus effect or not, it looked very much like models, a giant, detailed model city, until I’d see traffic moving. Think I liked it, anyway a nice way to start the program. I still remember the percussive music, but I bet I won’t the next time I read this. How to describe music?

Combining live action, stop-frame animation and a kinetic sculpture, Harrachov (Matt Hulse, Joost van Veen, Netherlands 2006, 10 min.) explores the effect of an arcane force that, like a black hole or an immensely powerful electromagnet, exerts a far-reaching and irresistible power upon certain objects and materials, willfully seducing, centralizing and internalizing them.

Junk moves across uninhabited ground towards a sinister shed, pulled by unseen strings, magnets, animated by stop-motion or simply tossed and rolled. Very cool movie, black and white, really brought to life by the great sound effects. We never see the final assembled creation, unless it was obscured in darkness or I blinked and missed it, but it’s shown on the website:

In The Drift (Kelly Sears, USA 2008,9 min.), a mysterious disappearance on a space journey gone awry launches the counter-cultural revolution at the end of the 1960s.

Not quite slow-zooms on still 1960’s photos, because slight motion is added to the “photos”. This one had a story and a voiceover, unusual for the program, and the woman next to me whispered “was that experimental?” From the director’s website statement: “The Drift uses frame-by-frame techniques to weave an absurd fable about our country’s unflinching frontierism and the desire to push too far, too fast. Images dug out of thrift store bookshelves and flea market bins are animated to create an alternate take on what really happened behind the face of ground control, the space program, and the American psyche.” A cool little movie about a contagious space-disease, certainly better than The Astronaut’s Wife. The drift theory would probably answer some of Werner Herzog’s questions about the inhabitants of Antarctica.

Sera Sera (John Murphy, USA 2007, 3 min.) sets atomic-bomb-testing footage to a reggae-ized version to hypnotic effect.

Director was in attendance but I had to haul ass to Phantom Love (which it turns out was cancelled, so I could’ve stayed, sorry Mr. Murphy, and sorry also for not being able to remember your film clearly but I do recall that it was short and felt like a good music video and that’s not an insult because I like a good music video). Come to think of it, the music was a trippy “que sera sera” remix. Wait, it’s coming back to me, 60’s footage treated with Tscherkasskian film-off-the-rails effects.

With water imagery as the foundation, Number One (Leighton Pierce, USA 2006,11 min.) engages the experience of elasticity between varying states of mind.

A flowing, sometimes symmetrical composition with a sliver of image in the center, and mirrored or continuous images on the left and right. And sometimes it’s something else entirely. Put me in a happy mood. Can be bought in digital form from the iTunes store.

Dig (Robert Todd, USA 2007, 3 min.) is a constricted frame in agitation, with the sweet music of jackhammers raging throughout - with intermission.

Haha, Mr. Todd, the “sweet music of jackhammers,” I get it. A desperately irritating movie about the annoyance of road construction. Actually, it’s pretty cool visually, rapid-rapid-fire shots of painted road markings spinning and sliding - would watch it again with the sound turned off. This is when people started walking out, about 3-4 per film from now until the end.

Kip Masker (Maria Petschnig, Austria 2007, 3 min.) disguises body parts in altered pieces of clothing to create semi-abstract compositions that defamiliarize the human form.

J. Schaffer says: “Soft, strained breathing accompanies the picture, intermixed with the occasional crackling of latex. From the start, I am faced with the task of disentangling the compositions magnified on screen: a hole purposely cut into a white bra with a shoulder muscle swelling over the seams? A white supporter for a packer (a silicone penis), worn the other way around?” And so on. I actually got and appreciated the intention of this film, a rarity for me. People next to me didn’t like it one bit.

The Green Bag/Documentary Happens (Tim Sharp, Austria 2007, 7 min.) is a single take, real-time documentary shot from the terrace of the Circle Hotel restaurant in Gondor, Ethiopia. While it allows a brief look at the density and multiplicity of everyday interactions taking place around the camera, the film also stimulates questions related to defining the essence of what documentary film is as a cultural artifact.

I was mesmerized by a green plastic bag blowing in the wind… dancing with me. Just kidding, I was actually bored to tears by this dull documentary by Wes Bentley, errr Tim Sharp. It stimulated questions like “when will it end?” and “how many more people will walk out?” Movie had a stunt ending: the appearance of a different-colored plastic bag. A different bag! Reminded me very much of Hidden In Plain Sight. Apparently there’s a new trend in filming stuff nobody cares about and calling it an experimental documentary. Paging Andy Warhol…

With super high-speed cinematography, reminiscent of adored science education films from our childhood, gun fetishization is taken to a surrealist extreme in Kogel Vogel (Frederico Campanale, Netherlands 2006, 6 min.).

Gun shoots bullet through glass in super-slo-mo - whoosh! Liked it, but not much there besides art-i-fying those mentioned education films.

In Ariana Gerstein’s 96 (USA 2007, 7 min.), the space between being 90 and 6 is always shifting in this moving picture portrait.

Something about photographs and a little girl? I don’t remember! I think the sensual overload of the next film acted as a memory-blanker.

Daddy I’m Scared (Tijmen Hauer, Netherlands 2006, 4 min.) is an iconoclastic video piece consisting of thirteen different children’s cartoons layered on top of one another, transforming their innocent qualities to an aggressive and mesmerizing inferno of image and sound.

Almost interesting, but the clips don’t seem to be meaningfully combined, just thrown atop each other to form a red-tinted fiery Disney nightmare. I recognized Aladdin by sound and Hunchback by visual. It was short at least.

In Light Is Waiting (Michael Robinson, USA 2007, 11 min.), a very special episode of television’s Full House devours itself from the inside out, excavating a hypnotic nightmare of a culture lost at sea.

The one I’d been looking forward to (and the reason I didn’t wander away unhappily during the green plastic bag doc) didn’t quite live up to expectations. Funnier as described to me than to actually watch. Excerpt of a Full House ep (which Katy remembers) where they drop a TV from a great height turns into SCREAMING BLINKING PAIN turns into a mirrored, folding-in-upon-itself color-tinted noisy nightmare, an extreme slow-mo excerpt from a different episode on some fantasy island (which Katy also remembers). Good move equating Full House with shrieking hell, but not actually much fun to watch. I want some Peter Tscherkassky, please.

NAFF says: “We celebrate their 45th birthday with this meticulously-chosen collection selected and introduced by Canyon Cinema’s executive director Dominic Angerame.” I don’t know what it means to be meticulously chosen. I mean, I assume Dominic is well familiar with Canyon’s films and he might’ve agonized over the selection, wondering how best to artistically and effectively represent his company’s holdings. Anyway, it was a very good selection, but NAFF could’ve been more meticulous with the presentation, misthreading one film which caused delays during which half the audience left early. But let’s face it, half the audience always leaves early during avant-garde film presentations. On with the descriptions… italic text is quoted from NAFF’s descriptions, regular text is from me.

Alone. Life Wastes Andy Hardy (Martin Arnold, Austria 1998, 15 min.), where Arnold remixes several clips of a Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland Andy Hardy film to form an erotic Oedipal musical.

I talked briefly about this one here and here. Seeing again on a giant screen in a nice theater with a packed audience was rewarding. Lots of laughter when people caught onto the oedipal/sexual jokes. Brilliant movie and concept - still one of my favorites.

Autumn Leaves (Donna Cameron, USA 1994, 6 min.), where the splendor and pleasures of autumn are the focus of this richly textured and brilliantly colored paper emulsion film.

I don’t remember it! I know I liked it - I liked all of these, but I do not remember in what specific ways I liked it. A shame, possibly.

China Girls (Michelle Silva, USA 2006, 3 min.), a short composition of women posing for skin tone and color slates used in film leaders that reveal some skin and the aesthetics of their day through film stocks and fashions.

Didn’t love this one, actually - all slates and countdowns and blips and test patterns. I see that stuff at work all day. I mean, yeah they were vintage test patterns with subliminal shots of women with carefully-maintained hairdos. A minute longer might’ve been too much, but this was harmless, probably of interest to someone else.

Delicacies of Molten Horror Synapse (Stan Brakhage, USA 1991, 10 min.), where four superimposed rolls of hand-painted and bi-packed television negative imagery are edited so as to approximate the hypnagogic process whereby the optic nerves resist grotesque infusions of luminescent light.

I mentioned this one previously here. Silent and gorgeous. Audience didn’t rustle around or yawn loudly or start to leave - they liked it too! Some of the multi-layered visuals are television images, and given the “molten horror” title you’d expect something like Light Is Waiting, but thankfully that’s not what you get.

Eaux D’Artifice (Kenneth Anger, USA 1953, 12 min.). Filmed in the gardens of the Villa D’Este in Tivoli, Italy, and accompanied by the music of Vivaldi, Camilla Salvatore plays hide and seek in a baroque night-time labyrinth of staircases, fountains, gargoyles, and balustrades.

Covered this one here. Light through water!

Ellipses (Frédé Devaux, France 1999, 6 min.), where a ripped strip of film is sewed back together following an aesthetic mode, in a celebratory end-of-century apocalypse of positive, negative, super-8, regular-8, black and white, color, saturated and faded found footage.

Oh god, I don’t remember this one either!

Georgetown Loop (Ken Jacobs, USA 1997, 11 min.), a reworking of 1905 footage of a train trip through the Colorado Rockies, where the original image is mirrored side by side to produce a stunning widescreen kaleidoscope effect.

Opens with the original film (discussed here) on the right half of a wide screen, kind of unnerving, then gloriously mirrors it onto the left. Images don’t overlap over themselves like in Light Is Waiting, but vanish into the center line, expanding and contracting, the train’s always-curving motion making it constantly split and merge. But it’s kind of an easy trick, doesn’t seem worth being called a great film, or even very “experimental.” I’m guessing they wanted to show something by big-name artist Jacobs and this was his shortest film?

In Kaleidoscope and Colour Flight (Len Lye, 1935/1938, 8 min.), Len Lye, pioneer kinetic artist, sculptor and experimental filmmaker, painted colorful designs onto celluloid, matching them to dance music.

Zowie wow, these are electric. They start out all hoppin’ jazz, colors and shapes and stripes and light and love, all in fast motion to the beat, then about three minutes in when you least expect it, they hit you with a cigarette ad. More, please!

Psalm III: Night of the Meek (Philip S. Solomon, USA 2002, 23 min.), a meditation on the twentieth century at closing time. Psalm III is a kindertotenlied in black and silver on a night of gods and monsters…

I guess it’s scenes from other films turned grey and treated with a heavy emboss filter. Often no recognizable details, then they’ll emerge suddenly from the murk. We see some nazi imagery at one point, pretty sure I saw Frankenstein a few times, and little Elsie’s balloon from M caught in the power lines. Longish, but nice, enjoyed it. Can’t remember the audio at all.

Wonderful 16mm screening at Emory, but not well-received by the students and regulars who came to be entertained. Silly students and regulars, it is not a university’s job to entertain you!

Scorpio Rising - 1964, Kenneth Anger
Couldn’t remember if I’d seen this before, but of course I have… opening credits bedazzled onto a motorcycle jacket were immediately familiar. Despite the nazi imagery and comparisons between bikers headed for a gay orgy and Jesus and his disciples, I heard no complaints. I think people enjoyed the juxtapositions (well-prepared presenter Andy warned us about ‘em in advance) and grooved on the hot 60’s rock radio score (kept hearing “oh I love this song” from behind me).

Lemon - 1969, Hollis Frampton
Lovely film, second time I’ve seen it. Should be shown every year. Only comment overheard: “I don’t know about the second movie. Just a lemon.” Mostly people were quiet about this one. I choose to believe that they were awed into silence, contemplating its light play and imagining possible deeper meanings, and not quietly wondering what they needed to pick up at the grocery store. A movie can feel much longer or shorter than it is. Lemon is supposed to be seven or eight minutes long, but I say it feels like four, five tops.

Zorns Lemma - 1970, Hollis Frampton
(no apostrophe, in tribute to James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake)
Okay, this one feels its length… its exact length, measured second by second.
1) Black screen, voice reads us some children’s poetry, each line beginning with a successive letter of the Roman alphabet (so I=J and U=V) to make 24.
2) The meat of the piece, 24 seconds, one letter per section. First section we see each letter once. Then a word beginning with each letter. Then again (different shots, different words). Again. Again, but X has been replaced by a shaking, roaring fire. Again, with the fire. Again. Again. Again, but Z has been replaced by the ocean, flat horizon, a wave rolling out to sea. Again with the fire and the ocean. Again. 24 letters at 24 frames per second (though it’s 25 seconds if you consider that each alphabet section is followed by a second of black, a shout-out to our PAL-locked buds in Europe who see everything on video a little faster than we do). And on until, some 40 minutes later, each letter has been replaced (C was the last to go). No audio except the groaning and laughter of my fellow filmgoers.
3) Sound and Vision together! A visual cooling-down after part two, two people and their dog walk across a snowy field from bottom of the screen to top as six alternating female voices on the soundtrack read us some philosophical writings about light - at precisely one word per second.
4) The audience members (those who hadn’t walked out) were horrified!

D. Sallitt liked it:

The bizarre experience of taking a test during a movie was completely distracting, so that I absorbed the materiality and the narrativity of the alphabet images only indirectly, during brief rest periods. Somehow this strengthened my investment in the images: I don’t think I would have found the “letter H” guy’s walk around the corner very interesting in itself, but that corner took on mythic spatial qualities for me.

Hahaha, I know what he means about the corner. Of the little movies that replace each letter, seen in one-second increments, some stay pretty much the same (the fire, the tide) and some progress as time passes (someone peels and eats a tangerine, this guy walks towards a corner). Everyone breathes a little sigh of relief when, finally after a half hour, the man disappears around the corner in a one-second bit toward the end. Next bit is just the corner. Next one the man comes back around the corner! Must be considered one of the biggest twist endings in non-narrative avant-garde cinema.

excerpts from S. MacDonald:

Even a partial understanding of Frampton’s films requires a rudimentary sense of the history of mathematics, science, and technology and of the literary and fine arts. … Nowhere is Frampton’s assumption that his viewers can be expected to be informed, or to inform themselves, more obvious than in Zorns Lemma, the challenging film that established Frampton as a major contributor to alternative cinema. Zorns Lemma combines several areas of intellectual and esthetic interest Frampton had explored in his early photographic work and in his early films. His fascination with mathematics, and in particular with set theory … is the source of the title Zorns Lemma. Mathematician Max Zorn’s “lemma,” the eleventh axiom of set theory, proposes that, given a set of sets, there is a further set composed of a representative item from each set. Zorns Lemma doesn’t exactly demonstrate Zorn’s lemma, but Frampton’s allusion to the “existential axiom” is appropriate, given his use of a set of sets to structure the film. Frampton’s longtime interest in languages and literature is equally evident in Zorns Lemma. …

The tripartite structure of Zorns Lemma can be understood in various ways, at least two of them roughly suggestive of early film history. The progression from darkness, to individual onesecond units of imagery, to long, continuous shots. … If the second section of Zorns Lemma is Muybridgian - not only in its general use of the serial, but because the one-second bits of the replacement images “analyze” continuous activities or motions in a manner analogous to Muybridge’s motion studies - the final section is Lumieresque.

As set after set of alphabetized words and their environments is experienced, it is difficult not to develop a sense of Frampton’s experience making the film. The film’s collection of hundreds of environmental words suggests that the film was a labor of love, and an index of the filmmaker’s extended travels around lower Manhattan, looking for, finding, and recording the words.

For most viewers the experience of “learning” the correspondences is fatiguing - especially since the process of watching sixty shots a minute for more than forty-seven minutes is grueling by itself - but the laborious process has been willingly (if somewhat grudgingly) accepted. The experience of learning the correspondences is the central analogy of the second section. It replicates the experience of learning that set of terms and rules necessary for the exploration of any intellectual field.

In a philosophic sense, Grosseteste’s treatise [spoken during the third segment] is an attempt to understand the entirety of the perceivable world as an emblem of the spiritual. And, on the literal level, what Grosseteste describes in the eleventh century is demonstrated by the twentieth-century film image: For a filmmaker, after all, light is the “first bodily form,” which, literally, draws out “matter along with itself into a mass as great as the fabric of the world.”

aka Short Story, but I much prefer the above title. I even prefer the title to the movie itself, though the movie is pretty cool too. A two-minute loop of a four-minute scene, the first and second halves playing at the same time, with neat overlapping of color and audio. The scene was hard-subtitled (dialogue in Farsi), so even the subtitles overlap. Then the scene repeats, presumably about 10 times, though my downloaded copy broke after about six. I thought that was sufficient. The set looks like the Presents set, with that staginess and simple color washes.

Snow:

Writing about my films has sometimes discussed the ‘narrative’ aspect or ‘reading’ of some of my ‘pictorial’ nature, which is much more important. Reflecting on this, I realized that I have never wanted to make a purely narrative film, never had and therefore perhaps I should. Perhaps I should finally make a film that really tells a story. Thus ‘SSHTOORRTY’. … The film of the … scene was cut exactly in half and the two halves of sound and picture as super-imposed. This makes a simultaneity of actions that occurred ‘linearly’. Before and After become a Transparent Now. Arrival and Departure are united. It’s truly ‘filmic’, one transparent film over another.

Jimmy came over for an unexpected evening of avant-garde shorts which I kicked off by fast-forwarding through Michael Snow’s Presents to show off its wackyness. Then we skimmed the Index DVD catalogue and I watched some others after he’d left.

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Structuralist Films By Kurt Kren
I kinda know what structuralism is, though I’d have trouble defining it… so I defer to P. Adams Sitney, who says a “tight nexus of content, a shape designed to explore the facets of the material,” and the films render content “minimal and subsidiary to the outline.” Sounds a lot like Presents.
37/78 Tree Again - stop-motion of a tree, sometimes with cows, sometimes without.
2/60 48 Heads From The Szondi-Test - I liked this one best - heads cut out of newspapers or magazines rapidly edited into a time-montage.
17/68 Green-Red - a meditation on green and red bottles. Not too exciting… hardly up to the meditation standards of Lemon, for instance. Not just green/red, I saw some yellow in there.

Christoph Huber, when asked “What is the greatest movie ever made?”:

“Why, Kurt Kren’s 37/78 Tree Again, of course.” - which usually just raises eyebrows. So then, it’s my pleasure to expand on how a film they’ve never heard of, by a filmmaker they’ve never heard of, embodies the beauty and contradictions of cinema in its essence - and does so in less than four minutes. Kren’s film has an additional advantage, not always the case in that grey zone we shall term for purposes of straightforwardness “avant garde:” It can be described quite vividly in words, and its genesis makes for a good story. For about two months Kren returned daily to the same spot in Vermont to shoot single frames of a tree (using a roll of infrared film well past its expiration date). The succession of frames was not chronological, but Kren rewound the film according to a prearranged plan. The result is intoxicating, miraculously and mysteriously capturing time out of joint. In split seconds, seasons change and leaves are flashing in different colours, animals and clouds rush by, light and weather mutate constantly. In capturing decay and renewal of (and around) this tree Kren communicates the perpetual flux of the entire world, and a central paradox of cinema.

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Actionist Films By Kurt Kren
A contemporary of Peter Kubelka, who made the irritating short Pause, Kren is also known for his “actionist” films. Actionism was an Austrian movement of artists who rejected “object-based or otherwise commodifiable art practices. The practice of staging precisely scored actions in controlled environments or before audiences.” (wikipedia). A precursor to performance-art, this mostly meant that people like Gunther Brus and Arnulf Rainer stripped naked and threw paint on each other, and people like Kren and Kubelka filmed it. Not as exciting as the structuralist works.
7/64 Leda and the Swan - Leda is covered in goo and acts as the main course in a feast, but the actionists stopped short of actually eating her. Eli Roth might’ve seen this before filming Thanksgiving.
10b/65 Silver Action Brus - Brus is in a tent, painting the walls, I dunno, looked like something high school kids would do as an art piece (because of the cheapness and easy shock-value) then edited to bits by Kren.

Leda and the Swan:

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Peter Tscherkassky
One of my new favorite people! His “Cinemascope Trilogy” (first three titles below) is mindblowingly awesome. I hope to watch it over and over again… it joins the ranks of Heart of the World and Life Wastes Andy Hardy and Dog’s Dialogue in my short-film hall of fame.
L’Arrivée
2 minutes, train arrives and happy woman disembarks, film itself “arrives” on the screen too after fluttering about for the first half.
Outer Space
10 minutes of terror, as a girl in a haunted house movie gets brutally attacked by film editing and multiple exposures.
Dream Work
11 more minutes of sheer awesomeness taken from the same film as Outer Space, but not as terrifying.
Manufraktur
Super-multi-exposure remix of some TV ads.
Motion Picture
All light/dark white/black flicker with no distinguishable image, short
Get Ready
A trailer for the 1999 Vienna film festival using PT’s exposure techniques

L’Arrivee:

Outer Space:

Dream Work:

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Today (1997, Eija-Liisa Ahtila)
“Today my dad’s crying. Last night a car drove over his dad who died instantly.” First part, Tanaan, a pretty girl tells us about her sad dad. Second part, Vera, an older woman, says some stuff but it doesn’t last long and before I’ve gotten my bearings we’re on to Third part, Faija (dad). First we see grandad lay down in the shadows of a dark road, then the pretty girl’s dad talks about being a dad. Movie wasn’t what I was expecting after sitting through all that Kurt Kren, but it’s actually pretty good, really nicely shot, some kinda associative pondering of three generations (going from the girl to her dad to vera/grandad, back to the dad and girl) maybe? Music by 22-Pistepirkko! Ahtila is Finnish. I found art gallery websites spouting off about her methods, but it’s all fancy-talk for “she tells stories about people.”

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Alone. Life Wastes Andy Hardy (1998, Martin Arnold)
Mickey Rooney, Judy Garland and Fay Holden are trapped in the moment, rewound, slowed down and turned into robots, their every subliminally sexual movement revealed. I can not watch this enough times… so happy to have it on DVD now.

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Le Film a Venir (1997, Raoul Ruiz)
Yay, more wacky short fun from my man Ruiz. Black and white and mysterious, once more about hidden meaning and light sources and repetitions, abruptly shifting mood and plot, either surrealistic or beyond my comprehension. I’ve watched it twice and I’m pleased to say that I can’t manage a plot description. More play with narrator voices and narrative shortcuts, like in Hypothesis and Dog’s Dialogue. And Ruiz has a hundred movies - a hundred movies! - to explore. I could not be more excited.

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Letter to America (1999, Kira Muratova)
Disappointingly not half as wacky as the Ruiz. A dude is being filmed by his friend, sending a video message to new york, but the dude has nothing to say. So dude goes to the place he rents and tries to get some rent money out of the woman staying there. She’s being a jerk about it, but gives him a little money. He wanders back to his video friend and recites a triumphant poem before the camera. Apparently had some Crime & Punishment references I didn’t catch. J. Taubman: “Muratova’s film is itself a letter to America. One of its not so hidden messages is an ironic self-commentary on Muratova’s own situation, an example of what talent can do even in poverty.” She won a $50,000 award in Berlin, which helped fund her next feature. I liked it alright, but rather than seeming like a new cinematic voice, it kinda seemed like an american indie short that speaks Russian.

At first I read the title like “Alfred Hitchcock Presents…” but now I think it’s more like Christmas presents. PREH-sents. We’ll never know for sure.

A line sloooowly twists itself into an image of a room with a naked woman on a bed, slooowly twists itself back into a line. The soundtrack is a terrible drone noise and I’m getting worried, watching the time pass on the DVD player face and asking myself whether Mr. Snow would approve if I watched his movie on fast-forward, or at least played some nice music and silenced his drone noise.

Then I was thinking that Snow probably wouldn’t approve of my watching “Presents” at home on a TV with afternoon light from the windows glaring off the screen in the first place. So I’m better off not worrying about it.

Suddenly the lines stop mutating into boxes and I cry out loud, “The camera moved! I am in heaven!” but it turns out the camera did not move. The whole set moved on a truck and hydraulic lifts while the camera stayed still. The naked woman gets up and puts on a robe, answers the door and lets in some guy. They look everywhere for something, while a record plays (and scratches and skips because the set keeps moving). Finally she finds whatever they were looking for, and the camera rolls up onto the set housed in some unseen destruction vehicle with a plexiglass front (you can see reflections which I’m pretty sure were not part of my TV glare) and clumsily mangles the set. Finally drives through the back wall, which falls down to reveal sky…

Drum hit!
camera pans down a waterfall
Drum hit!
we are creeping through the underbrush
Drum hit!
camera follows a line of buildings sideways
Drum hit!
I fall asleep.

A few days later I watched a bunch more avant-garde films (shorter than this one) and started P. Adams Sitney’s avant-garde book, then returned to this, beginning when the wall falls and the montage part begins. I fell asleep again! Seen most of it by now, and I get the point, so I am quitting.

The short shots in the montage section continue, camera always panning (note: camera mostly pans, not moves, but there’s clearly some movement in there), one shot cuts into the next with a drum hit, sometimes matching the same motion as the previous shot, sometimes changing direction, but always in motion, imitating the gaze of the human eye, oooh. After an hour and thousands of pans, the last cut is to a pink screen that fades to red then black.

A film camera attacks and destroys a TV set:

Don’t have it with me, but in the Sitney book the author says he uses the term “avant-garde” instead of “experimental”, because experimental implies that the artist is still messing around with his technique and doesn’t intend his film as a finished, planned piece. Can’t say that’s true of Presents, which was clearly planned, but it does feel experimental to me in that it’s an “investigation” of camera/eye movement which is actually interesting but I’ve found hard to watch. Snow bemoans that people’s attention spans for this kind of film aren’t what they used to be (hence his time-compressed reissue of Wavelength) and I guess I’m not helping matters by saying I thought this was too long.

Snow says he used a “Quantel analog effect” to stretch and squeeze the image in the first ten minutes.

Distributor calls it “an investigation into representation, process and material and the nature of camera movement.”

P. Monk:

The apparent vertical scratch in celluloid that opens Presents literally opens into a film within the film. When its figure awakens into a woman in a ‘real’ unreal set, the slapstick satire of structural film begins. It is not the camera that moves, but the whole set, in this first of three material ‘investigations’ of camera movement. In the second, the camera literally invades the set; a plexiglass sheet in front of the dolly crushes everything in its sight as it zooms through space. Finally, this monster of formalism pushes through the wall of the set and the film cuts to a series of rapidly edited shots as the camera zigzags over lines of force and moving fields of vision in an approximation of the eye in nature. Snow pushes us into acceptance of present moments of vision, but the single drum beat that coincides with each edit in this elegaic section announces each moment of life’s irreversible disappearance.

S. Liebman:

A major work, even when measured by the standards of Snow’s most impressive achievements. The title is a complex, provocatively ambiguous pun. The first section is a play based on the slipping and colliding senses of the word ‘presents,’ its homonyms, synonyms, and related concepts …. In the last section, assisted by the drum beat accenting each cut, the editing insists on the separateness of each shot and by doing so it constructs a vast inventory of different things and events. This extraordinary concluding montage sequence poses the most concerted and comprehensive challenge to the discourse of presen(ts)(ce) mounted by the film.

M. Snow in a 2002 interview:

Presents has something like three different modes in it. There is pushing and stretching, the tracking of the set, which because of convention you think of as camera movement, but you can see that the set is moving, then there is the smashing up of the set, followed by almost an hour of hand held pans which are from all over the world. Each one the pans is a different reaction to the scene with the camera. So that if the camera was moving in one way you might follow it or if the shape was round you would shoot it in a round way. One of the things I wanted to do was to cut each pan so that there would be no continuity from shot to shot, so they were isolated in time and space as these little instants taken from life. Pans are obviously much different from dollies or tracks. They are a glance. And they also reinforce a certain ephemerality, so there is a sadder aspect to the glance. It is recorded but then it is gone and then there’s another glance and it is gone. So that part of Presents is a particular thing that I have not done that much, a montage of things that have a tremendous variety, not in terms of the world itself but in terms of what you can gather from the world.

Frank Film

Barebones story of Frank Mouris’s life narrated on the soundtrack blended with a free-association list of words. Visual is a fast-motion collage of magazine-clipped images. Neat, must’ve taken forever. Won the Oscar, kickstarting a long life of filmmaking obscurity for Frank, poor guy.

Valse Triste

Looks like a montage of found footage from rural America in the 1940’s set to sweeping sad music. Sepia-tinted, only 5 minutes long. Took me a visit to IMDB to realize the montage represents the wet dream of the boy who goes to sleep at the beginning of the film, damn. I get it now. Bruce Conner born in Kansas in 1933, so he WAS that boy!

Adam, 5 to 12

Begin the rhythmic russian vocal music. Trippy animation doesn’t do much, then the clock appears, then a whole pile of grim images of war and death are overlaid on the clock. Adam tries to turn the clock back but it’s frozen at 5 to 12. Finally it moves dramatically to THE END. Director Petar Gligorovski died in 1995.

Reflecting Pool

Wow, this is great. Seven minutes of a reflecting pool with some video effects. A man motions to jump in, but is frozen in midair while the pool stays in gentle motion. The man slowly fades out, and most of the rest of the action takes place in the pool’s reflection and through its varying levels of agitation. Probably just a more complicated metaphor for sex than the last film… I don’t pick up on those things easily. Bill Viola is only 56 and still working.

Sweet Light

Another by Bill Viola. Close-up: some flies on a windowsill. Camera moves slowly and evenly away and turns toward a man writing at a desk. Camera fast follows a ball of paper he hurls on the floor. Abrupt change to camera spinning around a dinner table candle, then insects leaving vapor trails in the air. There is light involved, and it’s all pretty sweet, so there’s your title.

Pause!

A man against a wall making hand gestures, distorting his face and making breathy sounds. Gets violent at times. Probably also a metaphor for sex. My copy was dark and muddy but it’s not like I’ll be scouring rare video stores looking for a better version. Oh, I looked it up and the man is Arnulf Rainer, a surrealist-influenced artist known for “body art and painting under drug influence”. This must be body art. I wouldn’t have named a museum after this guy, but I guess the New York art scene knows better than I do. Directed by Peter Kubelka.

Powers of Ten

By famous designers/architects/filmmakers Charles and Ray Eames. “A film dealing with the relative size of things in the universe and the effect of adding another zero”, made for IBM. A man is laying in a park in Chicago. We zoom out from him to 100 million light years (10^24 m) then zoom into his hand to 0.000001 angstroms (10^-16 m). Both Eames died on August 21, ten years apart. Music by Elmer Bernstein (also dead) of “far from heaven” and “ghostbusters”.

The Metamorphosis of Mr. Samsa

The Kafka story done with cool mushy black and white perspective-shifting animation (paint on glass?). Samsa might be some sort of spider/beetle. Caroline Leaf works with the National Film Board of Canada.

Elimination Dance

Co-written and starring Don McKellar (Last Night). Dir. by Bruce McDonald, who made cult films Roadkill and Hard Core Logo. Couples dance all night while an announcer reads off descriptions (”anyone who has lost a urine sample in the mail”) eliminating them one by one, as the cops slowly close in fearing unrest. A comedy, cute. Not from the seventies, I realize (1998).

A Doonesbury Special

Kind of limited animation, but that’s not a cool criticism to make of a well-intentioned independent production like this one. Neat movie, could’ve stood to be another half hour longer. A regular day at the commune with a bunch of flashbacks, “feeling the present as it moves by”. A little sad, some disillusionment about the fallen ideals of the late 60’s, probably a nice companion to the comics (which I haven’t read since Hunter died). Both Hubleys have died, Trudeau cowrote the Tanner movies.

La Soufriere

“This is the police station. It was totally abandoned. It was a comfort for us not having the law hanging around.” Would’ve probably been one of Werner Herzog’s best-known movies (OR have led to Herzog’s fiery death) if the volcano had exploded as predicted, but since it didn’t, this is an obscurity on a DVD of documentary shorts. “There was something pathetic for us in the shooting of this picture, and therefore it ended a little bit embarrassing. Now it has become a report on an inevitable catastrophe that did not take place.” Herz and crew tromp about an extremely dangerous volcano site in the Caribbean, explore the completely empty towns below, and interview what few stragglers remain. One of the cameramen is from Morristown NJ, also shot “far from heaven”, “a prairie home companion”, “tokyo-ga”, “true stories” and “the limey”.

Most of these movies are as old as I am.

All seen on a wonderful DVD called The Cineseizure.

Pièce touchée (1989) - girl is reading, guy walks in the door, they kiss, he crosses behind her, she gets up. But for 15 minutes, painstakingly and obsessively re-enacted, rewound, stalled and repeated. Arnold mirrors the shot about halfway in, and flips it upside-down towards the end. An intriguing start. The main fault with this one is the annoying machine-loop audio.

Passage à l’acte (1993) - looks like a dinner scene from To Kill a Mockingbird. Boy comes running in, tells girl to hurry up, “I’m trying to”, “come on”, they run out but she stops to kiss her dad first. But all one frame at a time, with the obsessive back-forth repetition. The sound from the movie is here, so this is much less annoying than Piece Touchee… a large step towards the Andy Hardy movie, which, even had I not been told before I saw it, would recognize as the masterpiece of this bunch.

Extras: Psycho trailer (just a shower head, no text, clever), Jesus Walking On Screen trailer (”master, give me sight”), another trailer (in a train station), and a relatively serene montage of old clips called Der Osterreichfilm.

Also rewatched Alone. Life Wastes Andy Hardy (1998) a couple times. I had very little to say about it back in September ‘06.

I’ll bet the actors in these films would be horrified by what Martin Arnold does to them, calling attention to every single tiny expression and movement and gesture. Sure is fun/interesting to watch though. IMDB says he did one in 2002 called Deanimated and it sounds like he’s working with some new techniques.

Arnold: “The cinema of Hollywood is a cinema of exclusion, reduction and denial, a cinema of repression. There is always something behind that which is being represented, which was not represented. And it is exactly that that is most interesting to consider.”

A thorough viewing of the second disc of my favorite DVD set in the world this weekend. Some thoughts:

I do not know how to talk about Brakhage. Mostly on this site I talk about story, quality of performance… how do I talk about a non-narrative motion painting? Don’t have the background or vocabulary for that.

Cat’s Cradle and Window Water Baby Moving are early ones with actual camera shots of actual things. The editing of Window Water is entrancing.

Mothlight will be great forever. I’ve watched it twenty times now.

Then, chronologically, came Dog Star Man and Act Of Seeing, which I haven’t watched yet because I am afraid of them. The scariest nightmare I’ve had in a decade resulted from falling asleep during my only attempted viewing of Dog Star Man, and if Window Water is so attractive and disturbing, I can just not imagine how my stomach will feel after viewing The Act Of Seeing.

Eye Myth (a nine-second film) took a year to complete because Brakhage had to convince himself that it could be done, had never done a hand-painted film before. Mothlight was almost a decade earlier, but I guess Eye Myth was a big step. I’ve watched it a ton of times just because I can.

I’m not so wild about the visuals of The Wold Shadow (painting on glass over a view of the forest) or The Stars Are Beautiful (creation myths with shots of home and chickens with sync sound) or Kindering (kids at play), but then The Dante Quartet and Rage Net hit hard… some of my favorites of the painted films.

Black Ice and Delicacies and Study In Color are creepy. The screen shots below reveal nothing about those two. The Dark Tower is always a favorite. And I don’t remember ever seeing Commingled Containers before so I watched it three times. Can’t understand what it is, what those things are, what is happening. Something in a stream? What are “containers”? Beautiful, of course. That applies to all of the above… beautiful, beautiful, blah.

Need to read Brakhage’s book(s), to read Fred Camper’s writings, to read the DVD liner notes again and listen to the interviews with Brakhage on the discs. But I don’t expect to learn much that will gain me a deeper appreciation of the films… they need no explanation.

Matt Stone and Trey Parker were Brakhage’s students. He acted in “Cannibal the Musical” and loved the South Park movie. Incredible.

Katy did not watch it. I’m afraid to show her any Brakhage. What if she doesn’t love it? How will I explain or convince?

A barrage of screen shots.

Cat’s Cradle

Window Water Baby Moving

Mothlight

Eye Myth

The Wold Shadow

The Garden of Earthly Delights

The Stars Are Beautiful

Kindering

I… Dreaming

The Dante Quartet

Nightmusic

Rage Net

Glaze of Cathexis

Delicacies of Molten Horror Synapse

For Marilyn

Black Ice

Study in Color and Black and White

Stellar

Crack Glass Eulogy

The Dark Tower

Commingled Containers

Love Song