by ·Comments Off on Vogel 10: Red Psalm & Robert Fulton

Amos Vogel, from the Moving Camera chapter:

The concept of the moving camera is more closely associated with the visual filmmakers and the avant-garde (both independent and commercial) than with the earnest craftsmen of the large studios whose mandate was to produce safe entertainments within a matrix of pseudo-realism. To move the camera is a revolutionary act. It introduces an element of “hotness,” instability, emotional entanglement, and implicit anarchy. A period of social imbalance and unrest (from the twenties on, and as yet unresolved) characterizes its emergence; and it is the high-strung outsiders or critics of bourgeois society – Antonioni, Godard, Bertolucci, Brakhage – who use it more than the Fords, the Wylers, or the many Hollywood artisans, content with the stability exemplified by the fixed camera.

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Red Psalm (1972, Miklós Jancsó)

Dubbing is sometimes dodgy, compensated by the awesome choreography of the visuals, all editing within the shot, if that’s not a term I just made up. Practically a musical between that choreography and all the songs. But what is happening… a committed band of commie farmers is confronted by police and landowners and internal struggle. They pray all the time but also burn down a church. My favorite bit is when a landowner is discussing supply-and-demand pricing with them then says “excuse me” and lies down and dies. I think the cops do finally kill all the commie farmers, but I’d thought that a couple times earlier too. Woman in red dress then kills the entire army with a pistol. It’s all very symbolic.

Vogel: “Jancsó has reached the apotheosis of his style and theme: the constantly shifting relations between oppressed and oppressor, the role of violence in human affairs, the necessity for eternal revolution and (perhaps) eternal repression. Here the theme has become totally abstract – a cinematic ballet … against a background of revolutionary and counter-revolutionary ritual, chants, and mass ceremonies … its subversive aspect seems muted and subsumed by a curiously abstract, left- wing romanticism.”

It’s also a good bird movie:

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Robert Fulton

Since Vogel calls out Robert Fulton (“Here, at last, is a prototype of the new space-time continuum on film”) and I’d never heard of the guy, I dug up his 1979 Screening Room interview with Robert Gardner, which they do with Fulton’s films playing on the greenscreen behind themselves. Fulton had a new work which he’s showing in sections, Street Film, says he’s interested in “the street”, and the paradox of motion pictures. Then they play the first 15 minutes of Path of Cessation (1974) beginning with a long gong-trance intro in Nepal. He ran high-contrast film through the camera six times to make super-duper-imposed scenes – flickers through patterns and fabrics a la Jodie Mack, then slow closeups of faces. Looks awesome but we return to Street Film, which Fulton says he’s made after losing confidence in his understanding of time, light, images, and sound, rethinking his approach to all these in his cinema. After a flicker-montage of palm trees and landscapes, “I’m more interested in making things incomprehensible, because what I know isn’t very interesting to me.” Finally, they project a segment of Street Film and his earlier short Chant simultaneously, overlapped, and instead of talking further about the movies, Fulton plays saxophone. Between his demeanor and sunglasses and the high-level art discussion and the films themselves, this could’ve come off as one of the most pretentious hours ever televised… I thought it ruled.

Path of Cessation:

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Vineyard IV (1967)

Jumpcutting through craggy trees, then crosscutting surf with dunes. Short, a nice brainwash after a work day.

Kata (1967)

Even more anxious camerawork in the middle of a casual football game, and extremely frantic cutting. Suddenly an entire city and a couple seasons have gone by in a minute. Too much happening on the visual to recap, but the soundtrack maintains a piano jazz tune. Katy: “I think the editing is too fast.”

Vineyard III (1967)

Another mad rush of images, the surf and rocks and now a cow. These are cool.

Chant (1973)

Travel and nature footage, probably hours and days of it, plants and bugs and nude persons, supercut together into five silent minutes. Some very short time-lapse scenes, those shots having the same accelerated-time sense that the fast cuts are bringing, and overlapping images at the end.

Running Shadow (1972)

Some familiar characters (dunes, bugs) and now in addition to the strobing edits and time-lapse, the camera is flying and swooping and spinning. More peaceful than the others, or maybe I’m used to their high-energy destruction by now. Starts with a voiceover but I wasn’t sure if we were supposed to pay attention to the words since the tape kept cutting off, then piano jazz, then the sound of the surf.

Vogel:

An extraordinary example of a work entirely based on constant camera movement. A soaring third-consciousness exploration – in purely visual terms – of the shapes and patterns of nature, in which camera tilts, upside-down shots, single frame, and trucking shots at great speed register not as gimmicks but as structurally determined components of a visual poem.

by ·Comments Off on The Music Lovers (1970, Ken Russell)

Russell is the only person who should be allowed to make artist biopics. He loves the music, doesn’t care about historical truth, and never gets so caught up in plot that he forgets to make wonderful images.

Peter Tchaikovsky (Richard Chamberlain of The Last Wave) has got a boss who doesn’t like his compositions (Max Adrian, title star of Delius), a patron who does (Izabella Telezynskan of at least two other Russell biopics), a libidinous new wife (Glenda Jackson), and a gay lover he can’t be seen with (Chris Gable, Strauss in Dance of the Seven Veils). And I’d just like to point out that Peter’s playwright brother is Kenneth Colley, Life of Brian‘s Jesus. Ends downbeat, Peter dying in hospital after suicidally drinking cholera water, Glenda in a madhouse, both of them obsessed with the question of whether he ever loved her.

Ebert called it “irresponsible” and Kael called it “vile.” Russell wrote a piece in the Guardian, says his life was changed by Tchaikovsky’s music, and twenty years later he succeeded in honoring the man in film. “Great heroes are the stuff of myth and legend, not facts. Music and facts don’t mix. Tchaikovsky said: ‘My life is in my music.’ And who can deny that the man’s music is not utterly fantastic? So likewise the movie!”

by ·Comments Off on The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner (1974, Werner Herzog)

Werner as sports announcer, not comfortable in his onscreen role. I just “read” (listened to) his autobiography, which helped greatly with the ski-jumping context of this movie, and left me wanting to watch more Herzog films. Good music with big crashing drums by Popul Vuh.

by ·Comments Off on Madame X (1978, Ottinger & Blumenschein)

I guess after luring women onto her pirate ship, X kills them one by one with her artificial hand-knife.

Notes I sent to TB:
– Call chinese orlando, stop.
– “Ottinger” must mean “one-take” in German
– I feel like Bertrand Mandico has watched this movie more than once.
– This fits in nicely with the avant-garde traditions, in that some things (color, music, costumes, visual concept, counterculture vibes) are really good, and others (pacing, sound sync, pacing, mst3k-ass acting, pacing) are unbearable.
– But is the pacing unbearable because we are brainwashed by commercial cinema… would I rather be watching Mission: Impossible 5 because that’s the style of movie the capitalist system taught me to enjoy… I dunno, it’s worth questioning, but when I break free from hollywood pacing I like to break really decisively free (ahem Stray Dogs), while this feels more like a really slow John Waters movie. Fails to cast a spell, and if you only pay half attention it dissipates entirely.
– Feminism, tho. I guess.
– And a macaw if you make it to the end

by ·Comments Off on Hotel Monterey (1972, Chantal Akerman)

After reading Beatrice Loayza’s essay for the new box set, I had to watch an Akerman movie. But I cannot tolerate silence in a home screening, so, per the artist’s original intent, I made a playlist with Colleen then Titan to Tachyons then Tomeka Reid Quartet.

Static camera, hanging around in the hotel lobby and hallways and especially elevators, even getting into a couple rooms. Then back to the hallways… long static takes of hallways. Then movement! Dolly up a hallway, looking out the window at NYC, impressive jump cut from night to day, back up and down the hallway. Movie ends on the roof, slow rotation looking out at the city, the movement reminding of La Chambre. Akerman had moved to NYC and made these films with DP Babette Mangolte, both artists influenced by Michael Snow, then Mangolte shot Snow’s Rameau’s Nephew the following year.

by ·Comments Off on Lancelot of the Lake (1974, Robert Bresson)

So many funny things about the opening violence montage, from the extremely Monty Python-reminiscent beheadings to how Bresson, who cares so very much about performance style, cares less about blood-spurt mechanics. Text crawl says the rest of the action takes place after fruitless years of searching for the holy grail. The king misses all his dead knights… his nephew Gawain is restless… everyone hates Mordred… and Lancelot is busy having an affair with the queen. At a jousting tournament L fights his own guys and everyone gets hurt – Bresson ignores the knights and films their horses. Lancelot is missing presumed dead after the tournament until he returns and kills Gawain and steals the queen (then returns her). Mordred has had enough and takes the castle, King and L fight together, everyone dies.

Short and swift with excellent color (on my copy, at least). I can’t find who was just saying it’s one of the all-time most annoying movies to overhear from another room (clank, clank). The only actor who’s been in other films is Lionel: Humbert Balsan, who got picked up by Rivette, Brisseau, Pialat, and Sam Fuller.

Jonathan Rosenbaum:

According to Michel Estève, neither the tents nor the Round Table nor the chess game nor the wooden tub in which Guenièvre bathes belongs to the period, all of them constituting conscious anachronisms on Bresson’s part. This is a distinctly modern Lancelot, in striking contrast to the relatively “medieval” atmosphere of Bresson’s last two films, both set in contemporary Paris, where the gentle creature in Une Femme Douce often suggested a lonely maiden in a tower waiting to be rescued, and the dreamer in Four Nights of a Dreamer resembled a wandering knight in search of a pure love that was equally hopeless. The sense of elongated durations and passing seasons that we associate with the romances of Chrétien de Troyes is more evident in Balthazar, or even in John Ford’s The Searchers, than in the tightly compressed episodes of Lancelot, where action and event is all.

by ·Comments Off on Fear Eats the Soul (1974, Rainer Werner Fassbinder)

Brigitte Mira (The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser) plays the most naive German woman ever, who hasn’t heard about racism. She wanders into a bar full of foreigners to get out of the rain, doesn’t know how bars work, and Moroccan mechanic Ali is coerced into dancing with her. He starts coming over, and she blurts out that they’re married as a cover story to the landlord, so they really do get married, and her kids (incl. Irm Hermann and the director) disown her. The grocer bans her, coworkers stop speaking to her, only the landlord doesn’t seem to mind, weird to make a landlord the sympathetic one. When the happy couple returns from vacation everyone warms up to them, realizing they each need something from Brigitte. Marital woes – he is after all 20 years younger and she refuses to make couscous, then strange ending, he’s hospitalized for a stress ulcer after they’ve made up. Movie lives up to its high reputation, looks beautifully Kaurismakian, people standing very still when it’s not their turn to speak.

by ·Comments Off on That’s Entertainment! (1974, Jack Haley Jr.)

When this was filmed almost all the featured performers were still alive (exceptions: Judy Garland & Clark Gable, who get nice tributes, and Jean Harlow & Maurice Chevalier). There are two more of these musical clip shows, which we’ve previously watched, now Katy wants a That’s Entertainment for Westerns.

by ·Comments Off on 1973-ish Shorts

A follow-up to last year’s program, with some non-’73 films added for context.

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Heavy-Light (1973, Adam Beckett)

Video ghosts pong across the screen then engulf it, again and again with different RGBs and forms, sometimes in sync to the electro-spectral music. Adam seems cool – he was an animation pioneer who worked with the Hubleys and on Star Wars, and died young in a fire. Music by Barry Schrader, president of the electro-acoustical music society, who has recently worked with Wadada Leo Smith.

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Evolution of the Red Star (1973, Adam Beckett)

After a Chairman Mao intro we get rippling pen and paper red/blue line worms slowly blobbing across the screen, the shining red star and other geometrical pulsars holding fast in their spots. In the second half someone seems to be tweaking the settings on their tube TV until the rich color of the red star is restored and takes center stage again. Music by another electro-acoustical pioneer, Carl Stone, whose last few albums made some major top-tens.

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Diary (1974, Nedeljko Dragic)

Man is walking, then driving, going through as many transformations as the animator can dream up. Party and city scenes, mouse chasing cat, wild color shifts. English words and letters threaten to transform all people into language, but abstract forms win the day, and the man looks miserable about it. Better music than usual, always changing forms to suit the visuals. Won the grand prize at Zagreb.

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Production Stills (1970, Morgan Fisher)

Simply a film documenting its own making in real-time. We hear the crew working and discussing and see flashes as someone takes polaroids then pins them to the wall in front of the film camera. Reminds me of Michael Snow’s book.

P. Adams Sitney on Fisher: “Very quickly he became the most academically reductive practitioner of minimalist filmmaking … steadfastly resisted the sublime. Instead, he invented cinematic paradoxes.”

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Picture and Sound Rushes (1973, Morgan Fisher)

Fisher gives a a film technique lecture about picture and sound sync, reading from notes at a desk while an 11-miute timer counts down. We keep losing either sound or picture or both, as he explains why this will happen, breaking down the film’s structure – we lose sound and can’t hear the full description, but we’re also seeing it in action, so we can piece together the missing information. Self-reflexive structural pranksterism – the film is a lecture on itself and a demonstration of its own techniques.

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The Wilkinson Household Fire Alarm (1973, Morgan Fisher)

One-minute take of a rotating fire alarm which starts spinning then loses momentum like a wind-up toy.

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De?licieuse catastrophe (1970, Piotr Kamler)

Very blobby 3D scenarios. Person wearing bootleg liquid-engorged optical-illusion sweater engages with the Q-Bert bouncing sphere and plays his horn for a dust sprite until the electro-score gets stuck in a loop and the whole world overflows. The music is by – you’re not gonna believe it – an electro-acoustical pioneer, Robert Cohen-Solal. Kamler was Polish but his whole film career was in France

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Cours de secours / Heart of Relief (1973, Piotr Kamler)

Ornate cut-out cyclist balancing act upon a tug-o-war rope. Chess players atop the circus stack escape via light-balloon to correct imbalance caused by clockwork romantic pursuit so they can return to their game. Score by Francois Bayle, a “major figure” in electro-acoustical music.

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Le Pas (1975, Piotr Kamler)

Papery sheets peel off from the gleaming pink surface of a cube and land neatly in a new spot until the entire cube is transposed. A couple sheets stay airborne caressing each other in a film-edit lock-groove but eventually rejoin the cube. The sound is ethereal shimmers by Bernard Parmegiani, whose diverse body of work is mainly dedicated to electro-acoustical music.

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Orb (1973, Larry Jordan)

Following up Our Lady of the Sphere, more play with cut-out illustrations. Epilepsy-sun becomes balloon, ancient statues join an RGB disco, everything kinda floats away into space.

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Once Upon a Time (1974, Larry Jordan)

The same colors from the last movie with more direct music and less direct visuals. Narrated story about hearing a bird. Another voice, now it’s a radio play with a woman asking a bird for help finding the missing prince – she locates him in the bardo and says he must be born again.

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World (1970, Jordan Belson)

Sphere-lens smoke, the universe in a crystal ball. Sunflower spot patterns, TV static eyes, ink-blot anemone. A really good one. Wiki says Belson and Harry Smith got their start at the same time, but it’s Larry Jordan who reminded me of Smith… also says Belson did effects for The Right Stuff, that movie keeps coming up lately. P. Adams Sitney says this one is constrained “by a banal musical soundtrack,” says the abstract geometry recalls Allures.

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Meditation (1972, Jordan Belson)

Symmetrical spark shower, crashing waves, a human diver, then back into the ether, sphere-blobs slowly becoming other terrains and galaxies, the audio striking bells ringing long notes.

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Light (1973, Jordan Belson)

Piano score, very water-surface-looking light patterns, then wind, then rising sun. Blooming patterns as the music turns dark and electronic, harp with abstract forms in outer space, finally lens flare leading to fiery apocalypse. Can’t figure out how he did any of this.