by ·Comments Off on Four by Phil Solomon

Psalm I: The Lateness of the Hour (1999)

Blue flickers in the inky blackness, sometimes watery-reflective or anomene-textured, sometimes seemingly clips from other films with the Psalm III edge-enhancement filter. Apparently silent, so I played my own very groovy music, which was the highlight of the experience

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Last Days in a Lonely Place (2007)

None of these movies have titles or credits, and these next two form a Grand Theft Auto trilogy along with Rehearsals for Retirement called In Memoriam (Mark LaPore). Predating the kids’ craze for liminal spaces, Solomon finds meditative room in some low-res 3D game engine. Yes it’s the dreaded machinima, but thank goodness that beyond these shorts and Grand Theft Hamlet, that craze never took off, so we can appreciate these as singular objects. Ambient music with Humphrey Bogart clips.

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Still Raining, Still Dreaming (2009)

Mark LaPore codirected the short Crossroad with Solomon in tribute to David Gatten, and died that same year. This one’s even more ambient and liminal than before, though slightly less greyscale. Almst no movement except the shifting of digital daylight and video compression artifacts, the audio a bootleg Indian broadcast.

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Psalm IV: Valley of the Shadow (2013)

More ambient than ever, leans too hard on its audio track: the closing monologue of The Dead, without any good video game visuals.

by ·Comments Off on Jennifer Reeves shorts

Girls Daydream About Hollywood (1992)

Rapid-fire cut-ups of film and TV and sound clips, slowed down and distorted and strobed, about misogyny and other fun topics.

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Monsters in the Closet (1993)

Stories of queer youth: sex, crimes, and sex crimes. Sound and visual are again subject to speed tampering and flickering.

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The Girl’s Nervy (1995)

Single-frame flickers of beautiful colors covered in fractured-web patterns. Towards the middle a circular field in the frame makes me think nervy = optical nerve, then in the last segment we’re outside among flowers and the patterns look like veins in a plant leaf. Three 1930’s songs, the first of which sounds reversed.

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We Are Going Home (1998)

More reverse audio, images that look embossed, or posterized, whatever that photoshop filter was called. Double(?) exposures turn people into phantoms or twins, pull them apart from the background, the color flitting from pink to blue like a 3D movie in collapse. People walk slowly, someone is buried, breasts and toes get sucked on.

by ·Comments Off on Alexandre Larose shorts

930 (2006)

Rorschach black/white blobs in a slow reversal strobe, shifting to other things but always returning to what looks like a graveyard image morphing into the back of a person’s head. The sound turns from circus music at 10% volume (to trick you into cranking up your speakers) to nightmare industrial grinding at 100% to bubbly noise-reduction artifacts at 25% to a piano tune recorded in a room with terrible acoustics. Actually filmed inside a train tunnel, so that headstone image was the tunnel entrance. Larose is Canadian, roughly my age, and supposedly did more interesting work later, so let’s go.

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Artifices #1 (2007)

Ordinary traffic/street lights streaked into timelapse lines with ambient-doom music. It shows you the dot form and the line form, so know what you’re looking at, then a mirror view of the camera’s rotation apparatus at the end, so you know how they made it. Under/overscanned with visible sprocket holes, an impressive condensation of technique and imagery in three minutes.

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Ville Marie (2009)

Shapes and forms, sometimes human, in reverse-image flicker motion. Green person next to towering inferno. Unexpected face kaleidoscope. Trance-pulse, rainbow blotch, lot of different things visually as the soundtrack moves from haunted-house ambient to light piano to projector noise.

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La Grande Dame (2011)

Changing perspectives on building window grids, silent

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Brouillard #14 (2014)

Holy cow, what is this? Could be someone walking the same grassy path towards (and into) the water sixteen times, the images overlaid and masked so they bob and weave into each other, but I’m not sure if that would account for the trees being blown apart into pointillist abstractions. It adds up to a very cool trance effect, made even better by the song “Aghora” by Bill Laswell, which I added since it’s the right length.

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Saint Bathans Repetitions (2016)

1. Grainy indoor low-light scenes with a window in the background and a low hum on the soundtrack, not as cool as the bass parts in the Bill Laswell song, but the image is unstable, subtly changing into different scenes without you realizing how.
2. Similar fragmentary image instability but in nice clear color. A guy and his sixteen trailing shadow-images travel easily through the house, his actions causing exponentially-layered creaking-wood sounds.
3. Vague b/w dream of the previous segment.
4. b/w mountain textures
5. b/w but less vague, the guy and his shadows sit on a couch, the soundtrack clattering echoes in response.
Ohhhh, the layering was done in-camera, Larose must be a mad genius.

by ·Comments Off on The Extravagant Shadows (2012, David Gatten)

Opens with music, then literature, then watching paint dry, and stories… or we’ll call them texts, to be safe.

We get into our routine of new color, new text, then of course he starts changing the patterns. After the first hour, instead of text appearing over the colors then going away, the text starts changing, crossfading into new texts. Twenty minutes later there is sync sound for the first time. There have been slight light shifts before, but around the same time as the sound, the current paint color becomes unstable – it turns out this was filmed outside in Colorado, and he hoped that clouds would add some chance into the mix. Soon the idea that this might be a single time-lapsed shot (or real-time, turns out it’s quick-drying paint) goes out the window, as the scene cross-fades into different colors and textures.

Mouseover to make years pass by:
image

Halfway through, the title Anonymous Life Among the Definite Articles begins a more storylike story than usual, about a woman with a memory of a man and a bookstore. As soon as this story is reaching some kind of climax, he paints a color, then a new color before the first one has fully dried, the brush moving in splotches instead of nice even lines, making a blue/tan mess, over which plays our third hourly classic pop song. He runs some text about seeming and seemings, which I didn’t follow at all. Now all the rules are changing – he does multiple coats of the same color, plays multiple pop songs in a row. I lost my mind when he painted a diagonal line instead of a straight vertical, causing K to laugh at me. She says the movie is a palimpsest.

Essential interview at Idiom, where I learned the songs are “from a 1968 Merrilee Rush album called Angel of the Morning”…

Aaron Cutler:

Though many [texts] originally come from other writers, including Stefan Zweig, Maurice Blanchot, and Henry James (from whose short story “The Jolly Corner” Gatten took Shadows’ title), the tale that they obliquely tell — made up of overlapping possible stories that lovers might share, if chance allows — is of Gatten’s invention.

Gatten:

My background of consuming and enjoying [commercial cinema] probably helped me conceive work that was different, and closer to the aesthetic experience of the fine arts. I admire the idea of the oppositional cinema, but what I’m making is just in favor of itself, and not necessarily opposed to something else — I like the other thing too, it just isn’t what I’m doing … For the kind of experience I seek, I don’t want anyone to forget who they are or where they are, and I want my viewers to be active in a different way. I want the chief activity to be that of the viewer approaching the screen, and for the meaning of the work not to be inherent, but rather to be a product of someone’s engagement with it.

Daniel Kasman:

Since the paint is quick-drying, we also witness the change in texture of the painted surface itself, along with the evolution of the light conditions, so cracks, welts, smashed gnats, ripples and other distortions become apparent second by second. These changes — in light/color, texture — are often happening at the same time Gatten is fading in, or out, long excerpts of text, and the result is that as your eye scans the text to read it, “behind” the text the “background” seems to be changing with your reading. It is almost as if you, the viewer, are changing the image through the act of reading, which dovetails into the text’s mysterious evocation of almost/not-quite/happenstance/erstwhile relationships: the act of reading, of seeing, is so quicksilver that it changes the nature of the subject being seen, read, and the reading’s subject, the love, the memory.

Holly Willis in Film Comment quotes Gatten on the earlier Byrd films, then on Shadows:

“There will be a lot of words in these films,” he explained, speaking with characteristic precision. “You won’t be able to read all of these words. I expect that this will provoke anxiety. That is as it should be.” This anxiety, Gatten explained later in an interview, is significant: “The enjoyment of reading and the anxiety of not being able to read are the two sides of the coin: you can’t have one without the other.”
…
“I have moved in a few of the recent works to language that is not difficult because it is not available physically; it is that it’s more abstract. The questions become, ‘How does one get from one piece of legible language to the other piece of legible language?’ and ‘How does meaning accrue between those legible things?’ It’s less now about physical, visible legibility and more, I think, conceptual legibility or illegibility.”

Michael Sicinski has an overview of Gatten’s work leading up to this movie:

Taken as a whole, Gatten’s work over the past eighteen years has been an ongoing inquiry into cinematic knowledge, its connection to, and its role as a part of, the broader history of human knowledge … This strange new work is undoubtedly a continuation down the formal and phenomenological pathways forged by the Byrd films…

Gatten’s texts (which seem to be an amalgam of original and appropriated material) give the distinct impression that an actual story is developing. That is, The Extravagant Shadows is not just a feature, but it is almost a narrative. And what is it about? These textual fragments are preoccupied with two key elements: emotional connection and various methods of communicative transmission. Two figures are trying to make contact with one another … We read of the mails, the telegraph, the selection of books, the distance between nations. Eventually, the speaker (or speakers) seem to doubt the efficacy of writing altogether.

by ·Comments Off on Glass Life Shorts

Glass Life (2021, Sara Cwynar)

Photo-studio collage scroll with extreme digital compositing, music and voiceover tracks reinforcing or canceling each other, choice quotes from every modern philosopher, many objects and alphabets recognized from the gallery exhibit we saw, this 20-minute film itself refactored from a different exhibit. Daniel Gorman gets it.

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Neighbours (1952, Norman McLaren)

Two guys get along until a sweet-smelling flower grows on their property line and they ultimately murder each other’s families and each other to gain possession of it. It’s bad politics, say both Alex and McLaren’s studio boss, but terrific live-action stop-motion, and the source of the Mr. Show knees-levitation effect.

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Oz: The Tin Woodman’s Dream (1967, Harry Smith)

Smith loves transformative destruction, so the woodman whacks a tree with his ax, turning it into a pile of furniture and creatures, which eventually whirl around to form mystical fountain patterns. Psychedelic kaleidoscope setup starts with a Suspiria dance and leads to his most magickal images yet. Hoping to see this again next year with a live John Zorn performance, so instead of being obvious and playing Zorn with it now, I put on the middle third of Prefuse 73 One Word Extinguisher, which worked great during the dance scenes.

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Ghosts Before Breakfast (1928, Hans Richter)

When Tom Regan said “Nothing more foolish than a man chasing his hat,” he had probably just watched this, a silly movie about flying hats and the men who chase them. Fun to see stop-motion with live actors 24 years before the McLaren short. My version has a new Sosin score since the original sound version was burned by nazis.

Lost hat:

Lost head:

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Cosmic Ray (1962, Bruce Conner)

Nude dancing and fireworks set to a boogie-woogie Ray Charles song, after an excessive amount of countdown leader. It’s Conner, so there are quick shots of nationalism, Mickey Mouse, the atom bomb.

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Walking (1968, Ryan Larkin)

More and less abstractly-rendered people and their walk cycles. Now that I’ve seen the Hubley short and the Disney doc about birds, that’s all the 1969 oscar nominees, and I’m gonna say they are all winners.

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The Man on the Flying Trapeze (1954, Ted Parmelee)

Speaking of Hubley, here’s a UPA short. Talentless loser’s girl Fifi runs away with the circus to be with the handsome and graceful trapezeist Alonzo, turns out she’s a gold digger who leaves every man after they’ve showered her with gifts. Maybe the Popeye or W.C. Fields versions are better.

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The Daughters of Fire (2023, Pedro Costa)

A Costa musical: after six minutes of split-screen, three women singing about their suffering, the last two minutes is landscapes. Paired at Cannes with Wang Bing’s Man in Black.

Giovanni Marchini Camia:

Continuing in the ever-darker visual trajectory of his previous films, in Daughters of Fire Costa pushes even further towards an obsidian palette … Over a string quartet rendition of 17th-century violinist and composer Biagio Marini’s Passacaglia (Op. 22), the three women, all professional singers, intone a hymn-like song whose lyrics speak of solitude and suffering, toil and exhaustion, and fortitude in the face of neglect. Given that the women are Black and singing in Creole, and that the themes they invoke are familiar from Costa’s films about Cape Verdean immigrants, it’s a surprise to learn from the end credits that the lyrics belong to a traditional Ukrainian lullaby.

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Bleu Shut (1971, Robert Nelson)

Goofy prank film with structuralist tendencies – a no-stakes boat-name guessing game punctuated by half-minutes of weirdness (naked man in mirror chamber, dog gets Martin Arnolded, scenes from classic films, porn with intertitles). After minute three, a woman explains the rules of the movie and gives some coming attractions. I once saw about a third of this from one room away at an art gallery, maybe the same day we watched The Clock, and have wondered about it ever since.

It’s 19 minutes before either guy gets a single name right. The game show is abandoned towards the end for three minutes of people sticking their tongues out, then Nelson explains what the movie has been about, or he starts to before he’s interrupted by technical difficulties. Chuck Stephens did a Cinema Scope writeup, but I feel I’ve covered things pretty well.

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The Garage (1920, Roscoe Arbuckle)

Our guys work at a garage, managing to get every thing and everyone covered in black oil without making any racist jokes, nice. The boss (a White Zombie witch doctor) has a cute daughter whose annoying beau manages to burn the place down, and it becomes a rescue operation. I got a good laugh from the ending of the Buster-has-no-pants segment.

by ·Comments Off on We Don’t Talk Like We Used To (2023, Joshua Gen Solondz)

We Don’t Talk Like We Used To (2023)

Lotta different modes here, gradually cutting or blending between them. I really liked the strobe-trance section where someone is adjusting a white mask over their black stocking mask. Just a note: instead of pulsing harsh noise over this kind of scene, could experimental filmmakers not try repeating a gentle chime or alternating a couple nice chords? At least when movies are silent I can put on a Coil or Matmos album and be the perpetrator of my own punishment. Nice blend of check-the-gate 8mm and extreme digital editing. Love the metal-font intertitles too. Some pretty late voiceover then the sound of a crackling fire. After Ken Jacobsing some guys early on, he Martin Arnolds them later. Katy was reading on the couch, looked up at the halfway point and declared the movie “dumb.”

Michael Sicinski in Cinema Scope:

We Don’t Talk is part travelogue and part diary film, a combination of the artist’s bizarre version of domestic bonhomie and his resistance to reducing the larger world to consumptive tourism. Setting these two elements into dialectical action, Solondz produces an aggressive, throbbing film ritual that alludes to common experiences — travel, physical affection, scenes from daily life — but thwarts the tendency to reduce them to mere spectacle … Solondz alternates between different moments of a singular action, with a sharp electronic burble heard in every other image. A figure in a black hood is placing the N95 over their face in one half of the edit, and is removing it in the other. In addition to being a potent image, one that creates a kind of circular pumping action onscreen, it also provides a new twist on Solondz’s fixation on the body in space, as an interior that both threatens and is threatened by the outside … This concern with the body under duress, and the comprehensive breakdown of domesticity and public life, takes on a more direct valence in this film because, in a sense, the air is quite different in the COVID era.

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Tourism Studies (2019)

Opens with whispering about Tupac Shakur(?) before the soundtrack gets typically harsh. Strobe-edits between shots with different aspect ratios, compositions squared-off vs diagonal. Racetrack and test pattern and more homemade costumes. “Psychotronic savagery” per Sicinski.

by ·Comments Off on Everything Everywhere Again Alive (1975, Keith Lock)

Color fields, electro-tones, patterned text onscreen, with the main camera action being Canadian farmers. A barn raising is interrupted by color fields. A pig is killed, but then, pigs are portrayed as horrible disgusting creatures (I thought the one playing with the dogs was cute). It’s an ambitious title for an experimental re-edit of your home movies from some months at the cabin, but I’m not mad that I spent the time watching this, and at least it will always be filed alphabetically next to an oscar winner.

Joshua Minsoo Kim in Cinema Scope:

At various moments throughout the film we hear minimal, humming synth tones, which were added because Lock felt he heard such sounds coming from the images themselves … It’s an elegant manoeuvre that is matched by another interesting strategy: graphics (shapes, numbers, a circuit diagram) are overlaid atop images. Formally, these feel in line with works by other Canadian filmmakers like Joyce Wieland and R. Bruce Elder, and they call attention to the surface of the film plane, as if inviting us to view everything as a spectacle behind glass.

by ·Comments Off on Supershorts Sunday: Avant-Garde

Feather Family (2023 Alison Folland)

Mashup of backyard children home movies (distressed film) and glitchy 3D bird-based video game (clipping, strobing). The hawk eats a pigeon, the kid’s broom has googly eyes.

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Mockingbird (2020 Kevin Jerome Everson)

Watching the watcher: very shaky handheld of a Mississippi Air Force guy looking through binoculars. Sadly, no birds appear, at least none I could make out.

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Ornithology 6 (2021 Bill Brand)

Ugly green fence footage splintered into pieces, vaguely in the shape of a flock of birds. Silent, endless.

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NYC RGB (2023 Viktoria Schmid)

Static shots of interior/exterior buildings with light and shadows refracted into rainbows, really cool effect, ambient soundtrack. Clouds and traffic are not immune to the rainbowing.

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A Portrait of Ga (1952 Margaret Tait)

Her mom smokes outside while gardening and hanging out, and she smokes inside while having a half-melted hard candy. Light narration, nice color, file alongside Mr. Hayashi.

Cayley James in Cinema Scope:

A series of portraits and close readings of the places she called home, Tait’s “film poems” (as she called them) invite the viewer into a familiar but altogether hypnotic vision of everyday life. While there is an air of the home movie about the movement of her handheld 16mm camera, there is something far more exploratory here than in the average diary film … In this foundational early work, Tait’s camera is drawn to things that would become her visual vocabulary throughout her career — hands, bird calls, flora and fauna, the cut of a dress — while eschewing the easy route of picture-postcard views afforded by Orkney’s windswept landscapes.

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Information (1966 Hollis Frampton)

More like interlaced-formation, ugh. The intended image is lost by being broken into video-stripes, but the intended image is just wiggly white flashlight dots on a black background, silent.

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Prince Ruperts Drops (1969 Hollis Frampton)

A lollipop is licked in extreme closeup, then from the other angle. We give a guy a lot of free passes on stuff like this when the guy also made Zorns Lemma. Halfway through it switches to first-person basketball dribbling, in approx. the same rhythm as the licking. The title refers to strong glass beads formed by dropping (dribbling?) molten glass into cold water.

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A and B in Ontario (1984 Hollis Frampton & Joyce Wieland)

1967 home movies of these two taking home movies of each other, pausing only to reload. The game of camera warfare escapes the house and spills into the yard then all through town, hiding behind cars and lampposts, then to a park by the water. Casual back-and-forth editing until the last couple minutes when it takes some big swinging camera moves and shatters them into each other. Interesting edit overall, since you’re watching someone filming then cutting to their POV but usually/always at a different time, not to the reverse angle you’d expect.

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From Soup to Nuts (1928 Edgar Kennedy)

In Laurel & Hardy’s first couple minutes on the job they ruin a meal, attack the chef, and break a pile of plates. Long sidetrack of the hostess attempting to eat a cherry atop her fruit cocktail, lot of cake-smashing and banana peel-slipping. Finally they’re straight-up punching their boss.

The hostess is L&H/Charley Chase regular Anita Garvin, her tall husband was featured in Modern Times. The tail end of silent comedy, fun music with sfx on the DVD. Appreciate that the traveling camera following the hostess’s wiggly ass is repeated to follow Stan when he comes out to serve (“undressed”) salad in his underwear.

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Nocturne (2006 Peter Tscherkassky)

More classic film destruction for The Mozart Minute project, this time scenes of a masked ball and a girl escaping out her window, the Mozart soundtrack creatively degraded to match the picture.

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Parallel Space Inter-View (1992 Peter Tscherkassky)

Not conveyable with screenshots since it’s a flicker film, alternating frames between parallel spaces. Intertitles are typed live onto a Mac word processor, like the closing credits of my own Godzilla 2. Good soundtrack, ambient noise loops. Halfway in, we get our classic narrative film footage quota, silent and strobed into some psychotronic nude woman.

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Hotel des Invalides (1951 Georges Franju)

Fanciful little doc focusing on a war museum within the grand veterans hospital in Paris, made a couple years after Blood of the Beasts.

They saved Napoleon’s dog:

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In Order Not to Be Here (2002 Deborah Stratman)

Opens with refilmed video of a police arrest, proceeds to a glaring spelling error in the title text, and we’re not starting out promisingly. The rest is good, a narration-free video essay on fences, walls, gated communities, surveillance – commerce centers at night. Halfway through the police presence returns, culminating in an epic chase, all (per the credits) staged.

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Pitcher of Colored Light (2007 Robert Beavers)

Everyday backyard light and shadow, cutting every couple seconds. Like if Portrait of Ga had fewer life details and was five times as long. This one is rare, anyway. The short that convinced me to stop watching shorts. Anachronistic, that timeless 16mm color makes it feel like the 60s or 70s, you would never guess 2007.

The titular pitcher:

by ·Comments Off on Vogel 14: Sharits/Breer/Kubelka Part 2

I got hung up on the “Straining Towards the Limits” chapter, also covered in posts 12 and 13, where Vogel discusses the elimination of: reality, the image, the screen, the camera, the artist.

Paul Sharits:

N:O:T:H:I:N:G (1968)

Color fields flicker and fade. Would be a different experience in the front row of a screening, swallowing the colors with your eyes, but if you can see the whole frame on TV your lasting impression is Square, like a flipbook of colored post-it notes. Our only figures among the fields were titles and lightbulb, and I figured this was silent so I put on the new Animal Collective live album, but a chair appeared halfway through with a buzzer noise that was pretty much absorbed by the music.

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T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G (1969)

A guy having his face clawed off in two-frame flicker-motion, the soundtrack repeating the word “destroy” – then he’s cutting off his tongue with scissors Ichi-style. The flicker motion changes speed and intensity, reds and purples prevail, and the single letters appearing on occasion spell out the title. Pretty annoying! I’m missing the point as usual by watching a good video of this at home in 2025 with an IPA instead of at an underground film screening in 1969 out of my mind on hallucinogens.

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Peter Kubelka:

Arnulf Rainer (1960)

Simply square black-or-white flicker patterns with stuttering static noise. I would have proposed swapping the titles of the flicker-film (Arnulf Rainer) with the mini-doc of Arnulf Rainer (Pause!) but that’s why Kubelka had a significant influence on the European and American avant-garde and I did not. Vogel: “This is the first frame-by-frame abstraction that entirely dispenses with the image and consists solely of carefully orchestrated alternations of blank black or white frames.”

Unsere Afrikareise (1966)

Germans on safari, blasting every wild creature they see and staring at nude women, a travel doc with sound, re-edited into more interesting structure than these things usually are, but not interesting enough to make it worth watching these dudes shoot zebras and elephants.

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Robert Breer:

Inner and Outer Space (1960)

I think he’s animating airplanes (over Germany) in a very abstract way, all dots and lines, bombers and skywriting. Explodes into new subjects: red ball in obstacle course, brief sketch of people on the subway. Cool one.

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Horse Over Tea Kettle (1962)

Opens with a frog then introduces a whole range of objects and creatures (no horses or tea kettles that I noticed). These things will eventually fall down on the scene like rain, then fly back up into the sky. In between, everything transforms into something else, because why even work in animation unless you’re gonna transform things into something else?

Sitney:

he directly attacked the conventions of the cartoon while working within it … he transforms and moves these conventional figures within an intricate orchestration of expectations and surprises involving changes of scale, direction, virtual depth, and above all movement off the screen at all four edges

PBL 2 (1968)

The year 1968 got to Breer, who turned away from abstraction to make a one-minute two-part social issues parable, craving the oscar nomination that Windy Day got instead.

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Rubber Cement (1976)

Captioned scenes of the dog playing in the yard, animated in different styles, becoming more complex and intense, with periods of strobing. Focus turns to the means of production (xerox machine and rubber cement), aircraft are introduced, the whole scene melts into pure shape and color.