by ·Comments Off on Sshtoorrty (2005, Michael Snow)

aka Short Story, but I much prefer the above title. I even prefer the title to the movie itself, though the movie is pretty cool too. A two-minute loop of a four-minute scene, the first and second halves playing at the same time, with neat overlapping of color and audio. The scene was hard-subtitled (dialogue in Farsi), so even the subtitles overlap. Then the scene repeats, presumably about 10 times, though my downloaded copy broke after about six. I thought that was sufficient. The set looks like the Presents set, with that staginess and simple color washes.

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Snow:

Writing about my films has sometimes discussed the ‘narrative’ aspect or ‘reading’ of some of my ‘pictorial’ nature, which is much more important. Reflecting on this, I realized that I have never wanted to make a purely narrative film, never had and therefore perhaps I should. Perhaps I should finally make a film that really tells a story. Thus ‘SSHTOORRTY’. … The film of the … scene was cut exactly in half and the two halves of sound and picture as super-imposed. This makes a simultaneity of actions that occurred ‘linearly’. Before and After become a Transparent Now. Arrival and Departure are united. It’s truly ‘filmic’, one transparent film over another.

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by ·Comments Off on Avant-Garde Shorts (1960-2002)

Jimmy came over for an unexpected evening of avant-garde shorts which I kicked off by fast-forwarding through Michael Snow’s Presents to show off its wackyness. Then we skimmed the Index DVD catalogue and I watched some others after he’d left.

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Structuralist Films By Kurt Kren
I kinda know what structuralism is, though I’d have trouble defining it… so I defer to P. Adams Sitney, who says a “tight nexus of content, a shape designed to explore the facets of the material,” and the films render content “minimal and subsidiary to the outline.” Sounds a lot like Presents.
37/78 Tree Again – stop-motion of a tree, sometimes with cows, sometimes without.
2/60 48 Heads From The Szondi-Test – I liked this one best – heads cut out of newspapers or magazines rapidly edited into a time-montage.
17/68 Green-Red – a meditation on green and red bottles. Not too exciting… hardly up to the meditation standards of Lemon, for instance. Not just green/red, I saw some yellow in there.

Christoph Huber, when asked “What is the greatest movie ever made?”:

“Why, Kurt Kren’s 37/78 Tree Again, of course.” – which usually just raises eyebrows. So then, it’s my pleasure to expand on how a film they’ve never heard of, by a filmmaker they’ve never heard of, embodies the beauty and contradictions of cinema in its essence – and does so in less than four minutes. Kren’s film has an additional advantage, not always the case in that grey zone we shall term for purposes of straightforwardness “avant garde:” It can be described quite vividly in words, and its genesis makes for a good story. For about two months Kren returned daily to the same spot in Vermont to shoot single frames of a tree (using a roll of infrared film well past its expiration date). The succession of frames was not chronological, but Kren rewound the film according to a prearranged plan. The result is intoxicating, miraculously and mysteriously capturing time out of joint. In split seconds, seasons change and leaves are flashing in different colours, animals and clouds rush by, light and weather mutate constantly. In capturing decay and renewal of (and around) this tree Kren communicates the perpetual flux of the entire world, and a central paradox of cinema.

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Actionist Films By Kurt Kren
A contemporary of Peter Kubelka, who made the irritating short Pause, Kren is also known for his “actionist” films. Actionism was an Austrian movement of artists who rejected “object-based or otherwise commodifiable art practices. The practice of staging precisely scored actions in controlled environments or before audiences.” (wikipedia). A precursor to performance-art, this mostly meant that people like Gunther Brus and Arnulf Rainer stripped naked and threw paint on each other, and people like Kren and Kubelka filmed it. Not as exciting as the structuralist works.
7/64 Leda and the Swan – Leda is covered in goo and acts as the main course in a feast, but the actionists stopped short of actually eating her. Eli Roth might’ve seen this before filming Thanksgiving.
10b/65 Silver Action Brus – Brus is in a tent, painting the walls, I dunno, looked like something high school kids would do as an art piece (because of the cheapness and easy shock-value) then edited to bits by Kren.

Leda and the Swan:
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Peter Tscherkassky
One of my new favorite people! His “Cinemascope Trilogy” (first three titles below) is mindblowingly awesome. I hope to watch it over and over again… it joins the ranks of Heart of the World and Life Wastes Andy Hardy and Dog’s Dialogue in my short-film hall of fame.
L’Arrivée
2 minutes, train arrives and happy woman disembarks, film itself “arrives” on the screen too after fluttering about for the first half.
Outer Space
10 minutes of terror, as a girl in a haunted house movie gets brutally attacked by film editing and multiple exposures.
Dream Work
11 more minutes of sheer awesomeness taken from the same film as Outer Space, but not as terrifying.
Manufraktur
Super-multi-exposure remix of some TV ads.
Motion Picture
All light/dark white/black flicker with no distinguishable image, short
Get Ready
A trailer for the 1999 Vienna film festival using PT’s exposure techniques

L’Arrivee:
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Outer Space:
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Dream Work:
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Today (1997, Eija-Liisa Ahtila)
“Today my dad’s crying. Last night a car drove over his dad who died instantly.” First part, Tanaan, a pretty girl tells us about her sad dad. Second part, Vera, an older woman, says some stuff but it doesn’t last long and before I’ve gotten my bearings we’re on to Third part, Faija (dad). First we see grandad lay down in the shadows of a dark road, then the pretty girl’s dad talks about being a dad. Movie wasn’t what I was expecting after sitting through all that Kurt Kren, but it’s actually pretty good, really nicely shot, some kinda associative pondering of three generations (going from the girl to her dad to vera/grandad, back to the dad and girl) maybe? Music by 22-Pistepirkko! Ahtila is Finnish. I found art gallery websites spouting off about her methods, but it’s all fancy-talk for “she tells stories about people.”
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Alone. Life Wastes Andy Hardy (1998, Martin Arnold)
Mickey Rooney, Judy Garland and Fay Holden are trapped in the moment, rewound, slowed down and turned into robots, their every subliminally sexual movement revealed. I can not watch this enough times… so happy to have it on DVD now.
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Le Film a Venir (1997, Raoul Ruiz)
Yay, more wacky short fun from my man Ruiz. Black and white and mysterious, once more about hidden meaning and light sources and repetitions, abruptly shifting mood and plot, either surrealistic or beyond my comprehension. I’ve watched it twice and I’m pleased to say that I can’t manage a plot description. More play with narrator voices and narrative shortcuts, like in Hypothesis and Dog’s Dialogue. And Ruiz has a hundred movies – a hundred movies! – to explore. I could not be more excited.
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Letter to America (1999, Kira Muratova)
Disappointingly not half as wacky as the Ruiz. A dude is being filmed by his friend, sending a video message to new york, but the dude has nothing to say. So dude goes to the place he rents and tries to get some rent money out of the woman staying there. She’s being a jerk about it, but gives him a little money. He wanders back to his video friend and recites a triumphant poem before the camera. Apparently had some Crime & Punishment references I didn’t catch. J. Taubman: “Muratova’s film is itself a letter to America. One of its not so hidden messages is an ironic self-commentary on Muratova’s own situation, an example of what talent can do even in poverty.” She won a $50,000 award in Berlin, which helped fund her next feature. I liked it alright, but rather than seeming like a new cinematic voice, it kinda seemed like an american indie short that speaks Russian.
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by ·Comments Off on Presents (1981, Michael Snow)

At first I read the title like “Alfred Hitchcock Presents…” but now I think it’s more like Christmas presents. PREH-sents. We’ll never know for sure.

A line sloooowly twists itself into an image of a room with a naked woman on a bed, slooowly twists itself back into a line. The soundtrack is a terrible drone noise and I’m getting worried, watching the time pass on the DVD player face and asking myself whether Mr. Snow would approve if I watched his movie on fast-forward, or at least played some nice music and silenced his drone noise.

Then I was thinking that Snow probably wouldn’t approve of my watching “Presents” at home on a TV with afternoon light from the windows glaring off the screen in the first place. So I’m better off not worrying about it.

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Suddenly the lines stop mutating into boxes and I cry out loud, “The camera moved! I am in heaven!” but it turns out the camera did not move. The whole set moved on a truck and hydraulic lifts while the camera stayed still. The naked woman gets up and puts on a robe, answers the door and lets in some guy. They look everywhere for something, while a record plays (and scratches and skips because the set keeps moving). Finally she finds whatever they were looking for, and the camera rolls up onto the set housed in some unseen destruction vehicle with a plexiglass front (you can see reflections which I’m pretty sure were not part of my TV glare) and clumsily mangles the set. Finally drives through the back wall, which falls down to reveal sky…

Drum hit!
camera pans down a waterfall
Drum hit!
we are creeping through the underbrush
Drum hit!
camera follows a line of buildings sideways
Drum hit!
I fall asleep.

A few days later I watched a bunch more avant-garde films (shorter than this one) and started P. Adams Sitney’s avant-garde book, then returned to this, beginning when the wall falls and the montage part begins. I fell asleep again! Seen most of it by now, and I get the point, so I am quitting.

The short shots in the montage section continue, camera always panning (note: camera mostly pans, not moves, but there’s clearly some movement in there), one shot cuts into the next with a drum hit, sometimes matching the same motion as the previous shot, sometimes changing direction, but always in motion, imitating the gaze of the human eye, oooh. After an hour and thousands of pans, the last cut is to a pink screen that fades to red then black.

A film camera attacks and destroys a TV set:
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Don’t have it with me, but in the Sitney book the author says he uses the term “avant-garde” instead of “experimental”, because experimental implies that the artist is still messing around with his technique and doesn’t intend his film as a finished, planned piece. Can’t say that’s true of Presents, which was clearly planned, but it does feel experimental to me in that it’s an “investigation” of camera/eye movement which is actually interesting but I’ve found hard to watch. Snow bemoans that people’s attention spans for this kind of film aren’t what they used to be (hence his time-compressed reissue of Wavelength) and I guess I’m not helping matters by saying I thought this was too long.

Snow says he used a “Quantel analog effect” to stretch and squeeze the image in the first ten minutes.

Distributor calls it “an investigation into representation, process and material and the nature of camera movement.”

P. Monk:

The apparent vertical scratch in celluloid that opens Presents literally opens into a film within the film. When its figure awakens into a woman in a ‘real’ unreal set, the slapstick satire of structural film begins. It is not the camera that moves, but the whole set, in this first of three material ‘investigations’ of camera movement. In the second, the camera literally invades the set; a plexiglass sheet in front of the dolly crushes everything in its sight as it zooms through space. Finally, this monster of formalism pushes through the wall of the set and the film cuts to a series of rapidly edited shots as the camera zigzags over lines of force and moving fields of vision in an approximation of the eye in nature. Snow pushes us into acceptance of present moments of vision, but the single drum beat that coincides with each edit in this elegaic section announces each moment of life’s irreversible disappearance.

S. Liebman:

A major work, even when measured by the standards of Snow’s most impressive achievements. The title is a complex, provocatively ambiguous pun. The first section is a play based on the slipping and colliding senses of the word ‘presents,’ its homonyms, synonyms, and related concepts …. In the last section, assisted by the drum beat accenting each cut, the editing insists on the separateness of each shot and by doing so it constructs a vast inventory of different things and events. This extraordinary concluding montage sequence poses the most concerted and comprehensive challenge to the discourse of presen(ts)(ce) mounted by the film.

M. Snow in a 2002 interview:

Presents has something like three different modes in it. There is pushing and stretching, the tracking of the set, which because of convention you think of as camera movement, but you can see that the set is moving, then there is the smashing up of the set, followed by almost an hour of hand held pans which are from all over the world. Each one the pans is a different reaction to the scene with the camera. So that if the camera was moving in one way you might follow it or if the shape was round you would shoot it in a round way. One of the things I wanted to do was to cut each pan so that there would be no continuity from shot to shot, so they were isolated in time and space as these little instants taken from life. Pans are obviously much different from dollies or tracks. They are a glance. And they also reinforce a certain ephemerality, so there is a sadder aspect to the glance. It is recorded but then it is gone and then there’s another glance and it is gone. So that part of Presents is a particular thing that I have not done that much, a montage of things that have a tremendous variety, not in terms of the world itself but in terms of what you can gather from the world.

by ·Comments Off on Some Seventies Shorts

Frank Film
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Barebones story of Frank Mouris’s life narrated on the soundtrack blended with a free-association list of words. Visual is a fast-motion collage of magazine-clipped images. Neat, must’ve taken forever. Won the Oscar, kickstarting a long life of filmmaking obscurity for Frank, poor guy.

Valse Triste
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Looks like a montage of found footage from rural America in the 1940’s set to sweeping sad music. Sepia-tinted, only 5 minutes long. Took me a visit to IMDB to realize the montage represents the wet dream of the boy who goes to sleep at the beginning of the film, damn. I get it now. Bruce Conner born in Kansas in 1933, so he WAS that boy!

Adam, 5 to 12
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Begin the rhythmic Estonian vocal music. Trippy animation doesn’t do much, then the clock appears, then a whole pile of grim images of war and death are overlaid on the clock. Adam tries to turn the clock back but it’s frozen at 5 to 12. Finally it moves dramatically to THE END. Director Petar Gligorovski died in 1995.

V. Gligorijevic (via email) on the music: “Its composer, Veljo Tormis, had clash with Soviet authorities which perceived Estonian nationalist overtones in Tormis’s music, from which the Curse to the Iron, the featured background, is considered one of his most recognizable works.”

Reflecting Pool
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Wow, this is great. Seven minutes of a reflecting pool with some video effects. A man motions to jump in, but is frozen in midair while the pool stays in gentle motion. The man slowly fades out, and most of the rest of the action takes place in the pool’s reflection and through its varying levels of agitation. Probably just a more complicated metaphor for sex than the last film… I don’t pick up on those things easily. Bill Viola is only 56 and still working.

Sweet Light
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Another by Bill Viola. Close-up: some flies on a windowsill. Camera moves slowly and evenly away and turns toward a man writing at a desk. Camera fast follows a ball of paper he hurls on the floor. Abrupt change to camera spinning around a dinner table candle, then insects leaving vapor trails in the air. There is light involved, and it’s all pretty sweet, so there’s your title.

Pause!
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A man against a wall making hand gestures, distorting his face and making breathy sounds. Gets violent at times. Probably also a metaphor for sex. My copy was dark and muddy but it’s not like I’ll be scouring rare video stores looking for a better version. Oh, I looked it up and the man is Arnulf Rainer, a surrealist-influenced artist known for “body art and painting under drug influence”. This must be body art. I wouldn’t have named a museum after this guy, but I guess the New York art scene knows better than I do. Directed by Peter Kubelka.

Powers of Ten
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By famous designers/architects/filmmakers Charles and Ray Eames. “A film dealing with the relative size of things in the universe and the effect of adding another zero”, made for IBM. A man is laying in a park in Chicago. We zoom out from him to 100 million light years (10^24 m) then zoom into his hand to 0.000001 angstroms (10^-16 m). Both Eames died on August 21, ten years apart. Music by Elmer Bernstein (also dead) of Far From Heaven and Ghostbusters.

The Metamorphosis of Mr. Samsa
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The Kafka story done with cool mushy black and white perspective-shifting animation (paint on glass?). Samsa might be some sort of spider/beetle. Caroline Leaf works with the National Film Board of Canada.

Elimination Dance
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Co-written and starring Don McKellar (Last Night). Dir. by Bruce McDonald, who made cult films Roadkill and Hard Core Logo. Couples dance all night while an announcer reads off descriptions (“anyone who has lost a urine sample in the mail”) eliminating them one by one, as the cops slowly close in fearing unrest. A comedy, cute. Not from the seventies, I realize (1998).

A Doonesbury Special
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Kind of limited animation, but that’s not a cool criticism to make of a well-intentioned independent production like this one. Neat movie, could’ve stood to be another half hour longer. A regular day at the commune with a bunch of flashbacks, “feeling the present as it moves by”. A little sad, some disillusionment about the fallen ideals of the late 60’s, probably a nice companion to the comics (which I haven’t read since Hunter died). Both Hubleys have died, Trudeau cowrote the Tanner movies.

La Soufriere
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“This is the police station. It was totally abandoned. It was a comfort for us not having the law hanging around.” Would’ve probably been one of Werner Herzog’s best-known movies (OR have led to Herzog’s fiery death) if the volcano had exploded as predicted, but since it didn’t, this is an obscurity on a DVD of documentary shorts. “There was something pathetic for us in the shooting of this picture, and therefore it ended a little bit embarrassing. Now it has become a report on an inevitable catastrophe that did not take place.” Herz and crew tromp about an extremely dangerous volcano site in the Caribbean, explore the completely empty towns below, and interview what few stragglers remain. One of the cameramen is from Morristown NJ, also shot Far From Heaven, A Prairie Home Companion, Tokyo-ga, True Stories and The Limey.

Most of these movies are as old as I am.

by ·Comments Off on Martin Arnold shorts (1989-1998)

All seen on a wonderful DVD called The Cineseizure.

Pièce touchée (1989) – girl is reading, guy walks in the door, they kiss, he crosses behind her, she gets up. But for 15 minutes, painstakingly and obsessively re-enacted, rewound, stalled and repeated. Arnold mirrors the shot about halfway in, and flips it upside-down towards the end. An intriguing start. The main fault with this one is the annoying machine-loop audio.

Passage à l’acte (1993) – looks like a dinner scene from To Kill a Mockingbird. Boy comes running in, tells girl to hurry up, “I’m trying to”, “come on”, they run out but she stops to kiss her dad first. But all one frame at a time, with the obsessive back-forth repetition. The sound from the movie is here, so this is much less annoying than Piece Touchee… a large step towards the Andy Hardy movie, which, even had I not been told before I saw it, would recognize as the masterpiece of this bunch.

Extras: Psycho trailer (just a shower head, no text, clever), Jesus Walking On Screen trailer (“master, give me sight”), another trailer (in a train station), and a relatively serene montage of old clips called Der Osterreichfilm.

Also rewatched Alone. Life Wastes Andy Hardy (1998) a couple times. I had very little to say about it back in September ’06.

I’ll bet the actors in these films would be horrified by what Martin Arnold does to them, calling attention to every single tiny expression and movement and gesture. Sure is fun/interesting to watch though. IMDB says he did one in 2002 called Deanimated and it sounds like he’s working with some new techniques.

Arnold: “The cinema of Hollywood is a cinema of exclusion, reduction and denial, a cinema of repression. There is always something behind that which is being represented, which was not represented. And it is exactly that that is most interesting to consider.”

by ·Comments Off on Mostly Animated Shorts

Watched some of the earliest shorts I downloaded, over a year ago, and had never seen before.

The World of Stainboy (2000, Tim Burton)
Stainboy is a hero of sorts whose only power is creating stains. He takes on a giant darth bowling ball, a poisonous chemical hazard, a power-sucking robot, a girl with a hypnotic stare, and a match-prostitute, then in the final episode he flashes back to birth and the orphanage (where “boy with nails in his eyes” has a cameo). Pretty okay little show, short with funny bits.

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Breakfast (1976, Michael Snow)
Decided not to watch it because the quality is too low. Don’t know how I’m going to see the Michael Snow films, but not like this.

Vibroboy (1994, Jan Kounen)
Loud, cartoonish, full of threatened sexual violence, feels like taking a beating or watching the Shelly and Leo home scenes from Twin Peaks for a half hour. Explorers spirit away ancient statue from Mexico, it’s entrusted to transvestite Francesca, who comes home to his trailer park to find his pet murdered and his neighbors Leon and Brigitte fighting. Leon is a violent shit, and threatens both “women”, ends up shooting F. (not fatally), breaking the statue, retrieving the metal dildo within and turning into Vibroboy, who just goes on beating the two girls but with the dildo now. Stylishly shot, but why film such a piece of shit story? Real disappointing because Kounen is someone I’d decided I was interested in before seeing any of his movies, so now I don’t know what to do about Dobermann and Blueberry. (Update: a Kounen fan advises to check out the uneven Blueberry and the doc on psychedelics and skip Dobermann)

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Escargot de Venus (1975, Walerian Borowczyk)
Camera pans over color drawings of half-snail-half-women having sex with each other and themselves and various snaily men, while renfest flute music plays. Halfway in, a woman starts narrating in French, didn’t catch most of it except some of the dirty words. We actually see her flipping through the drawings, closes with her feeding a snail to an iguana. Nice, sexy images, liked it better than his DOM short. Internet says the woman is Bona Tibertelli De Pisis, and the drawings are hers.

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L’Amour monstre de tous les temps (1977, Walerian Borowczyk)
Close-up on a painter at work, nicely edited with music by Richard Wagner. Final painting involved a beast and human nudity, so right up Walerian’s alley. A good one. Can’t find who the bearded painter was.

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Lapis (1966, James Whitney)
finely detailed geometric images (points of light?) falling inwards and outwards to and from the center into infinity. Sound (indian music) didn’t play right on my copy, but when it did, it adds to the trance effect. Would be pretty awesome to see this in a theater. Apparently used motion-control camera (“analogue computer equipment”) and the circular shape is a mandala, “a Tibetan Buddhist spiritual meditation aid”. Director’s brother designed the motion-control for the title sequence of Vertigo!

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Recreation (1956, Robert Breer)
extremely rapidly edited shots of objects on plain backgrounds, a little animation, some guy talking in French, FIN.

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A Man And His Dog Out For Air (1957, Robert Breer)
flowing line drawing animation forming many abstract shapes but nothing quite recognizable until right before the end, when they form a man and his dog out for air. Neat.

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by ·Comments Off on By Brakhage disc 2 (1959-2001, Stan Brakhage)

A thorough viewing of the second disc of my favorite DVD set in the world this weekend. Some thoughts:

I do not know how to talk about Brakhage. Mostly on this site I talk about story, quality of performance… how do I talk about a non-narrative motion painting? Don’t have the background or vocabulary for that.

Cat’s Cradle and Window Water Baby Moving are early ones with actual camera shots of actual things. The editing of Window Water is entrancing.

Mothlight will be great forever. I’ve watched it twenty times now.

Then, chronologically, came Dog Star Man and Act Of Seeing, which I haven’t watched yet because I am afraid of them. The scariest nightmare I’ve had in a decade resulted from falling asleep during my only attempted viewing of Dog Star Man, and if Window Water is so attractive and disturbing, I can just not imagine how my stomach will feel after viewing The Act Of Seeing.

Eye Myth (a nine-second film) took a year to complete because Brakhage had to convince himself that it could be done, had never done a hand-painted film before. Mothlight was almost a decade earlier, but I guess Eye Myth was a big step. I’ve watched it a ton of times just because I can.

I’m not so wild about the visuals of The Wold Shadow (painting on glass over a view of the forest) or The Stars Are Beautiful (creation myths with shots of home and chickens with sync sound) or Kindering (kids at play), but then The Dante Quartet and Rage Net hit hard… some of my favorites of the painted films.

Black Ice and Delicacies and Study In Color are creepy. The screen shots below reveal nothing about those two. The Dark Tower is always a favorite. And I don’t remember ever seeing Commingled Containers before so I watched it three times. Can’t understand what it is, what those things are, what is happening. Something in a stream? What are “containers”? Beautiful, of course. That applies to all of the above… beautiful, beautiful, blah.

Need to read Brakhage’s book(s), to read Fred Camper’s writings, to read the DVD liner notes again and listen to the interviews with Brakhage on the discs. But I don’t expect to learn much that will gain me a deeper appreciation of the films… they need no explanation.

Matt Stone and Trey Parker were Brakhage’s students. He acted in Cannibal the Musical and loved the South Park movie. Incredible.

Katy did not watch it. I’m afraid to show her any Brakhage. What if she doesn’t love it? How will I explain or convince?

A barrage of screen shots.

Cat’s Cradle
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Window Water Baby Moving
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Mothlight
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Eye Myth
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The Wold Shadow
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The Garden of Earthly Delights
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The Stars Are Beautiful
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Kindering
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I… Dreaming
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The Dante Quartet
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Nightmusic
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Rage Net
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Glaze of Cathexis
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Delicacies of Molten Horror Synapse
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For Marilyn
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Black Ice
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Study in Color and Black and White
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Stellar
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Crack Glass Eulogy
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The Dark Tower
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Commingled Containers
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Love Song
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by ·Comments Off on Warren Sonbert shorts

Amphetamine (1966)
Where Did Our Love Go? (1966)

Warren Sonbert started his career just like Stan Brakhage (Desistfilm) – sitting around his apartment, shooting his friends doing daily stuff. But where Brakhage used camera tricks and crazy editing, Sonbert (12 years later) relied on his friends’ outrageous antics (drug use, homosexuality, knowing Andy Warhol) to make his movies interesting. It didn’t work for me, but the mid-60’s pop songs he strung together on the soundtrack made for good listening.

Honor and Obey (1988)
Friendly Witness (1989)

Then Sonbert travelled the world for a number of years, reviewing operas and shooting everything he came across with his portable Bolex. And like the dude who did “Ashes & Snow”, he one day sat down and edited all his stuff through the years into some movies. Unlike “Ashes” though, it’s quickly and intuitively edited, the shot order making sense only to the director, if anybody. “Honor and Obey” is completely Brakhage-silent, and Friendly Witness starts with the same 60’s pop songs from before, then uses opera over the second half. Slightly more excitingly edited than “Honor” and would’ve been preferable anyway if only for the pop songs. Completely wonderful films, great color, great framing, lots of animal shots, shots from planes, on water, on children. Loved ’em. Didn’t understand ’em, of course, but didn’t have to.