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


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.


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.


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.


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.”


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.


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.


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


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.


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.


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.


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.


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.


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.


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.

I watched all the shorts I could find called The Letter,
and some related shorts that were on the same DVDs.


The Letter (2008 Gael Garcia Bernal)

“Achieve universal education” – this is from an anthology in which overqualified filmmakers (Sissako, Wenders, Gaspar NoĆ©) created little issues dramas. Bernal had made one feature before this and never really took off as a director. Mustache man Ingvar Sigurdsson (lately star of A White, White Day, soon to be seen in The Northman) is working in Iceland. He helps his son with homework, reads to him. Any time he’s not talking with his kid, a narrator is speaking, and none of this is in English or subtitled on my disc, so I dunno, but the man seems to be divorced and the only letter they receive is a credit card bill.


The Water Diary (2008 Jane Campion)

From the same anthology as the Bernal. Drought caused by climate change causes a farming town to fall apart. The little girl at the center loses her horses, loses her uncle to suicide, spends the day pretend-galloping with her cousin through the dry riverbed. The neighbors tell each other their dreams of rain, and imagine that if the prettiest girl in town plays her viola atop a hill, the clouds will gather and weep. Second movie I’ve seen in a year where people collect their tears in jars. Lovely short, even on DVD, with some unusual visuals. The lead girl later played opposite Elle Fanning in Ginger & Rosa.


The Letter (1971 James Gore & Adam Beckett)

Silent freeform animation, the figures constantly transforming, returning to a striped-shirt character writing then mailing a letter. Besides the figure mutations (just while addressing and stamping the letter, the person becomes a stick figure, a mouse, a bird, a pig and a wolf) we spend some time inside the letter itself, a blue-on-blue field of growing and folding shapes.


Sausage City (1974 Adam Beckett)

Single-color pen drawings of mutating geometries, gradually becomes more 3D as colorful blobbos appear and begin taking over the image, a chaotic jazz combo underscoring the whole thing. This for a while, then it zooms out and a man jumps into the drawing table, where he’s transformed into a hip mouse creature. Music by “Brillo”


The Letter (2002 Vladimir Leschiov)

Man sitting under tall apple tree is writing a letter. Plays around with scale, and the nature of apples. Nice pencil-looking drawing style, with soft music that adds fx and transforms along with the visual scene. Leschiov is described as the most famous of Latvian animators, though he made this in Sweden.


Lost In Snow (2007 Vladimir Leschiov)

A man leaves his shack for some ice fishing and a drink. But the man begins multiplying, differently dressed ice fishers in different nearby spots, as the ice sheet cracks and they all float around each other. Prompted to watch this after we went to the lake today, saw some ice fishers and got very close to a bald eagle. The movie loses points for featuring no eagles, but there is a penguin at the end


The Letter (1998 Michel Gondry)

A boy with a photography hobby is anxious about Y2K and wanting to kiss a girl he likes. His older brother tries giving him advice, the boy dreams that he’s unable to connect with other humans because his head has become a camera, the girl writes a letter saying she likes his older brother. B/W with some nice photochemical effects, I think this was Gondry’s first narrative work that wasn’t a music video.


The Letter (1968 Jacques Drouin)

Only a minute long, simple animation on white background of a person attempting to write a love letter, the words of the discarded drafts appearing onscreen and self destructing.


Pismo aka Letter (2013 Sergei Loznitsa)

Cool jump-cut on a thunderclap, and there is a cow. Either this town is in heavy mist or the film is fogged. This goes beyond Slow Cinema into Sokurovian smear-cinema, without even a pretense at story or characterization, the camera too far from whatever daily menial activities are going on. There’s a four-hour Loznitsa playing True/False next month, and the guy’s not convincing me that’ll be time well spent [edit: a month later, after reviews and global events, now I’m dying to see the T/F feature]

Official description:
“A remote village in the Northwest of Russia. A mental asylum is located in an old wooden house. The place and its inhabitants seem to be untouched by civilization. Over 10 years ago, Loznitsa shot astounding black-and-white footage at a psychiatric institution in a forgotten corner of Russia. Since then it has resided in his archive.”


The Letter (2018 Bill Morrison)

A young man falls for a nurse. Her friend reads alarming news in a letter. A maid is being harassed by her employer. Is Bill a great preservationist, showing us the remnants of old films before they’re physically corroded away? Or is he the cause of the corrosion, has he realized that 1920’s studio pictures of well dressed people having conversations in rooms are inherently uninteresting without an added Decasia effect, and he’s out to document his chemical destruction of silent film history? I like my theory, gonna run with it, though now I see this was made from the Dawson City films.


The Letter (1976 Coni Beeson)

Big keyboard music, voiceover fragments of a man’s breakup letter while a blonde woman in a robe is montaged through all different scenarios, some of them nude. Her voice responds, “what if I change, what if I stop” as the movie deteriorates into hippie-manson-orgy territory with prominent ankhs. She achieves some kinda (still nude) peace at the end. The official description mentions “a symbolic rape by the Devil.”


The Letter (1970 Roman Kachanov)

Daddy’s off at war, and wifey gets very mopey when he hasn’t sent a letter lately, to the concern of their kid. Cute stop-motion.