by ·Comments Off on Tom, Tom, The Piper’s Son (1969, Ken Jacobs)

Ken shows us a ridiculous silent comedy, then re-shows it, this time splitting the image, or zoomed in on a different section, or showing an entirely different scene with a color flower and a person in silhouette for some reason. We have Peter Tscherkassky at home. Highlights from my soundtrack include Neu 2, the usual Zorn and Warp stuff, and Metallic Life Review.

Alex Fields:

The length feels like a product of how long it inevitably would be once the decision was made to rework all the footage chronologically, and not of how long the ideas and tricks could sustain interest. More importantly than the length, the rhythm of the film suffers as a result, and the longer it goes on the more it feels like some sequences are just going through motions we’ve already seen in order to get us to the next interesting part (and the interesting parts become fewer and further between after the first 30-40 minutes).

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A Tom Tom Chaser (2002)

That’s more like it – stretching the time and image of the film like taffy for ten minutes, more fun than the feature. I played a near-equal-length song from Dirty Three’s Ocean Songs.

by ·Comments Off on Scenes from Under Childhood (1970, Stan Brakhage)

I’ve watched part one before. Color fields flash and fade. Shots of the house and children have been turned into reddish defocused funhouse blobs. Almost-normal photography at the very end of a young kid feeding an even younger kid with a spoon.

2. Distinct textures in this one, not just more of the same. Added to the funhouse effect is some Melies house transformations with the kids as actors/witnesses, shimmering particle effects, and some really nice superimpositions, while the film processing looks like someone turning the color and tint up and down on a TV. The kids watch Shirley Temple on their own TV. Wild textures and flames, and a playhouse in the real house so he can mess with our sense of scale.

3. Ever more recognizable images of human activities. Getting out of the house more too, a picnic then a road trip. I never know how much of the apparently domestic footage is staged scenes vs. the rest of the family just living their lives while dad buzzes around them with a camera stuck to his face. If the latter, then it’s a fairly nude household.

4. Opens on his wife crying, then the kids are fighting too – this is the discord episode. A trip to the pool is edited into a fleshy mashup, two birds seen dimly. Stan does the dishes, and the color fields from part one return with a vengeance. Everyone shows us their penis then it wraps up at a baseball game.

I played the Silents Shuffle – MVP of each section: Anoushka Shankar, Squarepusher, Zorn’s Book of Angels, Orbital.

by ·Comments Off on Three 1976 Shorts with Unpromising Titles

Table (Ernie Gehr)

Flicker film of a table setting, with a teapot and some cups and saucers, maybe some scissors back there. A shot from one angle in red light, another shot slightly offset in blue light, a third in white, giving the impression of a 3D movie gone haywire in editing, or a preview of late-period Ken Jacobs. Watched this as the director intended (a video copy at home, which was seemingly rephotographed off a film projection, while listening to Makaya McCraven in the headphones).

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Window (Stan Brakhage)

Stan aims his camera at/through a window for ten minutes. Unfortunately for the haters, this is incredible, because Stan is able to aim his camera at/through objects until they reveal their spirits inside.

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Leisure (Bruce Petty)

“Everybody expressing themselves simultaneously was causing tension and blood pressure… work had been planned for, and leisure had not.” See, this is why I sketch out the month’s moviewatching in advance, to lower the blood pressure. “Plans were laid to get fitness into offices, design into chairs.” Very jumbled and busy, by design. Pencil sketches meets cutup animation, the narrator sounding like he’s advertising to us.

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.