by ·Comments Off on Masterworks of Avant-Garde Film: 1920’s and 1930’s

That Flicker Alley blu-ray set I threatened to buy at the beginning of the year, well I bought it. And besides being full of interesting avant-garde films beautifully preserved in high-def, it’s really well sequenced and presented. Gonna have to break this into a few screenings and posts since I’m taking so many screenshots.

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Manhatta (1921 Sheeler & Strand)

City photography, mostly seaside and rooftop, floats by, with intertitles from a Whitman poem. Impossible to know how this looked in 1921 since by now I’ve seen hours and days of NYC photography. Buildings and ships still look like buildings and ships, so I was mostly interested in the few shots of people and traffic. Strand later photographed Redes and codirected Native Land.

Lewis Jacobs, writing in Film Quarterly in late 1947:

In technique the film was simple and direct, avoiding all the so-called “tricks” of photography and setting. In a sense it was the forerunner of the documentary school which rose in the United States in the middle 1930’s … The picture’s emphasis upon visual pattern within the real world was an innovation for the times.

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Anemic Cinema (1926 Marcel Duchamp)

Alternates geometric spirals with word spirals (jokey French puns, I think). Peaceful. His buddy Man Ray helped out, and some prankster named Gustavo contributed a drone soundtrack.

In Visionary Film, Sitney calls it one of the “two fundamental works of the graphic cinema from the 1920s made without animation,” along with Ballet Mechanique.

Kristin Thompson:

Duchamp’s purpose was presumably to create an artwork with minimal means, including quasi-found objects, the disks he had made for another purpose. His idea is clearly reflected in the title, Anémic cinéma, which suggests a weakness or thinness of means. “Anémic” is also an anagram for “cinéma.”

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Life and Death of 9413 (1927 Florey & Vorkapich)

Still one of my favorite shorts ever. I love that Florey & Vorkapich were already this cynical about Hollywood in the silent era – especially great is the “babababa” mouth-flapping in place of speech. Would be a good short to run before The Last Command.

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Skyscraper Symphony (1929 Robert Florey)

New York buildings, photographed straight ahead and jutting out in all directions, making this an appropriate follow-up to the city documentary Manhatta and the expressionist angles of 9413. Donald Sosin contributes a very nice piano score. Florey directed a Marx Brothers movie the same year.

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Mechanical Principles (1930 Ralph Steiner)

Pistons, meshing gears and other mechanics, beginning slow and simple and getting into crazier and faster gizmos. Really cool.

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A Bronx Morning (1931 Jay Leyda)

More New York scenes, this one more social than the structural interests of the others. Leyda had documentary cinematography and editing pretty well figured out by age 20, worked with Steiner, later with Eisenstein and went on to write film histories.

How much does expert ladies hair bobbing cost to-day?

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Lot in Sodom (1933 Watson & Webber)

Leagues beyond the previous films in visual poetry. Bodies collide in slow motion, mirrored and refracted. Eventually a plot takes shape when an angel appears to woolen-bearded Lot and tells him to get out of town before it’s destroyed by a rain of fire (there’s some other stuff I didn’t catch, not being familiar with the bible story). Like I wrote for the same directors’ Fall of the House of Usher, “I still don’t know exactly what happened, but boy was it awesome.”

Jacobs called it “the most distinguished experimental sound film of the period.”

Lot in Sodom used a technique similar to that of The Fall of the House of Usher, but far more skillfully and resourcefully. It drew upon all the means of camera, lenses, multiple exposure, distortions, dissolves, and editing to achieve a beauty of mobile images, of
dazzling light and shade, of melting rhythms, with an intensity of feeling that approached poetry. Its brilliant array of diaphanous shots and scenes … were so smoothly synthesized on the screen that the elements of each composition seemed to melt and flow into one another with extraordinary iridescence.

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Poem 8 (1933 Emlen Etting)

Visual poetry with no narrative – the first time that had been done, according to Etting, who is wrong (Man Ray, Hans Richter, Ballet Mechanique). Rough on the technical side, but it works for me. Dig the first-person camera sipping a cocktail and making out with an undressing woman. I didn’t feel the new piano score by Rodney Sauer was appropriately poetic.

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An Optical Poem (1938 Oskar Fischinger)

Floating shapes appear and move in sync with a Liszt song. Since it’s made with paper cutouts in stop-motion (which must have been aggravating) you can their shadows upon each other.

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Thimble Theater (1938 Joseph Cornell)

Cornell and his posthumous editor Lawrence Jordan throw together a bunch of things and run circus music under them all. Too many kids in a paper flower… what looks like a Melies movie… a cartoon printed inverse and upside down… mountain goats… a man vs. kangaroo fight in slow-motion. Before Spike & Mike or Everything Is Terrible or Star Spangled to Death, Cornell was the original curator of clip shows of wonderous things.

by ·Comments Off on By Brakhage, Volume 2, Program 3

Quotes below are from Marilyn Brakhage’s program notes.

The Process (1972)

Flashing colors. Negative silhouettes of human figures (wearing hats). Increasingly recognizable scraps of home movies, but yeah, mostly it’s flashing colors. Listened to “Cosmetics (Secret Chiefs 3 Remix)” by Foetus, which had some nice moments of synchronicity, mostly served to make the film seem more sinister than was probably intended.

“Brakhage again addresses the interaction of internal and external sources of imagery, but in this case, as the sole subject of the film. Here, slightly displaced positive and negative versions of the same image create a feeling of insubstantiality.”

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Burial Path (1978)

Opens with a dead robin in a box, so I took the title literally and assumed a funeral tone to all the defocused light that proceeds from there. The bird does get buried towards the end, and he intercuts scenes of live birds (not robins) feeding outside. Played the end of Brian Eno & Harold Budd’s “Ambient 2” album, a pleasant change from the previous soundtrack.

Burial Path “graphs the process of forgetfulness.” But Burial Path is also about death, and was sometimes referred to (by Brakhage) as the third part of a trilogy, with Sirius Remembered (1959) and The Dead (1960). (The “path” is also the route taken to visit Brakhage’s friend, the then-ailing literary scholar Donald Sutherland, to whom the film is dedicated.)

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Duplicity III (1980)

All crossfades, all the time. The kids are going trick-or-treating, doing house work, playing with cards and toy guns, enacting satanic rituals, performing in school plays which involve ghosts, robots and an Indian chief. Deers and dogs towards the end. Played tracks 2-4 of Coil’s “The Angelic Conversation” which sometimes made the film seem doom-laden, sometimes gave the impression that it was taking place near the ocean.

Halloween: Fire Walk With Me

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The Domain of the Moment (1977)

Liked this one a lot because it’s full of critters: baby bird, guinea pig, dog, raccoon, mouse, snake, all double-exposed and playfully filmed, with painted mothlight sections in between animal blocks. Played tracks 4-6 of Secret Chiefs 3’s “Book M”, which was inappopriately energetic at the beginning but worked rather well in the middle.

“A consideration of the consciousness of other life forms.”

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Murder Psalm (1980)

Whenever Brakhage films a television it looks like the end of the world. One of his most music-video-looking films, full of increasingly sinister-seeming juxtapositions – pure texture interspersed with stock footage from a strange movie, an education film about brains, leftover autopsy footage from The Act of Seeing, war footage from 23rd Psalm Branch, reversal film of a highway at night. Played the end of Autechre’s “Exai”, which was a great idea.

“A collage of found footage of monstrous implications.”

M. Keller in Film Quarterly:

The most striking imagery comes from an educational film on epilepsy, and Brakhage’s film is structured around that preexisting narrative … Brakhage makes visual relationships between the ball, water in the birdbath, the girl’s hand, a scale model of the brain, a half of a wagon wheel, a covered wagon, and a semicircular tunnel. Circular imagery is cut in half by the frame to make semicircles or hemispheres. The material about epilepsy is transformed into a meditation on the social and cultural circumstances of childhood trauma via a visual string of semicircular imagery. By substituting one image for another – e.g., the model of the brain for the covered wagon – Brakhage links their meanings and implication. The girl’s seizure is made part of the social organism through visual rhyme.

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Arabic 12 (1982)

Light asterisks: a film of reddish, star-shaped light artifacts. Wonder if this is what ashtray epic The Text of Light is like – hopefully not, since I lost patience in this 17-minute movie towards the end. Felt like Autechre’s “spl9” was trying to give me a panic attack, but the next track slowed things down for the film’s more diffuse second half.

by ·Comments Off on Some 1920’s and 1930’s Shorts

Ballet Mecanique (1924, Léger & Murphy)

Every camera and editing trick known to man (at the time), in a rhythmic collage of pleasingly odd images. Plucky string music by Paul Mercer on this version.

The women (woman?) of Ballet Mecanique:

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Combat de boxe (1927, Charles Dekeukeleire)

Someone allowed a filmmaker to shoot a sold-out boxing match, not knowing Dekeukeleire was a lunatic obsessed with film reversal and superimposition who would shoot anything but a standard angle on the action. Who did the great soundtrack, all pulsing sound effects and breathing? Dekeukeleire was a Belgian film pioneer, made two other influential avant-garde films in the late 1920’s according to wikipedia.

The boxer uses ghost mode:

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Rose Hobart (1936, Joseph Cornell)

Cornell’s re-edit of East of Borneo, which appears to be a somnambulist jungle picture, highlighting the scenes of star Rose Hobart. Oh wait, he has slowed the film to silent speed, that’s why it looks so dreamy. The not-exactly-fitting-the-mood soundtrack is from a record called Holiday In Brazil.

Cornell’s first film, and his most famous. Reportedly during the premiere screening Salvador Dali attacked the film projector in a rage, claiming the film had been stolen from his dreams. I watched a whole program of Cornell shorts at Eyedrum in the pre-blog era, but hadn’t seen this one before.

Rose chats with a monkey:

B. Frye in Senses of Cinema:

Rose Hobart was only one of several mythologized actresses who populated Cornell’s hermetic world. Many of his boxes were homages to the actresses that formed his pantheon: Lauren Bacall, Hedy Lamarr, Greta Garbo and Deanna Durbin, among others. In Rose Hobart, Cornell holds Hobart in a state of semi-suspension, turning the film itself into a sort of box. She moves her hands, shifts her gaze, gestures briefly, smiles enigmatically, perhaps steps slightly to the side, and little more. The world appears as a sort of strange theatre, staged for her alone.

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Betty Boop for President (1932, Dave Fleischer)

Okay, what? That is a cynical view of government for the 1930’s. Betty does caricatures of I’m not sure who, and appears to be a communist. Her opponent is Mr. Nobody, who gets booed by his crowd. After she’s elected, her victory parade fades into a giant beer mug, implying the entire film has been a drunken fantasy.

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Betty Boop’s Penthouse (1933, Dave Fleischer)

Bimbo and Koko are incompetent, cat-tormenting mad scientists obsessed with their next door neighbor Betty. They accidentally create a Chemical Frankenstein who pursues her before being turned into a flower by her perfume. Insane and wonderful. Nice variation on the ol’ blackface Al Jolson gag.

Koko on fire:

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Carmen (1933, Lotte Reiniger)

I don’t watch much opera, so don’t know the plot of Carmen. It seems she lures some fancy man to her sexy lair, then steals his clothes and sells them, buying herself a new outfit. But she fails to impress an even fancier man, the famous bullfighter, so she heads into the ring, dodging the first man who is now trying to murder her, and dances with the bull. Is that the general idea? Oh yeah, Wikipedia says that’s pretty much it, except the first man ends up killing her. The first of Reiniger’s silhouette films I’ve seen and it’s just wonderful.

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Papageno (1935, Lotte Reiniger)

More opera… guess I never wrote up the Julie Taymor theater version of The Magic Flute we saw last year. It wasn’t a proper Taymor film like Midsummer but a live-televised version of her play. Anyway we both enjoyed. I wouldn’t have figured the carefree singing bird catcher Papageno for a spinoff film, but that’s what we’ve got here, set to the Mozart music. Papageno’s a real hero in this one, fighting off a giant snake that attacks his girlfriend Papagena by harnessing his bird-friends’ powers, like an avian Aquaman. She escapes on an ostrich, is gone for a half minute, which is too long for ‘geno, who attempts suicide, saved by a flock of parrots. Definitely best part is the ending, while the reunited lovers are singing to each other and the birds start rolling in eggs hatching baby Papageni.

Parrots!

There’s a lot of kissing and disrobing in these movies – guess you could get away with sexier stuff in silhouette animation than using actors in the 1930’s.

Making out in the trees:

About to catch an escape-ostrich outta here:

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”

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The Machine of Eden (1970)

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

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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.

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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.

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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.