by ·Comments Off on Rose Lowder’s Bouquets

Bouquets 1-10 (1994-1995)

Excellent to see these with the intro by Gloria Vilches of a Barcelona film society, since she goes into Lowder’s history and filming methods – utilizing the 16mm bolex camera’s ability to advance or rewind to a specific frame and capture stills. So Lowder will shoot every other frame, then move to a new location and fill in the alternate frames, or any new pattern variation she thinks up on-location. Unusually for me, I’m watching these silent films without adding my own soundtrack, figuring they’re each one-minute complex creations and I need to pay strict attention.

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Poppies and Sailboats (2001)

From the Cinexperimentaux 5 disc – unfortunately the poppy field does not hold up under DVD compression, but this is the easiest way to catch on to the perceptual experiments. With an even blend of poppy frames and sailboat frames, the boats are sailing through the flowers. Start to adjust the rhythms and you get something else, a harder flicker or a poppy field with sailboat ghosts.

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Bouquets 11-20 (2005-2009)

Less interleaving, more slow/fast and even real-time focus on single moments, more attention paid to flying and walking creatures.

Rewatched these while reading her notebooks, less for the frame-by-frame structure of each piece than for the context and location (mostly small French organic farms). She emphasized that the films aren’t structually pre-planned, that the notebooks are documents of the filmmaking decisions that have already been made

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Bouquets 31-40 (2014-2022)

The online copy of 21-30 isn’t great, skipping for now. I’d like to hear how her definition of a Bouquet has changed, because for instance Bouquet 1 (rapid flicker of beachy fauna/flora) isn’t so similar to Bouquet 40 (long take of a leather worker with a chicken credits stinger). The Light Cone notes are detailed, revealing that some Bouquets are sequels to previous episodes, and also that the chickens at the end of #40 were eaten soon afterwards by a fox.

Phil Coldiron in Cinema Scope 96:

Lowder creates constantly modulating patterns of outrageous intricacy. A more sustained accounting of these films would require taking their reels in hand and working frame by frame. While this would make available a more detailed description, it would not help with the fact that language requires placing one word after another, a process that plays out in a kind of time that is entirely remote from Lowder’s striving towards simultaneity – a richness of experience that is, for her, true realism. The images that we see in films such as the Bouquets, in some sense, don’t exist.

by ·Comments Off on Vogel 12: Sharits/Breer/Kubelka Part 1

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.

by ·Comments Off on Concorso Shorts 2019

Some shorts I could find online that played Locarno in 2019

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Carne (Camila Kater)

I figured watching an animated short unsubtitled would be fine, turns out it’s wall-to-wall narration in Portuguese. From what I can follow, five women’s stories about their bodies, chronologically through the life cycle, each in different animation styles (stop-mo, watercolor, flash, clay, Breer).

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In Vitro (Lind & Sansour)

Dry, serious sci-fi displayed in wide split-screen. Older woman in hospital bed is confronted by younger clone who questions her implanted memories and her purpose in the purgatorial present-day while the survivors of a global plague are kept indoors and underground.

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Volcano: What Does a Lake Dream? (Diana Vidrascu)

A movie about islands and earthquakes with distorted colors and cool sound design is for sure gonna remind me of Rock Bottom Riser. Gets caught up a little too hard in video effects wilderness but still my favorite of this bunch.

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Our Territory (Mathieu Volpe)

Italian narrator (speaking French) is weird and sad about encountering a neighborhood of poor African immigrants.

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White Afro (Akosua Adoma Owusu)

Adapted from a salon worker interview and a promotional film about giving white people afros, interspersed with Toni Morrison quotes, the picture highly distressed with film junk.

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Swinguerra (Benjamin de Burca & Barbara Wagner)

Ninety percent of this is sexy Brazilians dancing, what is not to love?

by ·Comments Off on Criterion Channel shorts watched July 2024

Watched some shorts on CC. I only mention the source because we know how I love to lean on the screenshot button, but streaming restricts my personal freedom to steal images. And also because they deserve to be mocked for still using the Baby’s First Streaming Platform template, which says “season one” under the titles of short films.

She and Her Cat (1999, Makoto Shinkai)

Talky, narrated by a cat who is sexually attracted to his female human owner, passing the seasons together. Limited animation, mostly gently panning across stills. Not too exciting, but I suppose its success got Shinkai (who also narrated) the budget for Voices of a Distant Star. When Your Name blew up, this got a sequel/remake, and Shinkai returned to narrate.

Voice of a Distant Star (2002, Makoto Shinkai)

The UN Space Force naturally needs morose teens to pilot giant space robots, preferably while wearing their school uniforms. Star pilot Mikako likes a boy called Noboru (same voice actors as the cat movie), and though she’s stationed on Jupiter’s moons they still text using 2002-model flip phones. When she’s sent further away to fight evil aliens, it gets harder to communicate since each message takes years to arrive.

Chuu Chuu (2021, Mackie Mallison)

Medium takes, then quick edits… digital stability with low-gauge colors… focusing on an aging Japanese grandma. Then a section discussing touchy family relationships and identity from the perspective of a doorbell cam. Not as many birds as I was hoping for, but there is a birdwatching section towards the end, then a projector throwing fast-cut home movies over a kid’s face.

Fly, Fly Sadness (2015, Miryam Charles)

Story of an explosion that affected everyone in the country, so now they all have the same girlish speaking voice, coincidentally the voice of the director, who narrates over short clips and loops. CC didn’t care to correct the subtitles.

by ·Comments Off on Vogel 11: Stephen Dwoskin and Structuralism

Color Film (1971, Standish Lawder)

A reminder that experimental film is actually fun to watch. We re-read the chapter on minimalist/structuralist film in the Vogel, then watch “a fine example of pure minimal cinema,” expecting the camera to just be facing a wall or something, and instead I get a blast of color and movement set to a raucous Zappa song.

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Eisenbahn (1967, Lutz Mommartz)

Not fun but surely hypnotic, facing square out a train window. Occasional edits, and light obstructions when we can clearly see the cameraperson’s reflection, but I’m not dedicated enough to get a still frame of those.

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Naissant (1964, Stephen Dwoskin)

The same length as the train movie, both of them bringing to mind Vogel’s comment “there is no aesthetic reason for the film to last nine minutes instead of ninety” Funny to watch this the day after Je Tu Il Elle, as it’s a long wordless focus on a seemingly troubled dark-haired girl sitting in bed. No bag of sugar or letter writing, and this movie stays closer to her face and cuts far more often. The girl is Beverly Grant, a major underground actress who was in Flaming Creatures the year before.

Vogel also points to Kiss and Sleep by Warhol, but instead let’s watch more Dwoskin (I’ve only previously seen his Dirty).

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Soliloquy (1969, Stephen Dwoskin)

Almost a remake of Naissant but this time we see mostly her hands, and we hear her thoughts in voiceover. She’s divorced, depressed. “I wish I were pretty.”

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Moment (1968, Stephen Dwoskin)

Close-up with no editing this time. Another dark-haired girl, smoking and masturbating. Who needs Warhol, anyway? The soundtrack is some kind of horrible industrial howl.

by ·Comments Off on Peter Hutton shorts

New York Near Sleep for Saskia (1972)

Not the kind of work that holds up great on SD video, but I’ve come across Hutton’s name enough times and want to know what he’s about. Everything I’ve got is silent, so I’m playing the Sean Ono Lennon Asterisms album, and the first track synced up just right with this film, which was extracted from a Screening Room episode. It’s all about light, apparently, light coming through holes and forming patterns, mostly indoors with a couple outdoor portraits of unnamed people, leading to its most complicated and beautiful setup, a chair on a raft.

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Florence (1975)

Yes, light is going to be the main thing. Unmoving camera, quick fades between shots, makes you wonder why he didn’t go into still photography instead, then there’s just enough motion in the images (water, clouds) and light shifts to answer that question.

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New York Portrait chapter 1 (1979)

Some incredible skies, great rainy streets, making constellations from asphalt sparkling under streetlights (most of this was shot at night). A murmuration or two – in this house we give bonus points when your movie focuses on birds. It’s not Hutton’s fault that the Lennon title track is less to my tastes than the first three songs. Since I’m already being offensive to avant-garde purists by playing music, I’ll also say that these films feel kinda ambient, like they’d be good to project on the wall behind the cinema-themed bar I’m gonna open when I retire.

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New York Portrait chapter 2 (1981)

This one’s on the Wendy & Lucy DVD, where Kelly(?) calls them “thoroughly observational documents … Hutton transforms the act of looking into a cause for silent meditation.” More flooded streets, an insane street drain, a great shot with a blimp moving between two silhouette buildings, what looks like a jet fleet leaving behind a morse code pattern. Seems less explicitly light-focused than the others, or perhaps I’m getting used to his particular photographic style, or I’m distracted since I ran out of Lennon tunes and it started playing Titan to Tachyons.

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New York Portrait chapter 3 (1990)

All of these are from different sources, and this source is the worst – why are there no blu-ray companies focused on fringe silent shorts collections? I appreciate the fireworks in this one since I’m watching on the 4th of July, even thought Hutton hasn’t solved the problem that seeing fireworks in a movie is never especially cool. A rare bit of human drama towards the end as he films a medical emergency from straight overhead. Return of the murmuration in the final seconds, beautifully done.

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Boston Fire (1979)

The easiest one to remember its images from the title – something in Boston is on fire, and Hutton is fortunately here to film the smoky light with the dark stream of firehose water cutting across the image. My favorite of the bunch, possibly influenced by my recently reading Ten Skies.

Michael Sicinski in Cinema Scope:

A nearly perfect distillation of Hutton’s aesthetic, Boston Fire also harks back to the earliest days of cinema. It is an actualité, an observational eight-minute record of a dramatic human event. And, in terms of Hutton’s mature films about the Hudson River [1996 and later], Boston Fire serves as a kind of inversion. Instead of humans struggling to move across a placid natural surface, here it is nature that is the (destructive) agent, with humans desperately trying to beat it back.

by ·Comments Off on DW Griffith shorts (1909-1913)

The Unchanging Sea (1910)

Multi-generational romance and amnesiac drama. The actors are phony from the second they step onscreen, but there are long shots of people looking away from camera staring at the sea, trying to match the tone of the poem they’re adapting, which makes up for the rest. The not-actually-widow is the future Mrs. Griffith, their daughter grows up to be Mary Pickford.

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A Drunkard’s Reformation (1909)

The reformation comes from taking his daughter to a play where he sees himself in the lead character – a drunk guy with enabler friends who’s violent with his family. The spectator returns home and vows to give up liquor immediately, instead smoking a giant pipe in the face of his young child. This couple is the same actors as the fishing couple, sans Pickford.

getting really into the play:

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The Mountaineer’s Honor (1909)

Is he a mountaineer because he wears high boots with his suit and tie? That’s no kind of costume to go mountaineering in. Pickford is playing teenaged, sneaking away from family gatherings to hang out with this guy. Her brother chases the guy into town, shoots him and some passer-by. The law chases the brother to the house, catches him, says he’ll be hanged, so mum shoots her son dead (death before dishonor). Continuity between shots is maintained by having actors always point where they came from, then point where they’re going next.

autographed still of Pickford pointing to where she’s going next:

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Enoch Arden (1911)

Enoch and Annie go home after their wedding, a title card says “later” and now they have three kids. Enoch goes to sea and might never return. Movie gets a lotta mileage out of people standing on the beach in front of crashing waves. Homely Philip pines after Annie and she finally agrees to marry him after Enoch has been lost at sea for a decade, but we’ve seen The Unchanging Sea and know that anything is possible. Sure enough, Enoch gets home after years on a desert island, sees his wife with Philip, then crawls away and dies. Remade a few years later with Lillian Gish (and Griffith in the cast), then twice in 1940, as Too Many Husbands and My Favorite Wife.

Island Enoch:

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The Painted Lady (1912)

More like the Unpainted Lady, our heroine refuses to wear makeup to impress the boys, so she’s unpopular. When some mustache guy finally goes for her, he was apparently only trying to get to her whitebeard father’s money, and she shoots him when he breaks into the house. In the aftermath, she does put on makeup, goes mad, and dies, not necessarily in that order. She was Blanche Sweet, and her dad was later in a Bela Lugosi movie called Murder by Television.

ice cream festival of wicked temptation:

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The Mothering Heart (1913)

Griffith’s concerns seem entirely domestic in these movies. Men go off to work – work where? Doing what? It doesn’t matter. Lillian Gish’s husband gets rich, somehow, and they start going to awful rich-person gathering places, where The Idle Woman starts pursuing the husband. Lillian catches on to the shenanigans and leaves him, goes to her mom’s and has a baby, which gets sick and dies. Meanwhile, The Idle Woman tires of the husband/dad and picks up a new guy. What’s the moral here?

by ·Comments Off on Shorts watched April 2024

Woman Haters (1934, Archie Gottler)

An entire Three Stooges short with dialogue in rhyme! And usually not so great. The plot goes that new members of the titular club have sworn off women, then each one is caught alone with the same blonde girl (Marjorie White of sci-fi musical Just Imagine). They sing too much in this one and the rhyming doesn’t work, but they do hit each other a whole lot.

Not trying to make sense of the historical context of these shorts, I ended up watching “the first official Three Stooges short” per a professor of Stoogeological Studies. Director Gottler wasn’t a Stooges guy but had a regular gimmick (his other movies feature “dialogue all in rhyme” and “young men competing for the affections of a beautiful blonde”).

Aged Stooges:

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World of Glory (1991, Roy Andersson)

And I rewatched this, after catching up with You, The Living.

by ·Comments Off on Owen Land films (1966-1977)

I’ve seen one short Owen Land film before and wasn’t so high on it, but I’m ever intrigued by the idea of a structural-experimental parody artist, or whatever he was, so I’m checking out everything I can find. All these were credited to George Landow – he changed his name soon afterwards.

Film in Which There Appear Sprocket Holes, Edge Lettering, Dirt Particles, etc. (1966)

Approx a one-second loop repeated a couple hundred times. Possibly one of those color reference images. Mekas was a fan. Why add film projector sound when any proper screening (not on a digital file in my living room) would have its own film projector sounds – is that part of the meta nature of the project or was it added during the video transfer?

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Diploteratology: Bardo Follies (1967)

1. A few-second loop of a boat exiting a tunnel while a person (real? animatronic?) waves on the left side
2. Three porthole views of the same image distributed across a mostly black screen
3. The image begins to get replaced with the bubbly butterfly-wing textures of celluloid melting or dissolving
4. Replacing the porthole views, we get fullscreen strobing freezeframes of the melt-dissolve textures
5. Left/right split-screen of film melts in motion
Fully silent.

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Remedial Reading Comprehension (1970)

“This is a film about you … not about its maker.” That’s more like it, layers upon layers. A woman dreams a classroom, a man jogs in place in front of a screen of someone jogging, an alarm sounds while we read about phony teaching techniques at a preordained pace, and why not throw in a commercial for pre-cooked rice.

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Thank You Jesus for the Eternal Present (1973)

An annoying one – high-contrast images of street scenes, closeups and a trade show, while overlapped sound loops are praising God/Jesus. Pretty short, at least.

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Wide Angle Saxon (1975)

Lively one with usually-sync sound, cutting between all sorts of things. Bible stories, and stories of modern people influenced by bible stories. Repeated outtakes of a reporter self-conscious that he can’t remember Panamanian generals’ names but who keeps pronouncing “junta” with a hard J. A terrified artist pouring red paint on things and people, who gets his own title sequence. “Oh it was a dream” – does this end with the woman from the beginning of Remedial waking up? Were the six years between films all her dream?

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New Improved Institutional Quality (1976)

Woman is giving exam instructions on the soundtrack, and the guy onscreen is following them. The instructions involve writing numbers on a photograph, so the guy goes inside the photograph, writing the numbers with a giant pencil. Then he shrinks further when confronted with a woman inside the picture, nestles in her shoe, and then flies silently through some previous Land films (Film In Which, Remedial). Weird, I would not have got the references if I hadn’t been watching these together.

new improved sprocket holes, edge lettering:

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On The Marriage Broker Joke (1979)

People in panda suits introduce versions of films about the marriage broker joke, which it sort of eventually gets around to telling. Marketing discussion with an offscreen speaker doing a bad Japanese stereotype accent. Ends with more religion stuff. The onscreen text was probably meant to be readable, but my video copy is horrendous. Rosenbaum called it an “obscure blend of deconstructive slapstick and various issues arising from his then-recent conversion to fundamentalist Christianity”

P. Adams Sitney in Artforum:

From the start, Land was unique in his subjects and in his relationship to the processes of filmmaking. Television, advertisements, linguistic confusions were the materials of his first films, and they remained his favorite subjects. Above all he used cinema as a means to explore the illusory nature of images.

He had no scruples about mercilessly making fun of his fellow filmmakers (and of me) so long as he prominently mocked himself and his own works, as he did with wry humor in films such as New Improved Institutional Quality and On the Marriage Broker Joke. His religious convictions never dispelled his fascination with the absurdities of human behavior. The drives for possessions, certitude, beauty, sex, money, and food — especially sex — make Land’s fictive humans ridiculous, confused, and devious. His ability to invent and to people his films with memorably ridiculous characters was unmatched, even by the late George Kuchar, among American avant-garde filmmakers.

Land:

I… developed the technique of fabricating fantastic stories about myself and relating them in a perfectly deadpan manner so as to convince my hearers of their authenticity. This was not done maliciously, but out of a sense of the absurdity of all phenomena and the arbitrariness of all information. This may be a form of poetry, which in Greek means making—as in “making it up.” Usually it is called “lying.”