by ·Comments Off on By Brakhage, Volume 2, Program 2

Scenes From Under Childhood, Section One (1967)

Looks like one of those Brakhage films where he tries to retrain the eye to remember seeing before object recognition, or some such thing, since there’s lots of blackness, then all red, blurry funhouse-mirror images before they finally coagulate into family life and portraits of children. I kept the iTunes music off since Criterion listed the audio as “silent/monaural” but don’t recall hearing anything.

Yup, the Criterion notes say this film “begins Brakhage’s major investigation into stages of consciousness”

–
The Machine of Eden (1970)

Landscapes and clouds, with zooms and time-lapse, made ominous by Coil’s “Escalation”

–
Star Garden (1974)

A bit more time lapse, a few more skies, but mostly domestic life: children in a house/cabin, doing things inside and outside, what things exactly it’s hard to tell. Side 2 of Animal Collective’s “Here Comes The Indian” wasn’t the best soundtrack choice.

–
Desert (1976)

This was my favorite of the bunch. Defocused(?) reds and browns, sunsets – apocalyptic – with a crazy final shot. Faith No More’s “The Real Thing / Underwater Love” worked surprisingly well.

M. Sicinski:

These films denaturalize our vision, positing the most basic rules and habits of the optical world as mere conveniences … Watching any Brakhage film will demonstrate how absolutely “tutored” our seeing really is. We focus on the object, but blind ourselves to its flickering shadow. We count the hours of daylight with the clock on the wall, but we ignore the gradual shifts in color temperature on our walls and through our curtains, the deep hash-marks of negative space in our pets’ fur near dusk or the way that a photo of a loved one becomes eerily elongated when we catch a glimpse of it from the side. Most of the time, we use our eyes to look at things, so we can take them, or throw them away, or avoid bumping into them. In Stan Brakhage’s films, we use our eyes to see, without demand or expectation, so that the surfaces of the world become a renewable resource.

by ·Comments Off on Free Radicals: A History of Experimental Film (2012, Pip Chodorov)

Personal history by Chodorov – I know the name because I was once subscribed to his FrameWorks email list. His dad Stephan was a filmmaker, so Pip grew up surrounded by independent film and artists. He’s got interviews with the big names: Mekas, Kubelka, Jacobs, Breer, Snow… and Hans Richter, so I guess some of the interviews were archival and I didn’t take great notes. He takes a fun, enthusiast approach rather than the history-book implied by the title, and any excuse to revisit this work is a good one.

Includes some short films (in their entirety?):

Free Radicals (1958, Len Lye) – tremendous, white scratches on black, edited rhythmically to an African drum group in ever-changing patterns.

Recreation (1956, Robert Breer) – seen this before, I don’t get the Noel Burch narration but the visuals are fast and exciting.

Rainbow Dance (1936, Len Lye) – insanely complicated color and effects for the mid-1930’s.

And the section of Brakhage’s Dante Quartet called Existence Is Song (I forgot the Quartet sections were titled).

by ·Comments Off on Screening Room: Hollis Frampton (1977)

Much more breathing room in the interview than in the Hubley episode, and Frampton, as always, is great fun to listen to. He discusses getting to know Ezra Pound and experiencing his Cantos (a difficult, book-length piece of modernist poetry full of obscure references), which sound like they could easily have influenced HF’s work, but sadly his story gets cut off to show Maxwell’s Demon, then Surface Tension (minus the first part, the man with a clock), accompanied by good descriptions. Frampton tries to explain exactly what kind of filmmaker he is, and they struggle into a very good HF intro to Lemon (excerpted on the Criterion disc), then they do an honest-to-god audio commentary over the silent film. Some talk of Frampton’s work as a professor then an excerpt from Critical Mass.

Pas de Trois (1975)

Oooh, haven’t seen this one appear anywhere else. Footage from the New York State Fair, the “stripper” tent lit by strobes, then a little girl dancing in a different area. HF shoots the dancers, but also the strobes, a crack in the tent where someone peers through, and a fishtank, all accompanied by another HF/RG commentary.

Description found online: “An analysis of film’s persistent relationship to sexuality, mediated by allusions to early cinema’s flicker, and other aggressive qualities of the cinematic apparatus.”

“This is probably something that will never transpire,” HF says about the final form of Magellan – sadly, he was right. He discusses his plan for Magellan, thoughts on sound vs. silent film, and shows a collection of “Lumiere Bits,” what Criterion calls the Pans, short for the Panopticons. Somewhere there’s a program called Straights of Magellan: Drafts and Fragments collecting 49 of these. Of the kid with the frog, “this is my one-minute horror movie.” There’s also a cat toying with captured bird, 3D pattern on a sidewalk, saw cutting wood, a few more.

HF, interviewed elsewhere about these: “A catalogue or compilation of films which were limited to exactly one minute – 1440 frames. They were to be an homage not so much to the early cinema of the Lumieres as to an aspect of film that I feel has been lost.”

At a certain point, what has tended to happen previously happened again: I set out to make a simple inventory or catalogue of the appearances of the world, which I imagined might run to a few hundred short films, but as I actually began to gather these film segments they began to organise themselves – to my discomfiture – in a manner that I suppose is determined by my own immersion in montage: one thing suggests another, and if you have five things there seems to be some best order in which they should be seen. The bits of film, which were as opaque as an isolated word, seemed somehow to be demanding a more intricate organisation than I had originally planned. At first I thought that simply meant sorting them into more intricate categories; I had originally imagined that there would be four categories – ‘ordinary, extraordinary, exotic, and erotic views’ – which were the categories used by the Lumieres. So I attempted a more complex sorting, which led to the question of an equilibrium among the categories … What basically evolved from that proposed inventory – or catalogue, or storehouse – is a work whose working title is currently Magellan. This is composed of parts, not all of which consist of one-minute segments, not by any means. It’s not a work that can be diagrammed in linear fashion, since it uses the grid – among many others – of the cycle of the solar year. In other words, it’s a calendar. That is to say, it rotates like a wheel, or rather like a series of wheels that rotate within one another. I now expect, when and if the whole thing is completed, that it will be, very roughly, thirty-six hours long. Within those thirty-six hours there are a series of rough categories – well, the categories are actually quite exact, but they name parts that overlap each other on a kind of twodimensional map of the work. Those categories are ‘Straits’ and ‘Clouds’ [of Magellan], and there’s a section which corresponds to a ‘Birth of Magellan’ (itself comprised of subsections), and there’s another which relates to adolescence. Then there’s a ‘Death’ and even, heaven help us, a ‘Resurrection’.

States (1967)

White-on-black streaks of falling water and/or sparks, and rising smoke, alternating. Lovely, put me right to sleep.

Heterodyne (1967)

A large amount of black, with quick single-frame bursts of a color wash, a shape, or a colored shape. Gets boring pretty quickly. I played Mogwai’s You’re Lionel Richie which didn’t work at all. Frampton says “it was made in abject (if blissful) ignorance of Paul Sharits’ early work.”

Watched again with William Tyler’s Terrace of the Leper King after fixing an interlacing issue. Much better! The film still lasts twice as long as it is interesting, but I enjoy the anticipation/response of each burst of colors and shapes.

Snowblind (1968)

Watched with Yo La Tengo’s Ashes on the Ground, very enjoyable. A study of shifting lighting, motion and focus effects on layered fence patterns, pretty simple as far as HF films go. Internet doesn’t mention the identity of the patient man behind the fences, but I don’t think it’s Michael Snow.

Artificial Light (1969)

A minute-long scene of some artist-types chatting around a table, with cuts and dissolves, ending with a zoom into a photo of the moon. But this is repeated twenty times, each with a different variation. Once their faces are whited-out, once the picture flickers on and off, sometimes they’re colored or processed in different ways, flipped upside down and run in reverse. Quite an amusing movie. Apparently it was Frampton’s entry point from typical 1960’s avant-garde into structural films – and only a year later he’d put out Zorns Lemma.

Music played: Ennio Morricone – Music For Cinema: The Complete Edition, disc 4, though only track 6 really worked with the movie.

Noctiluca (1974)

Colored circles, reminding me of searchlights across a chain link fence, and sometimes of the MasterCard logo. Music played: “Stalker Dub” from John Zorn’s Nosferatu, which worked nicely. Intended for day two of Magellan.

Autumnal Equinox (1974)

Watched on Frampton’s 77th birthday. Shot in a slaughterhouse, but not terribly comparable to Blood of the Beast, since HF shoots everything too close with his trademark jittery camera movements. I wish there’d been fewer tongues and eyeballs, but it was mostly bearable, more textural than representational. Still, a motherfucker of a film, very red and gloopy and horrible. Music played: Autechre’s Exai tracks 10-13, which worked well, so I’m glad I resisted the urge to play Ty Segall’s Slaughterhouse.

by ·Comments Off on A Hollis Frampton Odyssey disc 2 (1971-1980)

Frampton explains his Hapax Legomena cycle:

Hapax Legomena means things said one time. The phrase is a piece of scholarly jargon that refers to words that occur only once in an entire literature or in the entire corpus of a writer’s work in the antique languages. The problem typically with a hapax legomenum is that because it occurs once, it occurs only in one context, and the context does not always reveal the meaning… There is always an element of uncertainty.

Poetic Justice (1972)

Frampton: “a film script in the act of becoming a film”

HF shoots 240 pages of a script upon a table, one at a time, describing a film in four scenes (tableaus). The first describes a couple of rooms in which “you” (I didn’t expect to be the star of the film) attempt to film a blue jay out the window until “your lover” comes home. The second scene alternates between shots of empty rooms, and shots of “my hand holding a photograph of the same scene” but populated. Next, the two of you make love while different impossible visions appear out the window. Back to photographs in the fourth scene, as your lover rifles through a stack of photographs, alternately showing the two of you in similar scenarios. The filmmaker returns: “Your lover’s hand is holding a still photograph of myself, filming these pages.”

Critical Mass (1971)

Slowly step through the audio of a two-character improvised drama, looping two steps forward, one step back, like a less intense but no less methodical version of a Martin Arnold film. Audio plays over black for a couple minutes, then picture, then picture disappears halfway through, and comes back (but out-of-sync) after an interval. Near the end, the editing stops interrupting every word of the dialogue, lets them run on for 20 or 30 seconds at a time, repeating sections we’ve heard before.

Briefly annoying, then thoroughly mesmerizing for the first half, then back to annoying.

I’ve watched (Nostalgia) before. The other four in the series are Travelling Matte, Ordinary Matter, Remote Control and Special Effects.

–
Criterion summarizes Magellan: “His intention was for the cycle to include thirty-six hours of film, to be shown over the course of 371 days, which Frampton dubbed the Magellan Calendar.” This never made sense to me until I heard HF’s comments on the disc:

First of all, it’s a kind of encyclopedia or inventory of sites (sights?) which proposes to have so many different images that it will function as a kind of voyage through the world… If one were to undertake to see the final film in a certain form there would be really a little bit to see every day… One of the aspects that I think is important is that I feel that the spectator of film who has been invited or asked to experience film… might also enjoy having another kind of experience of film that filmmakers have. For a filmmaker, film is not an exotic thing that you go out to, it is a thing pretty much that you do every day. For a filmmaker, whatever you’re doing, even if you’re making Cleopatra or something like that, still you live with it, it becomes an extremely intimate part of your life, which is vivid on the one hand, and on the other hand it’s very ordinary. Film is not an exotic thing to be doing for a filmmaker, it’s daily.

The Birth of Magellan: Cadenza I (1980)

Green flickers on black as an orchestra tunes up. A thunderstorm. Then alternating shots of a wedding preparation (applause) and a silent film (a low buzzing sound), with a white/red circular wipe separating the two. Bizarre.

Pans 0-4, 697-700

I thought from the title that HF would be panning the camera for a minute, each in a different location, but these are simply minute-long idea-films using any sort of motion or effect.
0: two cloud patterns strobed together
1: hippie bead thing penduluming left and right
2: thin white stips falling downward
3: manic time-lapse run through cornfield
4: sheets of paper on wall blowing in breeze, overlaid with the same shot at a different time, so each page looks like two sheets, moving through each other
697: argh, machete man removing dead cow’s head
698: whipping back and forth in a flower field
699: boy taunts camera with a still-living frog on a fishhook
700: ghostly translucent road traffic

Selected Pans:

Ingenivm Nobis Ipsa Pvella Fecit, Part I (1975)

Nude woman walks, turns, skips rope, plays ball on a black field in stuttering stop-motion. To HF, this represents springtime.

Magellan: At the Gates of Death, Part I (1976)

Skulls and mummified things. Red and green overlaid patterns that would probably make your eyes fall out if you watched with 3D glasses on. A hexagonal pattern rushes past as a palate cleanser between the other sections. I liked this one a lot.

Winter Solstice (1974)

Opens with what looks like the bonfire shot from Zorns Lemma. Jittery handheld shots of fire – dark, all yellows and red, with single frames of light blue at the cuts. A shower of sparks which might have been Pan 2. It’s all repetitive, hypnotic and silent – an excellent film to doze off to.

Also on the disc is Gloria!, which I watched once before.

by ·Comments Off on Avant-Garde Memorial Shorts

A night of avant-garde shorts watched in memorium of a fellow enthusiast who died young.

Let Me Count The Ways (Minus 10, 9, 8, 7, 6) (2004, Leslie Thornton)

“August 6, 1945 – Dad observes the bomb drop on Hiroshima from a reconnaissance plane” Processed stock footage, some of it labeled “dad”. Motion seems sped up. Japanese dialogue, a woman is questioned about having lived through the Hiroshima explosion. “Not one white person was burned.” Onscreen text about plant mutations. Flyover camera with a blue circle flashing on and off, scrolling faster and faster. Stills of Hitler striking poses warp into one another, with confusing voiceover in German and English.

The Whitney uses big words: “By editing together controversial or transgressive material, she creates discursive cinematic spaces in which to consider humanity’s inexplicable behaviors, as do fellow avant-garde filmmakers Chris Marker and Chantal Akerman. . . . Thornton’s employment of footage relating to Hiroshima and the atomic age, elucidating her preoccupation with anxiety, trauma, and culpability, derives in part from her grandfather’s and her father’s roles in developing the atomic bomb and from her up-close childhood experience of the Cold War.”

Tusalava (1929, Len Lye)

Animation that looks like it’s inspired first by cellular biology, then at the end by an abusive relationship, all with great piano music.

Glimpse of the Garden (1957, Marie Menken)

Brief static and longer motion shots of the garden, with nice extreme close-ups. It’s all set to the ceaseless chirping of a bird whose song I know well, since my parents had a mechanical singing version. But which bird?

Wintercourse (1962, Paul Sharits)

Quick movement and fast cuts form light patterns with recognizeable images: trees, statues, a gutter gushing water, flashes of nudity. The movie pauses to watch some TV, then goes on and on. I dozed, but I think there was a wedding near the end.

Pixillation (1970, Lillian Schwartz)

I liked the inky liquid-on-glass effects more than the computer graphics, though those are probably impressive for 1970. Music that gets increasingly harsh, loud and grating, so I kept turning it down. Didn’t count on me being able to do that, huh Gershon Kingsley? Lillian Schwartz did computer animation on The Lathe of Heaven.

Dirty (1971, Steven Dwoskin)

Two topless girls drink a bottle of wine then roll around in bed, printed with differing levels of extreme slow motion, the light all pulsating. There’s supposed to be music but I just hear a staticky rumble

Yantra (1957, James Whitney)

A million colored specks slide into different patterns, surely animated by some mathematical obsessive. Soundtrack goes from annoying to nice and quickly back – sounds computery, but this was 1957 so maybe not.

Rat Life and Diet in North America (1968, Joyce Wieland)

Illustrating current politics using rats, wonderful. Nightmarish soundtrack: from a siren to a sax solo to carnival music to the beach boys (but covered in buzzing flies). Joyce was married to Michael Snow at the time – wish he’d provided some lighting or sound editing help.

Valentin de las Sierras (1968, Bruce Baillie)

A Mexican family at work and play, shot in extreme close-up, with music and some voice on the soundtrack.

Carabosse (1980, Larry Jordan)

More madcap cutout animation, made less madcap by the dour piano tune on the soundtrack. Maybe cropped at the top?

by ·Comments Off on Canyon Cinema in Portland

Luckily, a Canyon Cinema program was playing at the university when we rolled into Portland, and I somehow got Katy to come along to the severely under-attended screening.

Our Lady of the Sphere (1969, Larry Jordan)

Occasionally amusing clip-art animation with a colorful circus theme, featuring a woman with a balloon head. But if amusing is what Jordan was going for, he’s about 20,000 leagues below Terry Gilliam. I assume there’s something else that eludes me. The sound was irritating. I give it slightly more credit for difficulty once I realized it was made in the 60’s with physically-clipped-art and not on a Macintosh in the early 90’s. Apparently this is one of his best-known works – it’s in the National Film Registry, whatever that is. Internet says it draws from the Tibetan Book of the Dead.

Dream Work (2002, Peter Tscherkassky)

Quiet (relatively) centerpiece of the Cinemascope Trilogy – a world of difference seeing this on a cinema screen vs. my laptop and television. So, so awesome. Katy watched with her eyes closed. I’ve seen it before on DVD, noted here.

Self Portrait Post Mortem (2002, Louise Bourque)

A decaying pattern scrolls up on left and right of frame, low frame rate but with a weird sliding motion. During the second half, a woman appears in the center of screen.

Happy-End (1996, Peter Tscherkassky)

The one composed from stock footage of a couple in the 60’s at different holidays (or is it just one holiday?), opening and drinking a ton of celebratory booze, dancing and posing for the camera. I’ve seen it before on DVD, noted here.

Very (2001, Stan Brakhage)

We saw a trailer for some upcoming Helen Mirren thing before the shorts started, and I was annoyed to see that the projectionist was running another trailer beneath this totally gorgeous, brightly-colored hand-painted Brakhage piece, but no, it looks like Stan ran out of blank film and painted over a trailer reel for the movie Quills, taking his title from the on-screen superlatives complimenting that movie and cast. Hilarious and wonderous.

Night Mulch (2001, Stan Brakhage)

Companion piece to Very, coloring over the shortened TV version of the Quills trailer. Katy loved these.

Mirror (2003, Matthias Muller)

The rare piece with original footage using actors and locations and lots of careful lighting, not hand-tooling some stock footage. Lots of darkness, and chairs.

The Observer: “The tableaux in which the figures stand like statues are animated by light alone. A light that glimmers, or suffuses a room like smoke, or crackles and fizzes from overhead lamps in long corridors. It polishes a grand piano, soothes the cheek of the pensive woman, surrounds the man with glassy halations and then makes him vanish, as if his part was over, before the room in which he stands disappears.”

Phantom Limb (2005, Jay Rosenblatt)

Title cards tell the story of Jay’s little brother who died as a boy, then a series of short pieces (home movies, some stock footage, some staged) are presented in order of the stages of grief. Katy didn’t approve of the birthing scene, and I was mesmerized by the sheep-shearing one.

by ·Comments Off on Chelsea Girls (1966, Andy Warhol)

“Everybody tastes different. But they all taste pretty good.” – Eric

Warhol’s first national hit, breaking outside the New York underground scene – after the widely-discussed but barely-seen sex/art films and before further success with the Flesh/Trash/Heat movies then franchising his name out to movies like Dracula and Bad on which he exec-produced.

Two 16mm projections side-by-side, Zaireeka-like (or perhaps Napoleon-like). Found the reel numbers/titles online along with projection instructions. Think I found out why it ran longer at the High than the listed runtime. The reels were supposed to overlap more, with no long periods of black on one side waiting for its neighbor to run out. As well as shorter, it would’ve been more interesting without all the black, providing new juxtapositions.

Reel #1, right – Nico In Kitchen
B/W, sound for the first few minutes. Nico (some years after La Dolce Vita) gives herself a haircut in the kitchen, drinks “jungle juice.” Eric Emerson (of Heat and Lonesome Cowboys) and Nico’s son are hanging around. Some camera movement here, but not much in the other reels until the halfway point.

Reel #2, left – Father Ondine & Ingrid
“Pope” Ondine (a Factory speed freak) has shoved two chairs together, a woman (Ingrid Superstar) comes in for “confession.” She never quite takes his title seriously – he asks her questions about her boyfriend then berates her for being a lesbian.

Reel #3, right – Brigid Holds Court
Overweight drug dealer “The Duchess” (Brigid Berlin, who had small parts in a couple John Waters films) talks to another girl, answers the phone.

Reel #4, left – Boys In Bed
Exactly that, slight nudity but no real action, some guys (Ed and Patrick) having a conversation I guess, but no sound.

Reel #5, right – Hanoi Hannah
A girl who kinda looks like a boy (Mary Woronov, bewigged wife in House of the Devil, also in Eating Raoul, Death Race 2000) hangs out in a room with a couple other girls, somewhat bullying and tormenting them. One mostly stays on the floor under the sink. This (and presumably #6) was one of the pre-scripted segments.

Reel #6, left – More Hanoi Hannah and Guests
Same room/cast as on the right, but at a different time and without sound.

Reel #7, right – Mario Sings Two Songs
More of the same guys in bed as #4, with some “female” visitors this time (Mario “Banana” Montez, also of Flaming Creatures) and less nudity.

Reel #8, left – Marie Menken
The first color segment. A visiting mother (Menken, director of Go! Go! Go!) wielding a whip is berating her son (Gerard Malanga of Vinyl) over his treatment of his girlfriend – because the girl (Woronov again, sharply dressed in a white shirt and tie) is sitting in the other bed barely moving and never speaking. Mother and son’s conversation get more shrill until they’re lost in the bad sound recording and the Velvet Underground music (droning ambience), but the camera is very active, scanning back and forth the room.

Reel #9, right – Eric Says All
The source of some lyrics in the Sonic Youth song. Eric Emerson stands there tripping, saying whatever’s on his mind, semi-stripteasing. Nice red lighting, shifting about.

Reel #10, left – Color Lights on Cast
Eric and others stand around, talk (no sound) while colored lights scan over them. They seem to be watching the other Eric to their right.

Reel #11, right – Pope Ondine
The Pope again. This time he physically attacks the girl talking with him (Ronna Page), then tries to justify himself, then kills time waiting for the film to run out, asking an offscreen Paul Morrissey if he can leave early.

Reel #12, left – Nico Crying
Nico silently cries, then just looks into space, while great colored light patterns play over her face.

G. Morris:

The idea behind the project was to film various Factory denizens doing what they did best: prattling, prancing, fondling each other, shooting up, screaming, applying makeup, confessing secrets, smacking and upbraiding each other.
…
Drugs, especially methedrine, were a crucial component of this crowd, and they’re everywhere in The Chelsea Girls. Both Ondine and Brigid Polk shoot up in their sequences, with Ondine doing so ritualistically, while Brigid unceremoniously sticks a needle through her blue jeans.

I don’t get the movie, or Warhol or his “superstars” (the label given to the drug-addled friends he regularly cast in films). But I guess I can see its value as a unique document of the Warhol scene that was inexplicably fascinating people throughout the 1960’s. Probably best expressed by Omar Diop below:

Whether you consider Andy Warhol’s Chelsea Girls to be fiction or document, it is an event, a rupture in the history of the cinema and an attack on the morality implicit in the image. Chelsea Girls is a monster born in the mind of a dilettante who puts the technical extremism of a Godard to the service of a moral metaphysics of a de Sade. An infernal machine puts on the screen a universe which only obeys its own laws.

by ·Comments Off on Canyon Shorts

As I said, reading the Canyon Cinema book just made me want to see more of their films, and so I held a solo screening of some video reproductions of films from their archives.

Notes on the Circus (1966, Jonas Mekas)

Doc footage from his seat at the Ringling Bros. circus, edited to a pulp after the fact, divided into four sections.

1. nervous, jittery views of circus acts: trapeze, clowns, animal acts.
2. more of the same, but towards the end of this section the editing goes hyper and adds superimpositions.
3. picks up where the end of 2 left off. This is likely more fun than an actual circus.
4. all energy, focus be damned.

The guitar/harmonica folk music worked pretty well alongside the images. Mekas repeats songs just as he repeats shots (the same woman doffs her white coat and ascends the trapeze at least three times).
Canyon claims “no post-editing of opticals,” so was he rewinding and re-exposing the film while sitting at the circus?

Here I Am (1962, Bruce Baillie)

A pre-Wiseman verite doc on a local school for mentally disturbed children. Why is the caretaker giving the kids cigarettes?!? Non-sync sound (no narration) with added cello. Nicely paced, and very well preserved. Canyon called it “never before released,” but before when? The DVD notes say it was part of a homegrown newsreel program. “Like the school itself, the camera gives the kids center stage and moves at their pace.”

Fake Fruit Factory (1986, Chick Strand)

Shaky, handheld doc of women who work at the titular factory, talking about sex and food and work, interrupted in the middle by their annual picnic. Non-sync sound, I think – hard to tell since close-ups of hands and bodies and fake fruit are favored over faces. Canyon gets the title wrong on their website and botches the description. Wasn’t Strand one of their founders?

SSS (1988, Henry Hills)

Oh wonderful, a dance film. Many dancers in many locations, all wearing hilarious clothes, rapidly edited in a pleasing way, punctuated by a few seconds of black every once in a while. Best part is the music, orchestral then cartoonish, sounds like a DJ with some electronics, all by Tom Cora, Christian Marclay and Zeena Parkins (and recorded by Kramer). Canyon says “filmed on the streets of the East Village and edited over three years.”

Money (1985, Henry Hills)

No music this time, but lots of musicians and some dancers. Seems like a hundred people on the street were interviewed about money (some were given scripts to read) then their every word was chopped out of context and edited against everyone else, sometimes forming new sentences or patterns from different sources, sometimes just spazzing out all over, interspersed with the musician and dancer clips. Somewhere in there were John Zorn, Fred Frith, Tom Cora, Eugene Chadbourne, Ikue Mori, Bill Laswell, Christian Marclay and Derek Bailey. I’ll bet they play this at every Tzadik party. Hills would seem to have a love for music, a sense of humor and tons of patience. Canyon: “thematically centered around a discussion of economic problems facing avant-garde artists in the Reagan era. Discussion, however, is fragmented into words and phrases and reassembled into writing. Musical and movement phrases are woven through this conversation to create an almost operatic composition.” Good poster quote by J. Hoberman: “If time is money, this 15-minute film is a bargain.”

( ) (2003, Morgan Fisher)

Composed entirely of insert shots from other films. Could be the most intricate murder/conspiracy film of all time, what with all the plots and notes and watches and gambling and guns and knives and secret goings-on. I wish it’d had music. Didn’t recognize a single film, and I couldn’t even find any of the sources by searching character names spotted on notes and letters with IMDB. Shadowplay would be ashamed of my b-movie image-recognition prowess. I really want to do a remake, but the logistics and time involved would be hefty. Fisher is only glancingly mentioned in the Canyon book, but I had this and wanted to watch it.

Thom Andersen:

Fisher appreciates inserts because they perform the “self-effacing… drudge-work” of narrative cinema, showing “significant details that have to be included for the sake of clarity in telling a story,” and he made ( ) to liberate them… to raise them from the realm of Necessity to the realm of Freedom,” to reveal their hidden beauty.

Oh Dem Watermelons (1965, Robert Nelson)

Much talk about this one in the book. A silent, still shot of a watermelon lasts an age, then a singalong with an old racist song – or is it an ironically racist new song? – then some melon smashing with pioneering use of the shaky-cam. The song starts repeating and becomes irritating, as must all avant-garde film soundtracks. This time, Steve Reich is to blame. There’s stop-motion and Gilliam-style cut-out animation. My favorite bits are the dog that appears to poop out a watermelon, and the melon slowly crushed by construction equipment. Made as an intermission film for a theatrical racial satire, Nelson claims to have been inspired by Louis Feuillade.

Samadhi (1967, Jordan Belson)

Eclipses and auroras, perhaps the eyeball of a wizard, five spherical minutes with a blowing, groaning soundtrack.


Samadhi (c) Jordan Belson

The Way To Shadow Garden (1954, Stan Brakhage)

The camera stalks creepily around an empty room. A clean-cut young man comes home, struggles with a glass of water and the bed, dances, reads a book. The camera continues its subtly creepy assault, lingering on light bulbs, but otherwise I’m thinking this is Brakhage’s most performance-based film that I’ve seen, a wordless narrative episode. But then the man claws his eyes out, the film stock reverses, and he seems to find the shadow garden, all blind light and shubberies. The first half makes me think Brakhage could’ve made some killer Sirkian dramas if he’d had the urge.

The Potted Psalm (1947, Sidney Peterson & James Broughton)

Shots of people and things. A graveyard. A snail. An accordion. A funhouse mirror. Dolls suicide. A woman eats a leaf. The cameraman has a beer and a cigarette.

Not the first Sidney Peterson movie I’ve watched, and I still don’t get what he is on about. Kino made an interlaced transfer, hired a woman whose Casio can make neat sounds to record a horrible score.

I had a bunch more in mind to watch, but I suppose I’ll get to them another day.

by ·Comments Off on Canyon Cinema (2008, Scott MacDonald)

I first heard about this book (and Canyon, probably) at this screening at the Nashville Film Festival presented by Dominic Angerame, executive director of Canyon.

Had been meaning to buy it ever since. Coincidentally, the day after I placed my order, Dominic posted a letter declaring that Canyon “can no longer continue as it was originally conceived and changes need to be made that are appropriate to our present day and age.” I wish that such changes included more screenings like the one at NaFF (perhaps in two years, for Canyon’s 50th anniversary) since the book didn’t captivate me the way the films do. I guess infighting between partners and artists at an indie film distributor isn’t so exciting to me.

Divided into sections representing phases of the company’s history: Formation, Incorporation, Revitalization, Intellectualization, Maintenance

Little discussion about films themselves, but much about who gets paid what percentages, festival screenings and censorship, the difficulty of raising funds and the disparity between the famous members (Bruce Conner, Stan Brakhage) whose films rent out more than half the other members combined. Mostly interesting were the reprintings of original Canyon newsletter articles.

Some favorite pieces:
Saul Landau’s account of a 1964 police seizure of Jean Genet’s Un Chant d’Amour
Robert Nelson’s 1968 summary of the Brussels festival films, followed by miscellaneous notes, then another summary of the Bellevue festival.
Robert Pike’s story about a three-minute film called God Is Dog Spelled Backwards
Brakhage’s story of the making of The Text of Light
James Broughton’s “How to Cope with the Question Period”
A couple of Kuchar cartoons
Larry Jordan’s “Survival in the … Film Market of 1979”
Warren Sonbert on film syntax