by ·Comments Off on Vogel 13: The Secret Cinema

The Secret Cinema (1967, Paul Bartel)

Jane’s bf Dick dumps her for not caring enough about the cinema, she runs home crying and tears down her Jacques Tati poster, then the next day she overhears her sexual-harasser boss complaining at the bf over the phone that he went off-script during the breakup. Turns out a cinema society is ruining Jane’s life while covertly filming it, and all the cool cinephiles in town are laughing at her in nightly screenings. Are they bowfingering Jane (I haven’t seen Bowfinger)? Jane is killed off as conspirator Helen is chosen as the next subject. Why has it taken me so long to catch up with Bartel’s films?

Jane accepts the boss’s invitation to a club:

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Black TV (1968, Aldo Tambellini)

Shakily filming a flickering TV set, sometimes zooming rapidly in and out, then the image edited and split-screened to a different edit so they never match up. The sound is harsh noise then a loop of the aftermath of Senator Kennedy getting shot, then (blessedly) back to the harsh noise. Pretty intense – “TVs screaming at you” summarized one lboxd viewer. Once again I didn’t have the patience or viewing conditions for The Flicker, this was a good substitute.

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Damon the Mower (1972, George Dunning)

Poetry and animation, with the full page and frame numbers visible, then two animations side by side. The right half is usually the mower (old-school sickle-style) and the left is anything from dancing creatures to exploding mills. Cool at the end when the swish of the sickle starts to reposition the animation paper within the frame. Looks like Dunning made a ton more shorts and also Yellow Submarine.

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UFOs (1971, Lillian Schwartz)

Super trippy video animation with equally trippy electronic music. This might have spawned both Pac-Man and the phrase “liquid television.” I’ve seen her Pixillation, and I guess she made lots more movies if you can find ’em.

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H2O (1929, Ralph Steiner)

Steiner gets just the kinds of wild patterns that Schwartz would painstakingly produce with her video equipment, by aiming his camera at the surfaces of water in motion. Reproduces pretty poorly as stills, the movement is the point.

by ·Comments Off on Four by Man Ray & Sqürl

The Starfish (1928)

He’s loving distorting the camera view and irising in, cross-fades, the poem as intertitles to the action. The starfish motion diorama halfway through is very great.

I stand by what I wrote last time. Watched the new restoration with music by Sqürl which I love whenever there’s guitar/feedback and/or drums (the all-keyboard sections feel too tame for these films). Man Ray and I were alive within a year of each other.

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Emak-Bakia (1926)

What I said before, and add double exposures, plus Man Ray inventing the anamorphic lens-twisting effect 55 years before The Evil Dead.

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Return of Reason (1923)

Film-surface object patterns, an underlit carnival.
Sqürl getting into it with the drums and keys, intense.

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Mysteries of the Chateau of Dice (1929)

Faceless dice men drive out from Paris, leading to some excessive shaky-cam driving scenes, arriving at a very modern castle. Judging from the sliding panels full of canvases it’s the home of a rich art collector – is this movie a tour of a rich benefactor’s fancy house, like that one Cocteau? Apparently.

by ·Comments Off on Rose Lowder’s Bouquets

Bouquets 1-10 (1994-1995)

Excellent to see these with the intro by Gloria Vilches of a Barcelona film society, since she goes into Lowder’s history and filming methods – utilizing the 16mm bolex camera’s ability to advance or rewind to a specific frame and capture stills. So Lowder will shoot every other frame, then move to a new location and fill in the alternate frames, or any new pattern variation she thinks up on-location. Unusually for me, I’m watching these silent films without adding my own soundtrack, figuring they’re each one-minute complex creations and I need to pay strict attention.

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Poppies and Sailboats (2001)

From the Cinexperimentaux 5 disc – unfortunately the poppy field does not hold up under DVD compression, but this is the easiest way to catch on to the perceptual experiments. With an even blend of poppy frames and sailboat frames, the boats are sailing through the flowers. Start to adjust the rhythms and you get something else, a harder flicker or a poppy field with sailboat ghosts.

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Bouquets 11-20 (2005-2009)

Less interleaving, more slow/fast and even real-time focus on single moments, more attention paid to flying and walking creatures.

Rewatched these while reading her notebooks, less for the frame-by-frame structure of each piece than for the context and location (mostly small French organic farms). She emphasized that the films aren’t structually pre-planned, that the notebooks are documents of the filmmaking decisions that have already been made

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Bouquets 31-40 (2014-2022)

The online copy of 21-30 isn’t great, skipping for now. I’d like to hear how her definition of a Bouquet has changed, because for instance Bouquet 1 (rapid flicker of beachy fauna/flora) isn’t so similar to Bouquet 40 (long take of a leather worker with a chicken credits stinger). The Light Cone notes are detailed, revealing that some Bouquets are sequels to previous episodes, and also that the chickens at the end of #40 were eaten soon afterwards by a fox.

Phil Coldiron in Cinema Scope 96:

Lowder creates constantly modulating patterns of outrageous intricacy. A more sustained accounting of these films would require taking their reels in hand and working frame by frame. While this would make available a more detailed description, it would not help with the fact that language requires placing one word after another, a process that plays out in a kind of time that is entirely remote from Lowder’s striving towards simultaneity – a richness of experience that is, for her, true realism. The images that we see in films such as the Bouquets, in some sense, don’t exist.

by ·Comments Off on “Rameau’s Nephew” by Diderot (Thanx to Dennis Young) by Wilma Schoen (1974, Michael Snow)

An avant-garde sketch comedy omnibus, eyewash color field flashes between segments. My dream is to make a new version of this that isn’t annoying to watch, divide the four hours into eight episodes, and sell it to Criterion Channel as an original series.

Snow has called it a musical comedy, a true “talking picture” in 25 episodes. Most attempts at describing it quote his press notes: “Via the eyes and ears it is a composition aimed at exciting the two halves of the brain into recognition.”

Rosenbaum:

In parts, I find it intriguing; in toto, indigestible. Encyclopedias are useful things to have around, but who wants to plough through from A to Z in a single sitting?

The Episodes (incomplete):

1. guy (Snow) making bird sounds from three angles

Out-of-focus FOCUS card that seems designed to get audiences mad at the projectionist, woman speaks about Rameau on soundtrack.

Credits are read aloud – hey, Chantal is in this. So many credits, some of them fake.

6: Office ventriloquism – these are Jonas Mekas, Marlene Arvan, Harry Gant, and the voice of Tony Janneti.

7: Conversation(?) on an airplane with the camera turned sideways and gradually rotating, cutting after each line, Abbott and Costello academia. This goes on eternally but at least it’s constantly mutating, and the chapter headings (different numbers, usually with a voice announcing “four”) make me chuckle. Gradually pulls out revealing more of its artifice, the lighting, then the director’s script prompts.

8: someone’s hands (Snow’s) play a kitchen sink like a drum (with sink/synch sound), filling it with water to hear the pitch change.

9: A guy reads nonsense words into camera, the picture glitching on each syllable. I think it’s messing with us by dropping in some real words. He takes questions at the end.

10: Four-person table read among cacophony from different playback devices, primarily piano music by Rameau. They start talking in sync with their previously-filmed selves, sometimes their voices cut out, sometimes you have to turn down the TV volume because the cacophony gets too intense. This was Deborah Dobski, Carol Friedlander, Barry Gerson, Babette Mangolte. I didn’t skip ahead during this part, I think I might be immune to annoyance.

11: short one, visual of people riding a bus while voiceover talks about our man-machine future.

12: a group converses in a possibly made-up language while one of them films us watching… aha it was reverse-speak since the scene then plays backwards and flipped L-R with the sound reversed, but due to the sound quality I still can’t tell if they’re speaking English words. One of the two segments with professional actors, the other being #20.

13: A four-person sync-sound mockery in front of a museum diorama… on the soundtrack they’re reading each line all together, while on the visual one of them fake-lip-flaps a repeated pattern, until the film devolves into a stuttering flicker-horror. This one gets so loopy that it’s hard to tell if we’ve reached the between-scenes eyewash or if the scene has reached the limits of pure love and light.

14: Nude couple pissing into mic’d-up buckets, short segment.

15: Long one with a group in a fancy room, first making mouth sounds when a spotlight passes their face, then making sounds collaboratively, trying to emulate a Bob Dylan song heard on tape, lipsyncing “O Canada,” telling jokes, listening to the wall, all in the familiar stop-and-start style from the airplane segment. These are Nam June Paik, Annette Michelson, Bob Cowan, Helene Kaplan, Yoko Orimoto.

16: Hands are manipulating each item on a desk full of objects and a voice is breathlessly narrating the hands’ actions. It seems the voice is seeing what we see and trying to keep up, but then the voice catches up and gets ahead, so it seems the hands are following the voice’s instructions. The voice falls way behind again, with jumpcuts and blackouts in the image.

Short one, a family watches TV, hysterical laughter is heard, a mic faces an empty chair.

18: Girl looks out cabin window and we hear rain but don’t see any, then a rain-streaked glass is added in the foreground to complete the picture, other elements (including the girl) pop on and off. This is Joyce Wieland.

Three people sit awkwardly in a basement while a British comedy routine about religion plays on soundtrack, the picture cutting to a new lighting and pose when the radio show changes lead speaker.

20: People take turns reading lines, quick fades at end of lines to black or a color field or a strumming guitar. More setups and activity here than usual, I feel like the movie has been creating an alphabet Zorns Lemma-style and I haven’t been learning it. Settles into a one shot-per-spoken syllable rhythm, then mutates again, and again – this one has so many variations it’s like the full film in miniature.

Colored gels waved in front of a woman in bed. “Seeing is believing,” or is it? Double-exposure, a skit where some people conjure a bed (with an editing trick), then destroy a table (with a hammer). The only segment to include a hardcore sex scene, whose sound we only hear later as hands play a piano.

Bearded guy (Sitney) talking in profile, explaining that the onscreen numbers have been counting appearances of the word four/for in the movie, but the man splits into alternate versions of himself and jumbles the count.

Short scenes: empty tin/bell ring/snowy car, then credits/corrections/addenda.

from Snow’s notes:

Control of WAVES OF “COHERENCE” necessary. Rhythm continues but certain elements become more sequential then become more varied again … The entire film an “example” of the difficulty (impossibility) of the essentializing-symbolizing reduction involved in the (Platonic) nature of words in relation to experience (object) etc. discussed. The difference between the reduction absolutely necessary to discuss or even describe the experience and the experience. Each is “real” but each is different.

Regina Cornwell in Snow Seen:

Unlike the descriptive, literal, sometimes punning titles of many of Snow’s works which point to themselves, the title “Rameau’s Nephew” by Diderot (Thanx to Dennis Young) by Wilma Schoen appears to function differently. Denis Diderot, philosopher, editor of the Encyclopédie, art critic, theorist of drama as well as author of several plays and other fiction, was a major intellectual figure of the eighteenth century in France. Dennis Young receives thanks because he gave Snow the copy of Rameau’s Nephew by Diderot. Young was at that time a curator at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto. Wilma Schoen is a pseudonym: schoen the German word for beautiful, Wilma Schoen an anagram for Michael Snow. Jean Philippe Rameau was a contemporary of Bach and Handel who contributed important theoretical writings on harmony, wrote harpsicord music, operas and opera ballets. He was for a time admired by the French intellectual circle which included Diderot, Rousseau and d’Alembert. And he did have a nephew, a would-be musician and somewhat of a ne’er-do-well named Jean-François Rameau.

Sitney, who’s in the movie, calls it “the most comprehensive, and the most impressive, of the serial films of the seventies … The whole rambling film seems organized around a dizzying nexus of polarities which include picture/sound, script/performance, direction/acting, writing/speaking, and above all word/thing. The film opens with an image of the film-maker whistling into a microphone and ends with a brief shot of a snowdrift, so that the work is bracketed by a rebus for Mike … Snow.”

by ·Comments Off on Vogel 11: Stephen Dwoskin and Structuralism

Color Film (1971, Standish Lawder)

A reminder that experimental film is actually fun to watch. We re-read the chapter on minimalist/structuralist film in the Vogel, then watch “a fine example of pure minimal cinema,” expecting the camera to just be facing a wall or something, and instead I get a blast of color and movement set to a raucous Zappa song.

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Eisenbahn (1967, Lutz Mommartz)

Not fun but surely hypnotic, facing square out a train window. Occasional edits, and light obstructions when we can clearly see the cameraperson’s reflection, but I’m not dedicated enough to get a still frame of those.

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Naissant (1964, Stephen Dwoskin)

The same length as the train movie, both of them bringing to mind Vogel’s comment “there is no aesthetic reason for the film to last nine minutes instead of ninety” Funny to watch this the day after Je Tu Il Elle, as it’s a long wordless focus on a seemingly troubled dark-haired girl sitting in bed. No bag of sugar or letter writing, and this movie stays closer to her face and cuts far more often. The girl is Beverly Grant, a major underground actress who was in Flaming Creatures the year before.

Vogel also points to Kiss and Sleep by Warhol, but instead let’s watch more Dwoskin (I’ve only previously seen his Dirty).

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Soliloquy (1969, Stephen Dwoskin)

Almost a remake of Naissant but this time we see mostly her hands, and we hear her thoughts in voiceover. She’s divorced, depressed. “I wish I were pretty.”

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Moment (1968, Stephen Dwoskin)

Close-up with no editing this time. Another dark-haired girl, smoking and masturbating. Who needs Warhol, anyway? The soundtrack is some kind of horrible industrial howl.

by ·Comments Off on Peter Hutton shorts

New York Near Sleep for Saskia (1972)

Not the kind of work that holds up great on SD video, but I’ve come across Hutton’s name enough times and want to know what he’s about. Everything I’ve got is silent, so I’m playing the Sean Ono Lennon Asterisms album, and the first track synced up just right with this film, which was extracted from a Screening Room episode. It’s all about light, apparently, light coming through holes and forming patterns, mostly indoors with a couple outdoor portraits of unnamed people, leading to its most complicated and beautiful setup, a chair on a raft.

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Florence (1975)

Yes, light is going to be the main thing. Unmoving camera, quick fades between shots, makes you wonder why he didn’t go into still photography instead, then there’s just enough motion in the images (water, clouds) and light shifts to answer that question.

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New York Portrait chapter 1 (1979)

Some incredible skies, great rainy streets, making constellations from asphalt sparkling under streetlights (most of this was shot at night). A murmuration or two – in this house we give bonus points when your movie focuses on birds. It’s not Hutton’s fault that the Lennon title track is less to my tastes than the first three songs. Since I’m already being offensive to avant-garde purists by playing music, I’ll also say that these films feel kinda ambient, like they’d be good to project on the wall behind the cinema-themed bar I’m gonna open when I retire.

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New York Portrait chapter 2 (1981)

This one’s on the Wendy & Lucy DVD, where Kelly(?) calls them “thoroughly observational documents … Hutton transforms the act of looking into a cause for silent meditation.” More flooded streets, an insane street drain, a great shot with a blimp moving between two silhouette buildings, what looks like a jet fleet leaving behind a morse code pattern. Seems less explicitly light-focused than the others, or perhaps I’m getting used to his particular photographic style, or I’m distracted since I ran out of Lennon tunes and it started playing Titan to Tachyons.

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New York Portrait chapter 3 (1990)

All of these are from different sources, and this source is the worst – why are there no blu-ray companies focused on fringe silent shorts collections? I appreciate the fireworks in this one since I’m watching on the 4th of July, even thought Hutton hasn’t solved the problem that seeing fireworks in a movie is never especially cool. A rare bit of human drama towards the end as he films a medical emergency from straight overhead. Return of the murmuration in the final seconds, beautifully done.

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Boston Fire (1979)

The easiest one to remember its images from the title – something in Boston is on fire, and Hutton is fortunately here to film the smoky light with the dark stream of firehose water cutting across the image. My favorite of the bunch, possibly influenced by my recently reading Ten Skies.

Michael Sicinski in Cinema Scope:

A nearly perfect distillation of Hutton’s aesthetic, Boston Fire also harks back to the earliest days of cinema. It is an actualité, an observational eight-minute record of a dramatic human event. And, in terms of Hutton’s mature films about the Hudson River [1996 and later], Boston Fire serves as a kind of inversion. Instead of humans struggling to move across a placid natural surface, here it is nature that is the (destructive) agent, with humans desperately trying to beat it back.

by ·Comments Off on Owen Land films (1966-1977)

I’ve seen one short Owen Land film before and wasn’t so high on it, but I’m ever intrigued by the idea of a structural-experimental parody artist, or whatever he was, so I’m checking out everything I can find. All these were credited to George Landow – he changed his name soon afterwards.

Film in Which There Appear Sprocket Holes, Edge Lettering, Dirt Particles, etc. (1966)

Approx a one-second loop repeated a couple hundred times. Possibly one of those color reference images. Mekas was a fan. Why add film projector sound when any proper screening (not on a digital file in my living room) would have its own film projector sounds – is that part of the meta nature of the project or was it added during the video transfer?

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Diploteratology: Bardo Follies (1967)

1. A few-second loop of a boat exiting a tunnel while a person (real? animatronic?) waves on the left side
2. Three porthole views of the same image distributed across a mostly black screen
3. The image begins to get replaced with the bubbly butterfly-wing textures of celluloid melting or dissolving
4. Replacing the porthole views, we get fullscreen strobing freezeframes of the melt-dissolve textures
5. Left/right split-screen of film melts in motion
Fully silent.

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Remedial Reading Comprehension (1970)

“This is a film about you … not about its maker.” That’s more like it, layers upon layers. A woman dreams a classroom, a man jogs in place in front of a screen of someone jogging, an alarm sounds while we read about phony teaching techniques at a preordained pace, and why not throw in a commercial for pre-cooked rice.

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Thank You Jesus for the Eternal Present (1973)

An annoying one – high-contrast images of street scenes, closeups and a trade show, while overlapped sound loops are praising God/Jesus. Pretty short, at least.

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Wide Angle Saxon (1975)

Lively one with usually-sync sound, cutting between all sorts of things. Bible stories, and stories of modern people influenced by bible stories. Repeated outtakes of a reporter self-conscious that he can’t remember Panamanian generals’ names but who keeps pronouncing “junta” with a hard J. A terrified artist pouring red paint on things and people, who gets his own title sequence. “Oh it was a dream” – does this end with the woman from the beginning of Remedial waking up? Were the six years between films all her dream?

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New Improved Institutional Quality (1976)

Woman is giving exam instructions on the soundtrack, and the guy onscreen is following them. The instructions involve writing numbers on a photograph, so the guy goes inside the photograph, writing the numbers with a giant pencil. Then he shrinks further when confronted with a woman inside the picture, nestles in her shoe, and then flies silently through some previous Land films (Film In Which, Remedial). Weird, I would not have got the references if I hadn’t been watching these together.

new improved sprocket holes, edge lettering:

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On The Marriage Broker Joke (1979)

People in panda suits introduce versions of films about the marriage broker joke, which it sort of eventually gets around to telling. Marketing discussion with an offscreen speaker doing a bad Japanese stereotype accent. Ends with more religion stuff. The onscreen text was probably meant to be readable, but my video copy is horrendous. Rosenbaum called it an “obscure blend of deconstructive slapstick and various issues arising from his then-recent conversion to fundamentalist Christianity”

P. Adams Sitney in Artforum:

From the start, Land was unique in his subjects and in his relationship to the processes of filmmaking. Television, advertisements, linguistic confusions were the materials of his first films, and they remained his favorite subjects. Above all he used cinema as a means to explore the illusory nature of images.

He had no scruples about mercilessly making fun of his fellow filmmakers (and of me) so long as he prominently mocked himself and his own works, as he did with wry humor in films such as New Improved Institutional Quality and On the Marriage Broker Joke. His religious convictions never dispelled his fascination with the absurdities of human behavior. The drives for possessions, certitude, beauty, sex, money, and food — especially sex — make Land’s fictive humans ridiculous, confused, and devious. His ability to invent and to people his films with memorably ridiculous characters was unmatched, even by the late George Kuchar, among American avant-garde filmmakers.

Land:

I… developed the technique of fabricating fantastic stories about myself and relating them in a perfectly deadpan manner so as to convince my hearers of their authenticity. This was not done maliciously, but out of a sense of the absurdity of all phenomena and the arbitrariness of all information. This may be a form of poetry, which in Greek means making—as in “making it up.” Usually it is called “lying.”

by ·Comments Off on By Brakhage, Volume 2, Program 6 (1995-2003)

I Take These Truths (1995)

It took a frustrating few minutes to figure out how to play albums alongside silent movies on the new TV setup, but it was worth it… Brakhage films are up to 10X more effective at relaxing the mind after a work day than Three Stooges shorts. I Take These Truths is one of the hand-painted films, full of color and texture, and there’s not much else I can say except that I love it very much. Sometimes it feels like you’re seeing a flicker party of unrelated images, every frame a painting, and sometimes you catch a vertical line and feel the film flying through the projector, and if you’re locked in you can fly along with it.

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The Cat of the Worm’s Green Realm (1997)

These first two were silent so I played the new Prefuse 73 album. It’s a basic groove compared to the wildness of the films and I wondered if I should’ve put on something more crazy or abstract, but maybe it’s good to just have some beats and let the film do the talking. We’re back to photography – both the cat and the worm make appearances, and for a green realm there’s an awful lot of orange and pink and yellow. Seems like the realm might be the backyard, but the camera is so very close to every leaf and blade of grass (worm’s-eye view?) that the yard is reduced to blobs.

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Yggdrasill: Whose Roots Are Stars in the Human Mind (1997)

Now I’m picking songs to match the length of the movies, and I do have a 17-minute song, an eerie ambient piece from the new Kevin Drumm record. Instead of a rush of imagery in a particular style, this one edits all the styles together, a rush of rushes of imagery. I keep feeling like there’s a Framptonian pattern to crack in the edits, but maybe he just chopped together some mothlit leader, hand painted pieces, too-close photography, shots of whipping the camera around fast enough to leave trails, and the sun sparkling on turbulent water, at semi-random and appreciated the synchronicity.

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… Reel Five (1998)

This one has its own music, an avant-piano piece. We spend some minutes adjusting to the music over a blank screen, then the background turns blinding white, with light black and colored patterns flickering across.

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Persian Series 1-3 (1999)

Persian 1 gives us peak swirling oil painting flicker action, then #2 bends our minds by tracking into and out of the frame, an effect I can feel without being able to tell how they’re doing it without a consistent background to zoom into, and #3 cranks the pace into overdrive and adds a Rorschach mirror effect. Just outstanding. I played an anxious saxey Sons of Kemet song, a good fit.

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Chinese Series (2003)

Just white scratch-figures on widescreen windowboxed black background for a brief, light ending to the program. I unwisely played a heavy Zappa-quoting Pere Ubu track.

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For Stan (2009, Marilyn Brakhage)

Marilyn traces the landscape with her own camera and provides valuable footage of Stan filming in a cave wearing a Canyon Cinema shirt – and also walking into a wall because he couldn’t see where he was going. I played the Simon Hanes album – track 2 made the film too cartoony, then track 3 settled in nicely.

–
By now it’s been forever since I watched some of the other shorts on this blu-ray, and instead of pining for the 400-ish Brakhage films that it’s very hard to see, I could watch one from this set daily on a loop, forever. It’s not like I run the risk of memorizing them or tiring them out.

Loved the Brakhage on Brakhage series in the extras, like a scrapbook of choice Stan quotes, speaking clearly and sensibly about his work.

…the scratching of titles directly onto the film surface which had this effect: that from the beginning the viewer was given the rhythm of the very projector that was going to show them the rest of the film. They were given the sense of the film’s surface itself.

There’s crazy footage of him filming in the field. He says he edited a film for Joseph Cornell in Maya Deren’s apartment, talks about learning from Marie Menken, and his thoughts on the labels “experimental” and “avant-garde” and “underground.” Then the Sunday Salon segments are Q&A pieces about one film at a time:

  • Psalm Branch is a Freud film, Stan is a big Freud fan
  • Under Childhood was recognizing the dark side of his children’s existence
  • Murder Psalm was a “trance-state miracle” made in a rage after a nightmare about killing his mother
  • Boulder Blues: “I wanted the film to be composed of things that are mostly in people’s peripheral vision.”
  • Worm’s Green Realm: you can attempt to follow narratively with the “kinds of feelings that are intrinsic to story” but are purely visual

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.