I found a whole bunch of shorts by three filmmakers covered in the “Straining Towards the Limits” chapter, this is going to take multiple viewings.
Paul Sharits:
Word Movie (1966)
Not even four minutes, but an intense structuralist flicker film. You can focus on the words flipping rapidly across the screen, or the stable letters in the middle of the screen (whether there’s a pattern or they’re spelling something out) or one of the two reverby voices reading flatly and alternating words with each other – but not any two of those things. I dig it.
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Piece Mandala/End War (1966)
A few sex poses, flipped L-R, flickering with white fields then gradually adding new colors, with bookends of a pulsing dot and a sidetrack scene with a comic-suicidal guy. From what little I’ve seen, this does look like the work of someone who hung out with Yoko Ono.
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Ray Gun Virus (1966)
Good one, just flickering color fields but not too aggressively edited, so you can pleasantly space out to it. That’s given you turn the volume way down, since my copy comes with a relentless rumbly mechanical sound. No point in taking screenshots of the flicker films, and of course watching these on TV is especially pointless to begin with. Artforum’s got an extensive Regina Cornwell article on the Sharits films.
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Peter Kubelka:
Mosaik im Vertrauen (1955)
Mysterious montage of varied sources, I think he’s Rose Hobartting a bunch of euro narrative and news films. Is it on purpose that sometimes I can’t see at all what’s happening on screen?
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Adebar (1957)
One-minute shadow dancing music video with lots of freeze-frames.
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Schwechater (1958)
Looks like obsessively cut excerpts from some film scene, much of it with the contrast blown out.
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Robert Breer:
Form Phases 1 (1952)
Playful little line drawings based around acute angles, sometimes with color added
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Form Phases 2 (1953)
A dot becomes a line becomes a circle becomes a square becomes the background to a whole new series of shapes, and so on. Repeats and montages itself. One cool bit where the picture divides into identical overlapping translucent images which slide apart.
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Form Phases 3 (1953)
I think it’s watercolor drawings on clear glass filmed from below, the paintings appearing magically like in the Picasso movie, cool.
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Form Phases 4 (1953)
Back to the morphing-lines graphic design of parts 1+2 but more complicated, creating new rules around shape overlap and intersection and interaction.
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A Miracle (1954)
Very short one, the miracle is the pope juggling in a window, then falling to bits.
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Image by Images IV (1955)
More jaunty line/shape interactions, with a few new things. Brief flashes of photographic images (a hand, spectacles), and sound. Unfortunately the sound is mechanical noise, a la Ray Gun Virus but less annoying. It might even be the sound of the movie’s production tools, like in The Grand Bizarre.
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Cats (1956)
Another very short one, with sound credited to Frances Breer. The cats get deconstructed.
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unrelated bonus short that I couldn’t fit anywhere else:
Heavy Metal Parking Lot (1986, Heyn & Krulik)
“Are you fucked up?”
“Half and half.”
Outside a 1986 Judas Priest / Dokken show in Maryland. This show took place on May 31st, and setlist.fm says Judas Priest closed with a Fleetwood Mac cover. Some girls tell the cameraman that they’re going to Ocean City after this; maybe I saw ’em there. I think it’s really important to watch this on a traded VHS with your buddies while mocking the people onscreen, not on a laptop while eating lunch alone. We’re told that metal rules and punk sucks – guess I should watch Decline of Western Civilization Part 2 and see if that’s true.
