Back in October I was at the New York Film Festival for the Views from the Avant-Garde. It had been a long time since I had been at a proper festival dedicated to experimental work, and one that took the presentation thereof seriously.
The Francesca Beale is a wonderful theater, with some great projection. In fact, the 16mm film projection looked so good that I felt like it completely dismantled that “oldie” look film projection often has with dimmer projectors / worse spaces. That tungsten-bulbed look has it’s uses, such as having audience members ask you if you are being nostalgic by using film (because, ya know, the only reason to use film nowadays is to talk about death and the 20th century.) What a delight, perhaps even revelation, it must have been to the makers (and us!) to see their works projected at a space like this.
Of course, most places can’t show work like that, and most people don’t see work in such excellent conditions. I’ve been thinking of screenings too; after all, it’s the moment of truth. Accordingly, some basic notes.
Primarily an act of love, a how to. How to show off certain qualities a work may possess. Curatorial inquiry is secondary to this. Don’t include a work you can’t properly show off just because it fits your thesis…
…though of course, “properly” showing a work is always a negotiation. What if the projector is too dim for that room (get a different room)? What if you want to show a film, but don’t have a film projector? What if your video projector is meant for powerpoint presentations? Questions like these should be the primary guide in deciding which works you can show, and if you’re doing it yourself, you will most likely be making certain sacrifices. Though sacrifices is too negative a word; different setups can reveal different qualities. However some work may not survive your setups.
If you assume anything, anything is plug and play, then prepare to enter a world of pain. I wonder how many film teachers spend time on showing their students how to show work. Slightly sadistic homework idea: tell them to do a screening, then set up challenges. No take-up reel! Take the film away right before the show! A sudden rave next door! The screen is the belly of some guy who runs away! etc.
The little details matter. The framing of the screen. Blocking other light/sound sources that hit the screen/ears. Proper alignment of the projector and the screen so you can properly focus.
The laptop that is also showing the video that’s on the screen, but the laptops screen is brighter, so you end up just watch it from there (really hate that one). The mouse being on the screen. The iTunes interface popping up. Not properly putting a pause between pieces.
No work, ever, can stand on it’s own legs, though it feels like it when the organization pulls it off. Maybe it’s the best thing you can do for a work; though by making the process invisible, you also risk giving people a limited impression on how art is. Thinking specifically of uninteresting, only-narrative-film-folk arguments that a work should “speak for itself” instead of being “explained” to you, etc. But if you’re going to try and address every silly expectation that may occur, you have a lot to do…
“Wait!” I hear you say. “What of all those films I watched on pan-scan betamax videos back in the day? So many of those films I loved! Were they not authentic experiences?” It’s a matter of generosity. You, the audience, are being generous enough to bring your attention this way for some time. That’s all we can really ask for.No filmmaker wants the pity of its audience. No filmmaker wants to walk away from a screening wondering whether their work would be received differently “if only…”. Your generosity is your attendance (and the admission fee). Sometimes, I watch work that is intended to be watched on film on video, and it never leaves my imagination that “this would look different.” No artist wants you to do that (unless that’s the conceptual point, I suppose). Someone asked Michael Snow at the Experimental Media Congress what he thinks the people who are watching Wavelength on Youtube are seeing. He said that they haven’t seen Wavelength, but a ghost of it. And ghosts, naturally, require imagination (aha!). Yes, some work can survive in different setups, and you know what, it’s actually none of my business to question it’s effect on you. But if you liked that, just imagine all else that you aren’t seeing that you could be.
Edit: if all this seems simple, it’s only because I’ve been to far too many careless screenings lately, issues that can easily be solved, all that it would require is minimal care, just a bit more thought on how to care. Alas.
***
Wasn’t able to post about it in the moment, but had a wonderful show with the Küçük Sinemalar (click for the program) folk in Istanbul. May there be health! (Sağlık olsun.)
I can’t embed the Kickstarter image, but I can totally do a call out – INCITE – Journal of Experimental Media is looking for funds to help them to print out their great looking 3rd issue titled New Ages. Edited by Brett Kashmere, I’ve been following this journal ever since they dropped by for a small show with Christina Battle at Squeaky Wheel in Buffalo. The journal has been exciting through the last two issues, and I’m honored to be in this most recent issue with a small piece on the 2010 Toronto Experimental Media Congress. You can check out the entire Congress dosier here with a whole host of great pieces on the event. Remember, whatever you give to INCITE will be returned to you ten-fold in flickery delight.
Tomorrow is international Home Movie Day, and we’re totally putting it on at the Austin School of Film. The Texas Archive of the Moving Image will be our guest, and they’ll be showing off some of their collection. Obviously, I’m tremendously psyched; when I arrived in Austin last year, I thought it was weird that there was no Home Movie Day happening. So if you’re reading this, and you’re around, drop on by! Or go to one closer to you. Check here!
(A note: I suppose if you’re seeing this, you already know of the letter sent around by Canyon Cinema, which is where ASoF is getting the print of Line from. Help them out people!)
SMOKE AND MIRRORS
feat. Line Describing a Cone by Anthony McCall and work by Caroline Koebel and Scott Stark
1634 E Cesar Chavez
April 8th, 2011 // 8 PM
$6 / $5 for Students
Join us at the Austin School of Film for an evening of flowing layers and reflected rays! We will be rocking out our fog machine to screen Anthony McCall’s seminal Line Describing a Cone, described as “the most brilliant case of an observation on the essentially sculptural quality of every cinematic situation.” (P. Adams Sitney.) Our smoky program will also feature work by Caroline Koebel (the instructor of our upcoming avant-garde film class) and Scott Stark!
Program
Satrapy / Scott Stark
1988 / 13min / Color / Sound / 16mm
Rephotographed pornographic playing cards rhythmically intrude upon a piercing 5-beat score of different-sized black parallel lines, injecting a note of “negative sound” every third beat against the 5-beat background. As the film progresses, contrapuntal variations of 3, 4, 5 and 7 beat rhythms blend and collide, creating an almost indiscernible complexity, until the lined background ruptures and the sounds and visuals become scattered and disordered. The “girlie” cards break out onto saturated color fields and eventually find their way into the real world, aggressively flickering by against backgrounds of earth, concrete and other surfaces.
hole or space / Caroline Koebel
2006 / 4.23 mins / B&W and Color / Silent / Digital
Pricks, gaps, dots, openings, hole or space takes its cue from contortionists of the early screen in spiraling out from conceptions of the body as whole.
The film uses early cinema and avant-garde classics as its compositional notes: Luis Martinetti, Contortionist (Edison Manufacturing Company, 1894); Crissie Sheridan Serpentine Dance (Edison, 1897); Ballet Mécanique (Fernand Léger & Dudley Murphy, 1924); An Optical Poem (Oskar Fischinger, 1938); Tarantella (Mary E. Bute & Ted Nemeth, 1940).
Sea Lion / Caroline Koebel
2007 / 2:50 / Color / Super 8 to Digital
This hand processed Super 8 film marvels at the beauty of the movement of the sea lion. It reflects the fascination of the filmmaker’s two-year-old son with this animal new to his world.
Line Describing a Cone / Anthony McCall
1973 / 30 min / B&W / Silent / 16mm
“Line describing a cone is what I term a solid light film. It is dealing with the projected light-beam itself, rather than treating the light-beam as a mere carrier of coded information, which is decoded when it strikes a flat surface (the screen).
The film exists only in the present: the moment of projection. It refers to nothing beyond this real time.
The form of attention required on the part of the viewer is unprecedented. No longer is one viewing position as good as any other. For this film every viewing position presents a different aspect. The viewer therefore has a participatory role in apprehending the event: he or she can – indeed needs to move around, relative to the emerging light-form.” – AM
“… Anthony McCall’s LINE DESCRIBING A CONE [is] a film which demanded to be looked at, not on the screen, but in the space of the auditorium. What was at issue was the establishment of a cone of light between the projector and the screen, out of what was initially one pencil-like beam of light. I consider it “the most brilliant case of an observation on the essentially sculptural quality of every cinematic situation.”
- P. Adams Sitney, Artforum
Bios
Caroline Koebel makes experimental films and videos to provoke new modes of aesthetic and critical engagement with topics ranging from early cinema and the maternal body through commodity culture to world affairs and representations of violence. Screenings include MadCat (USA), Edinburgh International Film Festival (Scotland), dança em foco (Brazil), Ladyfest Toronto (Canada), European Media Art Festival (Germany), Camagüey Festival of Video Art (Cuba), and Abstracta: International Exhibition of Abstract Cinema (Italy). She holds a BA in Film Studies from the University of California, Berkeley, and an MFA in Visual Arts from the University of California, San Diego. She has taught at the University at Buffalo, Carnegie Mellon University, and the University of Rochester, and is an Advisor for the Transart Institute. She has served on the board of the Film-Makers’ Cooperative, curated many media arts programs, and among her publications are catalog essays on avant-garde pioneers Carolee Schneemann and Barbara Hammer. www.carolinekoebel.com
Anthony McCall is, without question, one of the seminal artists of American avant-garde cinema. His films and installations from the seventies such as Line Describing a Cone, Long Film for Four Projectors, and Four Projected Movements, represent an extraordinarily corporeal and sensuous meditation on the medium of film and the politics of the audience’s physical and conceptual relationship to it. All of these works took as their starting point the irreducible, necessary conditions of cinema: projected light, and real, three-dimensional space.
Philippe-Alain Michaud, the Film Curator at the Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges-Pompidou, writing about Anthony McCall’s work stated: “Instead of a perspectival, illusionist space that brings cinema close to painting, McCall’s films use a projective space that makes it into sculpture. The film is no longer a projected image that bores a fictive depth into the surface of the wall, but constitutes an actual field that merges with the event of projection itself. In this way Anthony McCall’s light-beams, outlined against mist, expanding upon the specifically plastic properties of film, cross the frontiers of cinema history to join the minimalist propositions of 1970s sculpture and rank alongside the geometric structures of Robert Morris, Sol LeWitt or Carl Andre, Dan Flavin’s fields of color, or Fred Sandback’s spans of colored yarn.”
Anthony McCall’s work is included in many major public collections worldwide including: the Tate Gallery, London, England; the Museum of Modern Art, New York, United States; the Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, United States; the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, Spain; and the Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt, Germany. (via the Sean Kelley Gallery)
Scott Stark has made over 70 films and videos since the early 1980s, and has created numerous installations, performances and photo-collages as well. His work has shown nationally and internationally in venues as diverse as New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the San Francisco Cinematheque, the International Film Festival Rotterdam, the Tokyo Image Forum, and many others. He is the webmaster for Flicker (www.hi-beam.net), the web resource for experimental film and video. More information is available at www.scottstark.com.
I close my eyes and see a flock of birds. The vision lasts a second, or perhaps less; I am not sure how many birds I saw. Was the number of birds definite or indefinite? The problem involves the existence of God. If God exists, the number is definite, because God knows how many birds I saw. If God does not exist, the number is indefinite, because no one can have counted. In this case I saw fewer than ten birds (let us say) and more than one, but did not see nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three or two birds. I saw a number between ten and one, which was not nine, eight, seven, six, five, etc. That integer – non-nine, not-eight, non-seven, non-six, not-five, etc. – is inconceivable. Ergo, God exists.
(Argumentum Ornithologicum by Jorge Luis Borges, trans. Andrew Hurley)
***
Film and video maker Scott Puccio recently uploaded a short video he made last year named Aviary: bird dreams, embedded above. It was originally made to be shown in wooden peep-boxes that Scott built himself, the video looping on a small digital frame. Aviary is the second video he made to be seen like this; below is a picture of one of these “Dream Machines”. It’s currently on display in my very favorite used bookstore, Rustbelt Books. From what I understand, Scott’s making some more of them.
I had met Scott a couple of times since I arrived in Buffalo 2001, but it was about five years ago that we became close friends. I had seen two films of his at the first Electric City Spectacular: Films about Buffalo, a series of short films, divided into 11 “boxes”, frame by frame shots of our mutual friends, of Wegmans, Buffalo, his father picking cherries; and Polyphemus, single-framed cut-outs of eyes from magazines, our eyes following that circling, maddening white spot on the pupil that says “life” – the life that Polyphemus lost. I loved the films. I remember us going on a long walk up east of Elmwood, up Utica, complaining about films and peoples reactions to them, how it made us upset that anyone could think of Michael Moore’s films as progressive considering his aesthetic was the same as that of Fox News, how David Lynch wasn’t really all that interesting, how all those cultural studies books of popular films seemed to be so pre-dominant and rarely interesting, and how this moving image thing is so much more then what we see around us. Then we kept hanging out, talking, always talking, rarely at bars, more till 4 am at one of our homes.
At the time, I didn’t really know anything about experimental flicks – my mind was still set on the old masters from Europe, (Truffaut, Malle, Bunuel, etc.), and it was Scott who introduced me to a whole host of films and videos that have been dear to me since. It was he who’d call me to say “Hey! We’re going to x festival and YOU ARE COMING. YOU HAVE TO COME.” I thought it was great. I think we both share a desire for deep, meaningful friendships, and if I learned anything from ours, it’s how important and vital it is to be generous, and I think it comes across, humbly and playfully, in his films too.
Aviary, inspired by the Borges story, is one of my favorites.
I recently started attending a small class led by poet Hoa Nguyen where we’ve been reading Susan Howe’s My Emily Dickinson, along with Dickinson’s poems as well as Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons. Each class is divided into two – the first half we take turns reading, the second half is dedicated to writing. In our last class, when my turn came to read, I gasped at a familiar line:
How odd this Girl’s life looks
Behind this soft Eclipse
I think that Earth thinks so
To folks in Heaven – now -
(excerpt from a poem by Emily Dickinson)
“Behind this soft Eclipse” is the title of a heartbreaking, gem-like film by Eve Heller that I saw over the summer and that hasn’t left me since. The black and white film was processed both as a negative and a positive: a horse outlined in white (in real life, dark), close-ups of body parts that come to reveal what they are, thick black skies, stone-like over white trees that I can’t get out of my head. Heller’s description of the film from the Canyon Cinema site:
A crossing of paths behind the seen, a labor of love in the wake of one who was just here.
I was imagining a collaboration of parallel worlds or a kind of doubled consciousness, a sense of the corporeal and the riddle of absence. The film is structured along a line of contrasting elements in the form of negative and positive imagery, day and night shots, under and above water elements, presence and disappearance. Light and motion, jarring and gentle, weave the hand processed elements. #Eclipse# is an elegy for Marion McMahon who co-founded the Film Farm (Independent Imaging Retreat) in Southern Ontario, where it was produced.
Premiered at the New York Film Festival, October 2004.
Being completely unfamiliar with Dickinson, I of course don’t know whether the line is a more famous one or not. Just to say, I am ever more excited to delve further into her lines, and to see more of Heller’s frames.
Last Sunday, I screened a little program I put together of work by the contributers to the Küçük Sinemalar blog (a small experimental film blog in Turkish where we post upcoming show announcements, reviews, recipes, polemics, etc.) at Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center in Buffalo, NY. It included work by Can Eskinazi, Eytan Ipeker, Yoel Meranda, Mustafa Uzuner and myself. I also screened a film I rented from the Filmmakers Cooperative named Of Eh (1968) by Cengiz Yetken, whom I had never heard of; I felt that this screening could be a nice moment to also excavate some possibly interesting moments from Turkish film history. Naturally, the screening isn’t meant to be some kind of all-encompassing anthology of Turkish experimental cinema (whatever that may be.) It’s more of a survey, and one that I believe produced a rather interesting portrait of the country. I hope that I can continue doing screenings like, showcasing work by other people as well, both older and newer.
WordPress doesn’t allow me to add Vimeo’s hubnut widget; you can see the program and watch all of the videos right here (scroll to the bottom.)
If interested, and if you have about half an hour where you can wipe away the rest of the world for a bit, I do heartily recommend it and I’d be happy to further talk about it with you (I hesitate talking about what the program produced in me beforehand…) The page for the show at Hallwalls is here.
As you might gather, I feel pretty happy about how the videos in the program came together; it ended up combining in ways that made me see these works – all of which I was long familiar with – in new lights, with themes emerging that I hadn’t given (enough) thought to before. It’s one thing to watch each piece individually, clicking through everybody’s Vimeo pages; it’s another to see them projected back to back on a nice big screen.
I should make one small note about one of the videos, specifically Mustafa Uzuner’s Neyse Halim…: The title loosely translates as “What my state is…”, and is a part of a phrase that one says during the whole Turkish coffee fortune ritual. The complete phrase is “Neyse halim, çıksın falım.” Roughly: “What my state is, so let my fortune be.” If you know some elementary Turkish coffee symbolism, it might charm you even more.
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A small note of housekeeping: I found an essay by Keewatin Dewdney named “Discontinous Film”. I added a link to it on the Breer / Dewdney post.
For a bit now, I’ve been visiting the Austin School of Film to help out here and there. The Austin School of Film came out of two different organizations: The Center for Young Cinema and the Austin Cinemaker Co-op. They have recently been interested in reigniting the experimental facitilities that lie in their roots under the name of Cinemaker, and I’ve been helping out with whatever limited knowledge I myself have in trying to set up a film editing and hand-processing space. It’s nice knowing that not only is there such space for my own needs, but also a space that others can use, knowing others too are working. Encouraging.
In conjunction with Lalitha Gopalan’s Experimental film class at the University of Texas, we set up a screening of Hollis Frampton’s Zorns Lemma to inaugurate their Cinemaker division. Esteemed filmmaker and Guggenheim recipient Scott Stark will introduce the film and lead a post-discussion Q and A. The doors will be open before hand for people to come in and see the (very much work-in-progress) film facilities. If you’re around I’d love to see you. The only other time I watched the film, the person who programmed it got up at the end and said “Well, if you have any questions, the filmmakers dead!” It’ll be fun seeing it again.
Zorns Lemma!
December 1st Door: 6pm / Zorn’s Lemma: 7pm
at
Austin School of Film
1634 E. Cesar Chavez Street
Austin, TX 78702 Telephone: 512.236.8877
(Admission is for the film only so we can keep having screenings! Feel free to come hang out before the film too! Depending on the weather the screening might be held outside; in either case however, do note that seating will be limited.)
If you want to watch a poopy version of the film (my god! Do people actually sit through this video? The print isn’t that expensive!), it’s right on UBU.
One day, you might find yourself driving on the Austin Highway in San Antonio. Among the suburban sprawl, you might not notice too much, just the regular chain businesses that pollute the country all over. After a bit, you might see a Wal-Mart. If you look on the other side of the street, and aim your eyes high, you might also notice this:
And when you lower your eyes again, you’ll see this:
Whatever this once was, it is now Jack Judson’s Magic Lantern Castle, a small, privately owned museum solely dedicated to the magic lantern purportedly invented by Athanasius Kircher. A bunch of us, organized by Barna Kantor, went on a little trip there the other day and it’s a small locale of wonders with thousands of slides and hundreds of different kinds of magic lanterns dating back to the 1700s. Judson gave us a small tour of the museum, describing all the varieties of lanterns, lighting devices and a small presentation of some of the slides. It was absolutely incredible to look at so many facets limited to only one element of what is generally termed pre-cinema. I only wish we could look at more slides. They include everything from landscape shots, to short comedic sketches (like The Rat Catcher) to “phantasmagorias“, little horror shows depicting the dead, where the projectionist would move the lantern closer to the screen to make the image bigger and freak people out.
Many of the slides also had little levers and things to make them actually move. A couple of years ago I had attended a small exhibit at MOMA put together by Ernie Gehr showing off some of these philosophical instruments (as well as the slides themselves.) Some of them I had an incredibly difficult time wrapping my head around; there were sometimes two or three layers of movement within a projection: a landscape where it changed from day to night, where it snowed and where a windmill moved. I tried to sketch and understand how they did this, but all my assumptions were based on having simply, one lantern. The solution was the picture on the right.
Here’s some more links on Jack Judson and below is a video from the Netherlands of an actual demonstration of the device (here’s part 2.) I also want to recommend a small, out of print book, full of charm: The Magician and the Cinema by Erik Barnouw.
A few years ago, as I discovered more and more things about experimental film and video, I wondered if anybody back in Turkey was interested in these “things”. At that point, it was my fifth or sixth consecutive year living in Buffalo; I went back to Turkey usually every summer, but I hadn’t lived there that long in my life to begin with, so I was very disconnected from back home. A little online digging didn’t reveal too much; most of the chatter was either of David Lynch, or people making fun of filmmakers naming things experimental because they were bad. There was a yahoo listserve however, simply named Deneysel Sinema – Experimental Cinema. My first contact was the admin of the list, Mustafa Uzuner, who was (and is) living in Montreal and whom I shared a couple of nice emails with. It wasn’t very active; a couple of posts of videos being screened in a café in Ankara and that was about it. My annual summer trip home was imminent, and I was considering shooting some 16mm there. I shot off a question that felt slightly naïve to me, but as the internet didn’t answer it, I thought perhaps someone could. “Can I find a 16mm projector in Turkey?” I received two replies; one from Mustafa and one by Yoel Meranda, and another series of correspondence began. Yoel ended up sending me a DVD of his videos: a bunch of little cine-poems, cityscapes in digital close-up, with terrific little rhythms and cuts that made you aware of lengths beyond their own. They remain my favorite Istanbul movies.
Above: 4 Eylül (September 4th),miniDV, 2006
I ended up meeting Yoel, and through him, Eytan İpeker as well. I had met another filmmaker, Can Eskinazi, independently, and then suddenly one summer our various friend groups came together in one of those multi-table, logistical nightmare, drinking manias that have since become synonymous in my mind with “I’m going to Istanbul.” Gather thirty people and make them drink and talk and shout while gypsy music rages in the background, and a single lined flood of humanity stammers along by your side. I was ecstatic; not only had I met people who cared deeply about this whole moving image shebang, but they were absolutely terrific and lovely people too. Yoel tells me that such crazy nights don’t happen too often, but I can’t imagine Istanbul any other way. Especially not without them. In short, I consider the trio mentioned above as very dear friends.
Between the first time I saw his DVD and when he opened his Vimeo account, Yoel has either become or is publicly showing himself to be an incredibly prolific video maker; there’s rarely a month that goes by without four or five new videos popping up, not to mention all the pieces he makes that aren’t online (the only ones that aren’t, according to Yoel, are those that depend on the interlacing effect on a miniDV player (such as could be seen when you pause a video on your camera), those that simply don’t work online or those that he doesn’t like anymore.) The length of the pieces is often between 30 seconds and 5 minutes. Since his miniDV camera broke, he has continued shooting with his cellphone, and recently, with HD. In all of these, his videos have tended to become more and more abstract, his colors and rhythms more precise, always mindful of their format, and pushing them as far as he needs them, often reshooting already “low quality” footage of of his computer screen again, as seen below in one of my very favorites, océanéant.
Above: océanéant. Shot with a Nokia 6151, reshot with an E65. January 2009.
As Fred Campersaidabout the piece: “Yoel Meranda indulges a fascination with color in his extraordinary abstraction océanéant: fields of translucent reds gather upon themselves until they seem to congeal into something with mass, weight, and texture.” Such indulgences have only been carried forward with his recent videos; we are given set-ups that over time are complicated by the introduction of sudden and frantic new rhythms, accelerated enlargements of a recurring flash of digital color, darkening digital blacks, closures of what was until then a full view, sometimes distancing us from the beautiful, trying to earn it. Aber die Horen (embedded below), along with his other recent output like the hallucinatory Television, the beautiful electric lights near buyukada or the exquisite rauscht are some of these most recent pieces. I can’t wait till next month.
Above: Aber die Horen. HD. June 2010.
***
Above: Legend of Nile. miniDV. 2008.
Only in the last week or so did Eytan İpeker begin uploading his videos online. Eytan and Yoel grew up together, and it’s obvious in every way that their conversations grew to influence each other. Yoel even told me that in highschool, before even encountering films by Brakhage et al, Eytan had written an essay named “The Possibility of an Abstract Cinema” (or as it’s called in Turkish, “aman da aman!”) Eytan’s work is also abstract, though , there’s more of a reference to simple geometric shapes, which makes sense as most of his videos come from the same set of footage of his piano. Legend of Nile, one of these “piano pieces”, has the overlaid and highly manipulated vertical lines continually crossing the frame horizontally. The video slowly progresses through different blues, blacks and golds, different rhythms, chronicling this river through the days passing over and under it, reflected by it.
Above: So Abstract. miniDV. 2009.
I find Yoel and Eytan’s work absolutely unmistakable, though it’s difficult to put to words. I’m tempted to say that Eytan’s work has a drier sense of humor, which he makes apparent in a piece like So Abstract above or like in The Eternal Wink, and I’m tempted to say that Yoel’s videos are more “organic”, but these comparisons aren’t fair to either filmmaker. It’s a difference that is apparent not only in their visual choices, but also in the rhythms which the films build – Yoel’s breathing can be staccato, if you will, with sudden breaks from the parameters of his medium, whereas Eytan’s pacing is often more even, and his surprises come from within his own structures.
I write this now as both these videomakers will be presenting work at the Toronto Film Festival, in the City to City shorts program. Yoel’s video Television is also viewable in New York City at the White Box Gallery for their Stirrings Still show.
Hopefully, I’ll see them sooner rather than later.
There was a year in my life where I tried to write something really substantial on Robert Breer, but ended up not being able to get anywhere with it; I read what I could, but as is often the case with work like this, couldn’t see all I wanted. Our department had some of his films: 69, 70, 77, Gulls and Buoys and Pat’s Birthday. 69 especially blew me away. It really made me giggle, like some kind of wonderful machine, learning how to live, setting up rules here and there, changing them just a bit, the weight, the heaviness, the (illusion of) movement of objects, things “moving” because of sounds in the background, depth coming in and out, and all of this hilariously breaking down into blues, greys, everything we saw before in single frames, and a gasping flashing and focusing of little chotchkeys right before. If we ever get robots, this is how they should break - or be born (they probably already do.)
I know there’s a bunch of versions online, but seriously, none of them are worthwhile unless you’ve seen 69 on film.
I figure it might be of interest to someone to offer some of the quotes I gathered, along with a bibliography here (.doc), both by Breer and about him. To be frank, blogging again about films really came via the back to back posts on Breer by Jacob W. (who posted the interview with Breer by Mekas/Sitney quoted below) and Yoel Meranda, and I had this little post in mind ever since. The quotes mostly focus on 69, but I was also interested in trying to connect him to Jean Vigo (whom he mentions as an influence) and also talk politics briefly. I’ve generally felt that the most interesting writing on Breer was done by Scott MacDonald, Fred Camper and Lois Mendelson in her difficult-to-find book Robert Breer: A Study of His Work in the Context of the Modernist Tradition. I never gathered all the quotes I wanted from that book – there were too many. Anyhow, here’s some samples from the file:
From Film Culure Interview (Mekas/Sitney) p.46-47 (on 69, analyses of synthesis):
Mekas: I projected, yesterday, to a group of people, here at Anthology, your film 69. And I could talk about any other film, any film – but I practically couldn’t say a work about 69. I don’t know how to approach it, or how to talk about it, although it may be my favorite film of yours. I don’t know how to begin to talk about it.
Breer: … I think 69 goes from a kind of very deliberate, repetitive opening sequence that seems to be very locked in on itself, and gradually disintegrates, right? And it goes dark, and it ends dark. Things break up completely. Somebody asked me at the Flaherty Seminar or some place, what was the meaning of the last part of 69 when the flow that was previously there, on the screen, began to break into pieces? And I said that that was the analysis of the synthesis. They are all synthetic films, very much so. I mean frame by frame synthesis. I broke up those motions and actually shuffled the cards to get that effect, you know – I shuffle and shoot them, and I shuffle them again and I shoot them again… So then, I was analyzing the construction of the film. That’s part of my idea about concreteness and exposing the materials of film itself and that was the way of doing it.
From Letter sent to Jonas Mekas by Breer (Film Culture, p.70)
“It has to do with revealing the artifices instead of concealing them. The fact of that rabbit sitting inside the magician’s hat is the real mystery, not how it’s dissimulated. The hat should be transparent and show the rabbit.
So it’s again the threshold area that defines the form. Thresholds for my own exploration have been:
The fusion of stills into flowing motion and back again (flip cards, collage film, sculpture).
Transition from literary convention to other – i.e. abstraction and back again (collage films – Pat’s B’day).
Transition from subconscious to conscious awareness-i.e. slow motion sculpture, fast paced film.
Transition from 2d to 3D and from 3D to 2D-transparent mutascopes and cut out sculpted mutascopes – rotating bent wires.
RB: There was a project that Billy Kluver came up with from Sweden that didn’t ever get done, but solicited some suggestions. Somebody here reminded me of the project that I’d suggested and which was for a room that would be made for meetings, political, artistic and that room would be on wheels but very quietly. People would come in and spend all day talking and deciding things, but when they go out of the same door it would be in a different place.
HUO: It would move slowly?
RB: Yes it would move slowly and the idea was again to undermine certitude so that even these big decisions would have to be… It’s kind of obvious I guess. But that was one of the projects that never got realised and that will probably never get realised because it’s anti-organisation, it’s anti-orthodoxy, so that maybe is a little problematic too.
***
On my last trip to Toronto, we visited the CFMDC. I assume like other film coops, they let you preview films, which basically means $10 to watch what ever sweet Canadian flicks you want (or perhaps whoever was working that day let it mean that.) Made me really jealous of Torontonians… So along with Frampton/Wieland’s A to B in Ontario, Elie Epp’s Trapline, we watchedKeewatin Dewdney‘s Maltese Cross Movement. For those wondering what a Maltese Cross (also known as a Geneva Drive) is, here’s a Wikipedia article. Dewdney didn’t make that many films, but this is a real, joyful hoot. It was the second time I saw it; the first time, Michael Zryd had introduced it to us at our Canadian Curiosities screening with the words, and I paraphrase, “A film about a projector learning how to speak.” Ever since I watched it, I kept trying to remember the music, the progression and the general giddy feeling of watching it, and it all happened again the second time. Here’s some program notes from the Courtisane Festival in the Netherlands:
The “Maltese Cross” system was at the heart of the cinema machine in its infancy. This was the mechanism that originally dissected the continuity of vision in the camera and also re-assembled it in the projector. Keewatin Dewdney uses it as the central motif in this fascinating film, which not only addresses the nature of cinematographic illusion, but also plays in a witty way with the cognitive relationship between word and image. The Maltese Cross Movement reads like a rebus. In the process of its decoding, the deep-rooted process of attributing meaning is reversed, and in doing so generates a turbulent counter current which carries us along to the edge of the logics of meaning.
The Maltese Cross Movement is a fascinating rebus of a film. The star and crescent motif shot through the film can represent so many things. At first it is the mechanical movement in the camera/projector that slices flow in just the right frequency and regularity for us to see motion where there is none. Then this pair goes on to be the sun and moon, as the astronomical basis for our diurnal and calendric rhythms, they represent another kind of intermittance and alternation. Then further to be the symbols of complementarity, one in continuous motion and one intermittent (with the sound of the ratcheting cogs of the projector). Many images flash past as the film teaches you various ways to read it. And as the montage gets ever more ecstatic — and interrupted — the text of image, sound and their synchronization working like a rickety reality, almost ready to collapse, multivalent and almost intelligible, like the fine structure of our own experience, the final words, “If i die tonight, tomorrow “I” ‘ll be gone” representing a joke.
You can rent the film from the CFMDC, which I really recommend you do.
What would happen if you showed 69 and Maltese Cross Movement back to back? Would they cancel each other out? Would it work out perfectly? Are you ready?
…
…
no
(♫)
Update (1/18/2011): I found a small essay by Dewdney entitled Discontinous Films (.pdf). Check it out!
