As a Chimney Draws

Films by Abigail Child

2011-12-26T22:12:00.005-05:00

Frames from Covert Action by Abigail Child (courtesy of the artist)

The latest issue of The Brooklyn Rail includes my review of a recent DVD-and-book release for Abigail Child's Is This What You Were Born For? Endlessly inventive, this remarkable cycle of films, whose creation spanned the 1980s, is unlike anything made before or since; in their approaches to montage, image/sound relationship, and constituent materials, each film is distinctly different, yet they work together as a cohesive whole. Their soundtracks are meticulously crafted, and feature a set of extraordinary musical contributions by the likes of Shelley Hirsch, Christian Marclay, Zeena Parkins, and Charles Noyes.

The review itself can only begin to suggest the cycle's richness and depth, and this is where the book comes in; it includes a very fine set of essays by Tom Gunning, Melissa Ragona, Redell Olsen, and Thomas Zummer, along with an interview with Child by Francois Bovier and Ricardo Da Silva. You can read the Rail piece here:

http://www.brooklynrail.org/2011/12/film/is-this-what-you-were-born-for

Alvin Lucier’s "The Queen of the South"

2011-07-27T22:33:00.015-04:00

Members of Loadbang and Pygmy Jerboa performing at Issue Project Room- June 2011

This is the first in a series of entries on individual works by the composer Alvin Lucier; it begins with The Queen of the South, commissioned in 1972 by Gerald Shapiro and the New Music Ensemble. Stay tuned over the coming months as the series continues.

The Queen of the South is for me part of an ongoing fascination with attempts by artists and musicians to visualize sound; typically achieved through technological means (regardless of the sophistication of materials at hand or degree of scientific understanding on the part of the artist), they are often informed by—yet distinct from—any science-driven objectives of recording and measurement. My recent article about Ryoji Ikeda looks at one recent example of this desire at its most elaborate; The Queen of the South represents a more back-to-basics approach.

Lucier’s composition draws direct inspiration from the work of the Ernst Chladni and Hans Jenny; Chladni, an 18th century German physicist, is best known for his pioneering research into the laws of acoustics and the visualization of sound waves, using simple materials like sand, flat resonant plates, and a violin bow. Two centuries later, Jenny (who passed away the same year Lucier’s piece was composed) extended Chladni’s explorations, conducting rigorous experiments with liquids, and using oscillators for precise calibration of audio signals. Later, he speculated about the potential healing powers of certain sound frequencies, thought that has been presented as fact by some of his kookier followers.

Plate from Die Akustik by Ernst Chladni

Lucier saw these experiments not simply as a form of drawing with sound; he was intrigued too by the momentary arrest and exposure of something invisible and ever in flux, a kind of photography before (and beyond) photography. Many of his pieces, such as Vespers and Bird and Person Dyning, foreground the process of discovery, enacted anew with each performance. They evoke a childlike wonder in the most positive sense, and he achieves this by stripping each piece down to its essential elements. For The Queen of the South, he steps back from Jenny’s precision instruments, deploying a musical ensemble with all its sonic idiosyncrasies and the human imperfections of its members. The prose score instructs performers to

“Sing, speak, or play electronic or acoustic musical instruments in such a way as to activate metal plates, drumheads, sheets of glass, or any wood, copper, steel, glass, cardboard, earthenware, or other responsive surfaces upon which are strewn quartz sand, silver salt, iron filings, lycopodium, granulated sugar, pearled barley or grains of other kinds, or other similar materials suitable for making visible the effects of sound.”

This indirect interface is a bit like watching someone use a computer mouse for the first time, struggling to understand the correlation between their actions and what happens upon the resonant surface. The various materials suggested in the score may respond quite differently to the same sounds- some offering visible resistance, others skittering across the chosen surface with minimal sonic prompting. Performers are given great leeway for real creative input, for Lucier is quite at home with the idea that no two performances of this piece will look or sound quite like another. In truth, Lucier—along with post-Cagean contemporaries such as George Brecht, La Monte Young, and others—went well beyond Cage in both the freedom granted to the performer and, following that, their encouragement of such varied outcomes (it’s too little known that Cage himself, for all his professed allegiance to chance methods, quite often displayed control freak tendencies.)

Important as Cage and his contemporaries were, Lucier was also reacting to the cultural and pedagogical traditions of the conservatory in which he was trained. Why must the search be the composer’s alone? What about the performers, or for that matter, the audience? By the time he composed The Queen of the South, he had established convictions about the importance of music as a process of inquiry, wholly antithetical to the values now calcified within the western classical tradition.

Back in early June at Issue Project Room, two ensembles- Loadbang (Alejandro Acierto, Jeffrey Gavett, Andy Kozar, and Will Lang) and Pygmy Jerboa (Maria Stankova and Ivan Naranjo) gave a fine performance of Lucier’s piece. Following a note suggested in the score for the benefit of the audience, a video camera transmitted a live signal of the image for projection onto a wall behind the performers. In an interview with Douglas Simon, Lucier explained that:

“...needing closed circuit video is a blessing in disguise. You make the imagery available to the audience, but what happens along with that is that you defy gravity, you turn the plates up on their axes, you change the spatial relationships, you show something that is physically impossible. And secondly, by translating the image to video, you’re turning a mechanical phenomenon into an electronic one.”

The groups at IPR were respectful of the score and to the sense of what Lucier’s music often sounds like. Their first iteration with salt on the head of a snare drum was perhaps the most successful, a particular combination of instrumental voices, resonant surface, and granular material that worked wonderfully together.

Eschewing traditional notation, Lucier’s prose scores are beautiful in and of themselves. Instructions are clear, and the language evocative- the score for The Queen of the South invites its performers to sonically conjure patterns and images from an inventory that includes “...beads, medallions, topologies of near or far environs, plaids, tweeds, road signs, floor plans, tapestries, diamonds,” and so on. It’s rare to encounter an artist so unafraid of the poetic associations within their own work. What’s more, the clarity with which he lays out his concepts extends to the performance aesthetic itself; Lucier’s music and his pedagogical contributions are very much of a piece.

The hand-wringing that takes place over the ever diminishing audience for contemporary art music rarely (if ever) considers that most listeners have no idea what composers are up to. Occasionally the composers themselves may bear some responsibility for this, but to me it’s the promotional materials—lazy, cut-and-paste press releases, program notes that comprise little beyond lists of career highlights—that are the great missed opportunities in bringing new listeners to music outside the mainstream. One look at Lucier’s Reflections: Interviews Scores Writings 1965-1994, published by MusikTexte (and from which the quotes here are taken) throws this into stark relief, lucid and with a generosity of ideas too often absent elsewhere in the world of contemporary music.

Through the transformation of language into sound and vibrating matter, then again into audio and video signals, the richness of this seemingly simple idea becomes apparent. As Lucier explained in that same interview,

“If you’re to play a piece in which the task is to put sounds into a material and experience the modes of vibration in that sound, as in The Queen of the South, ...you have two choices. One is to make any sound that you already know how to make, or any music that you know, and see what it does to the materials; in that case, you’re making son et lumière. That’s the first thing that everybody suggests I do, to plug in a Beethoven symphony, for example... Or to avoid that simple- minded situation, you can do something more simple-minded: ask a player to pay very close attention to what occurs in those situations and use those occurrences as a...—I was going to use the word “score”—use them as a procedure with which to continue making sounds.”

Is it possible to reconcile these two approaches, creating “sound that you already know how to make”, while at the same time paying “very close attention to what occurs”? Josh Solondz and I (aka SynthHumpers) will see if it’s possible sometime this fall- performances details forthcoming.

Notes on W.C. Fields

2011-07-16T16:17:00.006-04:00

The July/August issue of The Brooklyn Rail includes an essay I wrote about W.C. Fields; in it, I explore how his screen persona was shaped by his reimagination of an alternate destiny, one where the psychic scars of his early years of struggle were transformed into a dark comedy that resonated for audiences during the Great Depression. I also focus on the nuance and modulation of his comic voice and some of the complex issues of power connected to it. You can find it all here:

http://www.brooklynrail.org/2011/07/film/notes-on-wc-fields-for-jim-gardner

Ryoji Ikeda's "the transfinite"

2011-07-04T16:47:00.006-04:00

Ryoji Ikeda's the transfinite, photo by James Ewing (courtesy of Park Avenue Armory)

The current Film Comment includes an article I wrote about the transfinite, Ryoji Ikeda's stunning recent installation at the Park Avenue Armory. I've been intrigued by Ikeda's music since first hearing it nearly ten years ago. Good as it was, it left me wholly unprepared for CI, a "concert" he staged at Eyebeam in 2004 (concert is in quotes because Ikeda had abandoned all pretense toward live performance); that, along with last year's datamatics [ver.2.0] at Alliance Française, solidified his place for me as one of the truly important artists working today. the transfinite moves beyond that earlier work, integrating elements of expanded cinema, sculpture, motion graphics, concrete poetry and, of course, electronic music. A few critics, including Ken Johnson of the New York Times, didn't really get it; the hope is that this piece might offer a little belated insight:

http://www.filmlinc.com/film-comment/article/come-together-ryoji-ikeda-traverses-the-transfinite

Claire Denis and Tindersticks

2011-05-22T19:13:00.005-04:00

Still from Nenette et Boni by Claire Denis

The current issue of Film Comment features a new article by me about the recently released collection of soundtracks by Tindersticks for the films of Claire Denis. My reaction to this set was quite mixed, but instead of repeating myself here, you can go straight to it:

http://www.filmlinc.com/film-comment/article/claire-denis-and-tindersticks

To be fair, much of that criticism could be just as easily made against hundreds of other soundtrack recordings- in the coming weeks I'll post some further thoughts about what I think makes a living, breathing soundtrack with a life of its own, along with a handful of personal favorites- stay tuned.

Synthhumpers at ETC

2011-03-23T14:26:00.015-04:00

Synthhumpers at ETC, March 19, 2011

This video will help to account for my extended time away from posting anything new here- it's one of several pieces that Josh Solondz and I--aka Synthhumpers--put together last week during our residency at the Experimental Television Center in Owego, NY. It was my sixth time there, and Josh's first: the place has played a crucial role in my own creative life, but more importantly, in the larger history of the electronic moving image; it's imbued with the love of its core staff- Sherry Miller Hocking, founder Ralph Hocking, Hank Rudolph, and Dave Jones, who designed much of the equipment especially for the Center. We're sad that after 40 years, the Residency Program will be coming to an end- and all the more grateful to get this one last chance to shake a few bricks loose. This is dedicated to the ETC crew.

Josh Solondz: Matrix/delay and distortion pedals, percussion, and Casio SK-1.

Jim Supanick: Boss DR-110 drum machine/mixer feedback loops, guitar, and clamshell sleep aid.

Odds and Ends for the End of 2010

2010-12-31T19:49:00.041-05:00

Still from Agrarian Utopia by Uruphong Raksasad

A year ago I took inventory of works I enjoyed over the previous twelve months which were ineligible for the year-end best-of lists- unseen classics, little-known gems, YouTubes, and what-not; it was too much fun not to do once again, so here are some personal viewing highlights, numbered but unranked. Happy New Year to all!

1) Agrarian Utopia- Uruphong Raksasad: Drama or document? As I watched this film I cared less and less about that distinction. Loose script, nonprofessional actors, space for improvisation- this approach is not so unusual now, but what IS unusual is the loving care given to depiction of the workaday world. The title plays two ways: perfectly descriptive for extended stretches where the lives of these Thai subsistence farmers—cultivating a rice crop, catching frogs, gathering honey—appear as sheer bliss; when the outside world intrudes—via forces of globalization driving crop prices downward and rendering their livelihoods unsustainable—it rings with bitter irony. Truly a highlight of this year’s Flaherty Seminar.

2) Dusty and Sweets McGee- Floyd Mutrux: Conventional wisdom might tell us that one intimate look into the lives of junkies would be enough to meet demands of the moviegoing public at any given time; as luck would have it, this $16,000 econo-masterwork was released in the same week as Panic in Needle Park (and disappeared soon after). This is one for the time capsule–to go alongside William Eggleston’s Stranded in Canton and Neil Young’s Time Fades Away–as tales of hard drugs and spiritual depletion. Featuring brilliant camerawork by William A. Fraker (along with unpaid and uncredited contributions by Vilmos Zsigmond and Laszlo Kovacs), Mutrux (like Raksasad) relied heavily on nonprofessional actors- in some cases, real users; even with $400-a-day consumption, The Habit was, as it turned out, more cost-efficient than The Method. The film leisurely cross-cuts amongst several characters, eventually gravitating toward a young woman worthy of Botticelli (track marks discreetly hidden) and her dumb-ass boyfriend (complete with ochre Mustang and bleeding swastika tattoo) in their search for dope and a place to shoot it. Its use of pop music is often extraordinary- Van Morrison’s Into the Mystic will never be the same for me again. Thom Andersen deserves our gratitude for making the Walter Reade screening happen.

Still from La Commune: Paris, 1871 by Peter Watkins

3) La Commune: Paris, 1871: Peter Watkins: Infusing the production process itself with the idealism and spirit of his subject, Watkins went perhaps as far as any filmmaker ever has in marrying radical content with an equally radical form. Presented by way of competing news broadcasts, this creative anachronism (first introduced with his Culloden back in 1964) presents its history while at the same time performing a kind of reverse engineering to its narrative mechanisms. The stage, built inside a factory in the Paris suburbs, evokes the spatial inequities of the newly Haussmannized city; for all it Brechtianisms, the climax is emotionally devastating. Hats off to 16 Beaver, who hosted the screening in conjunction with Doctruck, Red Channels, and Brecht Forum.

4) The Hellstrom Chronicle- Walon Green: Pestilence straight out of Exodus, recast as a near-future doomsday prophecy- this 1971 landmark in experimental nonfiction was tremendously popular upon its release (and shockingly, won an Oscar for Best Documentary Feature), so why, to this day, no DVD? Lawrence Pressman is superb as the entomologist Hellstrom.

5) Bug on glass two- Darrin Martin: A perfect bookend to Hellstrom, and way better than Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo; Martin’s other, less casually-produced body of video work is terrific in a very different way.

Still from A Portrait of Michel Simon by Jean Renoir... by Jacques Rivette

6) A Portrait of Michel Simon by Jean Renoir, or A Portrait of Jean Renoir by Michel Simon, or The Direction of Actors: Dialogue- Jacques Rivette: For sheer Franco-star power, it’s hard to beat this one- edited by Jean Eustache, it also features (along with the principals) Henri Cartier-Bresson. Originally produced for French TV though never broadcast, Rivette’s look back at this five-time collaboration is remarkable in the way it conveys their delight in one another’s presence.

Still from Luc Ferrari facing his tautology... by Dominique Lohlé and Guy Marc Hinant

7) Luc Ferrari facing his tautology: two days before the end- Dominique Lohlé and Guy Marc Hinant: Best known as a musique concrete pioneer, Ferrari’s output was considerably more varied than that. Here he’s seen working with two gifted improvisers (Jean-Phillipe Collard-Neven and Vincent Royer) towards a new realization of his Tautologos III of 1970; akin to Pedro Costa’s recent Ne Change Rien, Lohlé and Hinant give us privileged access into the slow transformation of ideas into music. This is one of the finest documents about the creative process that I know of, and a monument to a great composer just before his death.

Still from Threads by Caspar Stracke and Mike Hoolboom

8) Threads- Caspar Stracke and Mike Hoolboom: An oblique yet emotionally affecting portrait of the late filmmaker Tom Chomont, one of several surprises Stracke unveiled last month at The Thing @White Slab Palace.

9) Alex Chilton- My Rival- William Eggleston: Too soon, too soon… leftover footage from Stranded in Canton, Eggleston’s epic tour through the demimonde of Memphis. A rousing performance by Chilton with Sid Selvidge (heard but unseen) on piano, its eerie light (courtesy of an infrared lamp retrofitted to his Portapak) seems now of another world.

Still from Reichsautobahn: Highways of the Third Reich by Hartmut Bitomsky

10) Reichsautobahn: Highways of the Third Reich- Hartmut Bitomsky: In our current political climate, the notion of public works programs as a means to economic stimulus elicits predictably fractious debate, but knees don’t jerk so predictably when the Third Reich is its state sponsor. Shrouded in myth, celebrated in song, the Autobahn embodies German know-how in the popular imagination, and Bitomsky’s nuanced cine-essay digs deep into German archives to extract poetry from unlikely places and sort out truth from all the rest.

11) A Deadly Invention (aka The Fabulous World of Jules Verne)- Karel Zeman: Who needs After Effects? Loosely adapted from Jules Verne’s Facing the Flag (other Verne fans have identified bits of several other of his novels in the plot, such as it is), it’s easy to get carried away by the sheer technical inventiveness of this live action/animated hybrid; what’s remarkable is how completely Zeman evokes the world Verne has created. This “Magic-Image Miracle of Mystimation” (as its posters put it) is the most child-like fun I’ve had at the movies this year- submarines, pedal-powered flying machines, hideaways nested inside volcanoes, and exquisite Meliesian sets painted to resemble Victorian engravings- plus an A-Bomb-like explosive device that drives the story (and I’m leaving a lot out). Keep your eyes peeled this spring when Spectacle Theater mounts a full-on Zeman retrospective.

12) Schmeerguntz- Gunvor Nelson and Dorothy Wiley: If Pop Art celebrated consumer goods at the point of purchase, this 1965 film (both artists’ first) fixates on their aftermath from a decidedly feminist perspective. Replete with dirty diapers and stopped-up kitchen sinks, Schmeerguntz recalls a 1957 passage from the journals of Sylvia Plath in which she viscerally recounts being sickened by fatty food; it anticipates, too, the work of Martha Rosler, some ten years before the fact.

13) Worst Band Ever butchers Pink Floyd- “MUSIC” declares the sign behind the band, in case there was any doubt. Skynyrd seems their speed, more so than Floyd; “The Wall” consists of hay bales and pumpkins. No doubt this will be the most reviled item on the list, and I’m hard pressed to explain why I like it- all I can say is that it takes a song by a band I despise and injects it—especially the guitar solo—with some sort of genuine pathos. Thanks go to Monica Frost for sending it along.

Still from Hellzapoppin’ by H.C. Potter

14) Hellzapoppin’- H.C. Potter: Released less than three weeks after Pearl Harbor, this adaptation of an already-crazy Broadway hit upped the ante to stage its own all-out attack; clearly the older Hollywood sibling of Bruce Conner’s A Movie, it wreaks havoc on continuity, genre conventions, and taste. The Hell sequence is indescribably great, and the Lindy Hop unlike any dance number seen in an American musical. In light of Leslie Nielsen’s recent passing, it’s fun to imagine this as Airplane!’s in-flight movie. Big thanks to Light Industry, and to Ken Jacobs for sharing the print from his collection.

15) Pete Drake (performing Forever): Peter Frampton met prolific Nashville session man and producer Drake, as he recounted, during a recording session for George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass, and the rest, as they say, is history. “Show me the way”, Frampton famously implored; here Drake obliges. For Marianne.

This is Not a Portrait

2010-11-27T15:33:00.009-05:00

My guide drawing.

Some months back I was asked by my friend James Esber to participate in a project to be included in his solo show that opened last week at Pierogi Gallery; my assignment was to make a drawing based on one of his, part of a series of portraits he’d done derived from an iconic photograph of Osama bin Laden. Now completed, my drawing--along with 99 others--hang together as part of a work entitled This is not a portrait.

James and I have known one another for a good thirty years, having met at art school in our hometown of Cleveland. The rigorous, sometimes stodgy program there was--until recently--the only five-year BFA program in the country, with its industrial design program attracting recruiters each year from the Big Three automakers; we “real artists” were on our own.

Though I hadn’t drawn seriously for some time, reasons abounded to put hesitation aside and do it: for one, it offered another glimpse into his creative process, continuing on from the interview I’d conducted two years ago with James and his long-time partner (and fellow painter) Jane Fine for The Brooklyn Rail just prior to their first collaborative show.

The project too bridged my artistic origins (I started out as a painter) to current interests in collaborative and constraint-based processes; the distance between certain suppositions contained in each, though, was what really intrigued me the most.

For the last several years, James has derived inspiration from images ranging (in his words) “from the violent to the saccharine”; he salvages scraps from photojournalism, caricature, kitsch figurines, the Bureau of Printing and Engraving, the marginalia of Don Martin (of MAD Magazine fame), and other picture-making traditions light years away from museum decorum. The ability of these images to survive his radical transformations is testament both to his draftsmanly skills and the deep imprint of their source materials upon our psyches.

Layered too within the work is a long-standing fascination with anamorphosis and other types of distortion. There’s a spatial elasticity that varies from one work to the next, but that never fails to astonish. The bin Laden drawing from which I worked is typical: as much as likeness is retained, the movement of its lines is cutting, playful, and free. A face we know so well from page and screen is nonetheless prone to deformation. The left side of the face and the right eye appear pulled by opposing gravities, while hair, beard and headscarf cascade joyously toward the bottom of the page.

During breaks in the course of drawing I paused to make some notes; they’re the basis for the following, grammatically repaired and made a bit more cohesive after the fact.

***********

- First things: wipe down table, and wash hands to protect the masterwork-in-waiting from bodily oils and the embarrassing smudges they make. Inside the supply pack he’s given me are bottles of brown and black ink, a little welled palette, and a much better sable brush than the ratty ones I’ve used in the past. A software upgrade or a case of blank tapes can never compare to such implements (or, more than anything, paint), whose sensuality I now realize I miss.

- The enclosed guidelines state that:

The drawings will be made on a translucent piece of parchment with a copy of the original drawing underneath to serve as a guide. However, I am not asking people to make an exact copy of my drawing. It is more accurate to say I am asking them to overlay each line of my drawing with their own line.

And the last paragraph:

An 8 1/2” x 11” reproduction of my original drawing is included as a second guide. You may or may not wish to refer to it. I am estimating the drawing will take between two and five hours to make. I want it to be an enjoyable process, so if it appears to be taking longer than this, you are probably being too precise or too cautious.

- All set up, ready to go- now to match the grace and agility of his line and add my own.

- First hour is spent just trying to get my bearings; while relieved of the challenge of gauging proportions by the guide drawing underneath, it turns out the parchment is more opaque than I’d expected. I struggle to see more than the basic location of marks- their subtle articulation is pretty much obscured. Moving across the surface, looking for a foothold to dig into- a few strokes here, a bit over there; hopefully it’ll add up to something.

- Never really got the hang of brush and ink either- the first-try accuracy was never my forte. No corrections! I refuse the loophole allowed in the instructions:

A small container of white gesso is provided in case you make a mistake so glaring that you need to correct it. Simply use the gesso like White-out to overpaint the area and then redraw the lines on top after it dries.

Now I’m wavering... maybe I’ll allow myself a second go-round with the gesso just to clarify a few passages. But then where does it end? What’s to stop me from correcting the corrections? This is where neurosis kicks in.

- Speed seems vital to mastering this, at odds with the plodding line I’m laying down.

- Getting into a rhythm now. Or maybe its just the spaces between my many attempts at a beginning are now filling in? Silencing the critical voice seems to help things flow.

- de Kooning envy reappears (how long since I felt that?), of that extraordinary facility (innate?) honed beyond the human by his years painting signs. Drawing with his eyes closed, along with those made while watching TV (and with whiskey as a constant companion) were some of the methods used to stymie that facility and keep himself interested.

- Ballpoint pen is the tool for me, more forgiving the way it allows the hand to keep moving and absorb the angst that comes with the desire to make the right strike in the right place.

- Some marks describe; others delineate or direct; often a single line performs more than one function. Above and below the right eye are a series of hashtag-ish flourishes- more than any others, they shirk their depictive role and assert a mark-for-marks-sake autonomy. The right side of the beard features a serpentine swoop that’d make a nice water park attraction. Watch out though- you’re liable to land in what looks like a gnarly heap of intestines.

- Esber envy joins that of de Kooning. James’s grace is astounding- he’s incapable of making an ugly mark. Surprised too by the competitive impulses aroused going into this. Imagine, me trying to improve on this work. Thinking back to school, I recall a competitive spirit, if you could call it that- more like a challenge by example.

- Funny to realize that the act of drawing may bring me the closest I ever get to a meditative state. To draw is to paddle against the current of shortening attention span, a slow triangulation between eye, object, and image.

- At it for a few hours now- time to take a break.

- The short break I meant to take turned in to two days- now on to round two. Surprised at how much there is still to do.

- Is a drawing of a drawing still a drawing? It seems closer to what tattoo artists do. I waver between my attempts at seeing through the heavy vellum parchment well enough to make a proper tracing and, seeing the futility of that, looking to the scaled-down print-out I’ve been given for guidance and clearer direction. I think about the different types of mimicry performed when serving self-directed creative apprenticeship- copying hot rods out of magazines into a spiral notebook, figuring out the chords to Iron Man.

- In certain places, it’s hard to know where beard ends and headscarf begins. Does it matter, really? Maybe just as a place marker- away from easier facial features, the less recognizable passages are places I get lost. I notice I’m resorting to language as an aid to memory, as naming assists in the transfer at that moment my eyes move from the smaller reproduction to the surface of my drawing.

- Esber is a sadist! How else to explain this project, with these parameters, following this drawing? Trying to make sense of the virtuosity underneath against this mess I’ve made on top. The tangled eyebrows are especially challenging- I decide to simply go my own way. And the lower half- a place to get lost, an interminable Tora Bora. This is the first time the subject of the drawing has really even crossed my mind.

I am estimating the drawing will take between two and five hours to make. I want it to be an enjoyable process, so if it appears to be taking longer than this, you are probably being too precise or too cautious.

- I’m coming close to the finish now, somewhere into the seventh hour. Too precise, but not precise enough. Too cautious? Maybe so. It has its moments though. It’ll look best hanging high on the wall, and not directly next to his.

Other drawings hanging in James's studio.

"On a Phantom Limb" by Nancy Andrews

2010-08-13T22:07:00.010-04:00

Nancy Andrews- Ghosts- drawing, 2008

Here is an essay entitled Contemplating One's Own Skeleton, which I wrote for the DVD release of On a Phantom Limb, a 2009 film by Nancy Andrews; the film will have its New York City premiere on September 23 at Anthology Film Archives, along with her just-completed film, Behind the Eyes Are the Ears and Dave Fleischer's Snow White. This is a don't-miss program- I hope to see you all there.

http://www.nancyandrews.net/
http://anthologyfilmarchives.org/

* * * * * * * * * *

There were things I could draw pictures of,
and there were things that couldn’t be drawn;
more and more I was attracted to the second category.
There were things I wanted to describe, but I didn’t know how.
There were things that I wanted to show, but there was no way to show them.

from The Haunted Camera by Nancy Andrews

Let’s begin with these words, voiced by one Ima Plume, and zero in on a key tension at play within the films of Nancy Andrews. For now, we’ll ignore the failure those words imply and turn instead to her pursuit of the unknown, the invisible, the what-lies-beyond, qualities that impel her larger creative project.

Her most recent film, On a Phantom Limb, looks far beyond the visible. But what might this mean, given the extensions available to our senses by way of technology? Viewing the contents of a sealed handbag at a security checkpoint, remote locales mapped by hi-res aerial photos, or an exploding star via radio telescope, we are shadowed by an omniscience once linked to God and the novel, blasé toward a shrinking frontier.

Long drawn to the unfathomable and the unaccounted-for, Andrews considers what our technological apparatus hasn’t mastered and cannot access. In her film entitled The Dreamless Sleep, she paid tribute to Else Bosselman, a forgotten illustrator who drew—sight unseen—the sea creatures described via telephone connection by the early underwater explorer William Beebe during his pioneering descents in a bathysphere. Surely her interest in Bosselman stemmed as much from the excitement of Beebe’s discoveries as from the fact that these images weren’t photographed, but imaginatively interpreted by way of drawing, under circumstances much like a stenographer receiving dictation.

Late in 2005, illness brought Andrews face-to-face with the what-lies-beyond; On a Phantom Limb depicts that moment with the simple shock of black paper ripped away to reveal the words, I thought I’d died scrawled beneath, a gesture recalling a pain that signaled something was dreadfully wrong. Flown by helicopter for emergency surgery some 200 miles away, she was held while doctors waited for her condition to stabilize before operating; it never did. Her body temperature was then lowered precipitously, inducing temporary cessation of heartbeat, breathing, and brain function so the surgery on which her life depended could then be performed. Several days later, another operation was necessary to address complications that arose with the first; following that, her slow recovery began. Under heavy sedation, suffering intense hallucinations and delirious for weeks on end, the shock of such extensive bodily and emotional trauma left its lasting mark.

Nancy Andrews- Hospital Bed- drawing, 2008

Andre Bazin once asserted that, “If the plastic arts were put under psychoanalysis, the practice of embalming the dead might turn out to be a fundamental factor in their creation. ...[P]roviding a defense against the passage of time...satisfied a basic psychological need in man...to snatch it from the flow of time, to stow it away neatly, so to speak, in the hold of life.” For Bazin, this impulse to preserve—traceable at least as far back as the mummies of ancient Egypt—reached its zenith with the development of photography (and by extension, cinema); further on, he likened the medium’s indexical nature to that of a death mask. Andrews, having spent weeks perilously close to death, essentially assigned herself the task of evoking the fear and vivid sensations forever inscribed in both muscle and mind. To report one’s subjective state by way of a medium whose objectivity is its strength: how might Bazin’s formulation apply to a film that represents life prevailing—albeit temporarily—over death itself?

Midway into On a Phantom Limb, a series of closeups follow the trail left from the surgeon’s scalpel across the filmmaker’s body: a scar running from the shoulder blade, down and around the rib cage, and extending below the navel. In the words of her internist, “...this gets you about as deep into a human body as you can get”, offering not just visceral evidence of trauma, but an affirmation too of the power of cinematic realism as claimed by Bazin.

The scar, though, has a dual nature: we follow its serpentine course, yet it indicates nothing of the drifting twilight of days in intensive care or the emotional suffering and paranoia that colored them, much less a framework to help make sense of all that happened; it is both explicit narrative and shut-up secret. To the extent that those secrets are revealed, it must occur by other means.

The sequence which follows inverts what precedes it: using WWII-era archival footage of a workshop for prosthetic limbs, the contours of new body parts are traced out on flat sheets of plastic, echoing the line of the scar traversing her trunk much in the way that a flat map projection relates to a globe. But there’s something more here, beyond a simple rhyming of forms; we’re asked too to consider the nature of prosthetic augmentation- of inert, foreign materials joined to the living continuum of one’s body. Along with that, there is material that Andrews herself created: a woman plotting out the contours of a large head of a bird and beginning its construction, shot to match the archival scenes. The critic Gilberto Perez once described the crosscutting of D.W. Griffith as “a rupture looking forward to its mending”; these words recall both the bodily repair depicted within On a Phantom Limb and the grafting together of seemingly incongruous discourses, cinematic and cosmological.

On a Phantom Limb has little to do with the laws of narrative gravity as defined by Griffith and others. The film as a whole is (as with her previous work) a stylistic and discursive hybrid, a montage of attractions; live action, archival material, puppets, and various types of drawn animation are combined in sometimes tenuous ways, summoned by outright necessity. But what, for our purposes, lies beyond the visible, and how can it be accessed?

Nancy Andrews- Study for Future Film Birds and Hands- drawing

For Andrews, Mircea Eliade’s Shamanism was crucial in the film’s conception and in bringing us closer to a sense of emotional truth. Surveying shamanic initiation rituals the world over, Eliade identified several of its aspects common from one culture to the next: sickness and delirium; symbolic death of the neophyte; ritual dismemberment of the body; renewal of the organs; resurrection. Within these recurring threads, the filmmaker recognized uncanny parallels to her own encounter with death, as well as an imaginative framework for reconsidering that experience through the medium of film.

On a Phantom Limb hovers in an indeterminate zone, less a place than a state of consciousness. The avian imagery seen throughout is part of this- even more than in her previous films, where birds are quite prominent. In shamanic lore, birds often act as go-betweens moving from Earth to heavens to underworld; the film itself functions in much the same manner.

A biform creature—part bird, part woman—appears as both drawing and in live action - posing heroically, flying a kite (modeled after herself), and rocking out with guitar and drums in a giddy musical interlude. The costume from the workshop sequence—much like the shaman’s costumes described by Eliade—is donned by the filmmaker herself, complete with a superhero’s cape. Elsewhere, that body is reassembled limb by limb by a large raptor, itself augmented with mechanical parts- a tutelary spirit perhaps, and clearly an allusion to lived experience.

Reading Eliade and the varying accounts of shamanic practices, one can’t help but wonder what to make of the dissonance in recall between initiate and profane witness. On a Phantom Limb recasts this dissonance, turning the mortal encounter of another inside out, and creating a means through which to imagine what we will inevitably face ourselves.

Rammellzee 1960 - 2010

2010-08-02T21:01:00.023-04:00

Evolution Griller the Master Killer, Gothic Futurist, #1 Stain On The Train: these and other monikers belonged to Rammellzee, whose passing on June 27 marked a rupture in the Afro-futuristic continuum joining the likes of Sun Ra, Drexciya, and Anthony Braxton. Too little known outside the circles of graffiti and Hip Hop cognoscenti, I first learned of his existence back in 1983 when he was invited by Francesco Clemente to Skowhegan (of all places) to speak about his work. Far beyond my ability to summarize, let’s just say he blew many minds that day, and confirmed the sneaking suspicion that my provincial, Bauhaus-derived art schooling was leaving me ill-equipped for the slippery but very real issues at stake; what follows is a modest attempt to come to grips with that unforgettable summer afternoon.

For me and the legions of MFAs saddled with student loan payments to last their lifetimes, it was galling to encounter the kind of effortless originality that Rammellzee embodied; in 1997 he told Peter Shapiro that he believed himself to be a “real monk from the 14th century. I know too much, put it this way. There’s no possible way that, if I didn’t go to school, I’m going to know all this shit, since I don’t read and I only look at that [he points to a dictionary], and that’s not a book you read.”

Rammellzee won early notoriety in the late 70s as a scourge of New York City law enforcement, trespassing through MTA train yards, tagging trains from top to bottom- in color, courtesy of Krylon. He saw that activity as a form of warfare, a pitched competition in which fellow bombers decided the victors. As the art world briefly tapped that talent pool (hoping to interject some “street authenticity” amidst the faux primitivism and flailing gestures of Baselitz, Chia, Basquiat, and company), Ramm was critical of old friends who succumbed to the endless flow of cash, squandering credibility with tossed-off works that paled under the track lighting of Soho and East Village galleries.

During these years he devised what he called Ikonoklast Panzerism (or alternately, Gothic Futurism). In the spirit of Sequoyah, inventor of a system of writing for his Cherokee kin extracted from shards of the English alphabet, his aim was to “armor the letter”, mounting a symbolic defense against co-optation by the art market and, in a broader sense, the culture’s tendency to deploy language as a weapon against those less powerful: “...there was another type of war, a political war of languages, where – let me say I’m not a racist, but I am racing - certain people had used language in a dominating effort to take over other languages or pictograms, and now there is a problem in schools where African languages are not allowed...”

Sequoyah- lithograph from a painting by Charles Bird King

Ramm was Kabbalistic in his belief that the alphabet itself was encoded with layers of significance all but obscured through the debasement of its everyday use. The ideas contained in that subway handiwork (now long gone, as are the trains it covered) were later laid out in his Ionic Treatise Gothic Futurism Assassin Knowledges of Remanipulated Square Point’s, as grammatically freewheeling as the title suggests. Its language is not so much written as sculpted, an accretion of science, mysticism, neologisms, and puns; its voice is oracular, and not a little paranoid. Here’s what he said about the letter A:

Capitol energy houser constructor (finance) formation high bar strategy middle lane missile launcher uppercase falls once. Second case, second case second lane missile launcher falls twice, third lane vortex complete, all lanes hold complete. Full knowledge complete ∆ (Pyramid) formation final beginning knowledge of the O (cipher and square).

Rammellzee- illustration from Ionic Treatise Gothic Futurism Assassin Knowledges of Remanipulated Square Point’s

Last year I introduced the Ionic Treatise to my Writing and Practice class at Brooklyn College alongside Henri Michaux’s Stroke by Stroke, fitting by virtue of a shared distrust of language, and through the ways their drawing and writing worked in relay with one another. A passage toward the end of Michaux’s book—from a piece entitled Of Languages and Writing: Why the Urge to Turn from Them—would surely have met with Ramm’s approval:

Applied languages, directed languages, organizational tools.

A business enterprise now, language, unbeknownst to anybody, takes the place of murmurs, laments (faint or clear), calls. Commanding, commandeering.

Destined to become an ADMINISTRATION into which every conscience must enter.

Master of the situation, language will answer every need (!). Like tyrannies.

The handcuffs of words are on for good.

Henri Michaux- Untitled (Mouvements) 1950 -51

Aligned as their attitudes might have been, key differences in the conclusions they drew came through in how they handled their materials. Through the fluidity of ink and brush, Michaux’s hand fought the letter and all it signified. Drawing back toward a liquid state, to the letter’s prehistory as pictogram- this was passive resistance in graphic form. Rammellzee played the warrior, ready to reclaim and defend; his letters appeared as a bulwark, impermeable hardness rendered with a mist of aerosol.

The militarized imagery ran through Ramm’s later work as well- in the Letter Racers (a personalized variant of Ed “Big Daddy” Roth’s Monster Model Kits), in the samurai-inspired body armor fashioned from neighborhood detritus, and in Alpha’s Bet, the dystopian screenplay for a never-realized film (though a short animated version was produced by Celia Bulwinkel.)

Sadly, this work has been ignored by New York museums (save for a couple of group show appearances); will some city institution—the New Museum, the Whitney, the Studio Museum, MoMA—at last wake up to one of its own?

The 7th Orphan Film Symposium

2010-06-23T21:20:00.027-04:00

The word “orphan” typically evokes pity for the unfortunate and unloved; when it comes to orphan films though, there’s no lack of love, as was evident at the Seventh Orphans Film Symposium held in April at the SVA Theatre in New York City. Founded by Dan Streible and colleagues from the University of South Carolina in 1999, the Symposium embraces nearly any moving image produced outside the entertainment-industrial complex, attracting Méliès experts, decaying nitrate fetishists, and home movie buffs sharing tales of close calls with customs officials, rusty film cans discovered in sweltering sheds, and heroic restoration of works written off as lost long ago.

Game shows from the Sandinista regime, footage shot by Danny Williams of an early Velvet Underground rehearsal, Henri Cartier-Bresson’s first film, produced to raise funds for the Lincoln Brigade, and a lysergic collaboration by Pat O’Neill, Chick Strand and Neon Park commissioned by Sears as an in-store promotion for a new line of jeans: those were just a few of the many highlights this time around. In some instances the story of a film’s discovery could be more compelling than the film itself; throughout it all, the detective’s instincts prevailed.

Passionate belief in preservation sprung up from the podium and in casual conversation, whether explicitly addressed, or implicit in the presence of so many intelligent people pursuing this less-than-lucrative path. A basic question arose again and again: what constitutes an archive? Precipitated not so much by theoretical inquiry than more practical concerns, film archives are all too often defined by a lack of material resources, in some instances consisting of little more than a single individual’s desire to save a few odd reels.

The acquisition of the entire Twitter archive by the Library of Congress, announced that same week (a Borgesian nightmare if there ever was one), only served to remind us of—in contrast to the digital world—the material obstacles of film preservation; the Symposium was a veritable survey of the ways in which a film could disappear. Most often it happened through simple neglect of some form or another; too often though, its destruction was intentional.

It’s astounding that film and video could be valued more as raw material than for what it recorded- recycled for its silver, rerecorded upon to avoid purchase of new tape stock, or otherwise destroyed. In Standard Gauge—not included on the bill, but as persuasive a case for the Symposium’s existence as you’ll ever see (and a great film to boot)—Morgan Fisher describes watching Technicolor lab employees hack old release prints to pieces with meat cleavers. Through that act of mutilation we can glimpse, conversely, a tacit admission of value. And if this was the way the studios treated film (or as the business side of media archives refers to their holdings, “assets”), one can only imagine the many paths to oblivion for the moving image produced outside of Hollywood.

So if the notion of posterity has been antithetical to the moving image for much of its history, it was all the more surprising to see something like The Janitor, which opened the proceedings (I’m too weak to resist) with a bang. Possessing a certain raunchy splendor, this early stag film produced circa 1930 (with superb piano accompaniment by Ed Pastorini), is one of the rare works from the Kinsey Institute’s archives to be screened publicly; its illicit nature is in fact what saved it from disappearing altogether.

With The Investigators, the archive functioned again as a repository for secrets (though for very different reasons). Presented by Charles Musser, this remarkable 1948 lampoon of the HUAC Hearings suggests a collaboration between Dr. Seuss and Bertolt Brecht. Unseen since its completion, the Union Films collective responsible for its production (with Abel Meeropol, Max Glandbard, and Carl Marzani among its principals) realized that to screen it publicly would mean a sure spot on the blacklist. Herschel Bernardi, playing the Chief Investigator (and who appeared 28 years later in The Front), gives a fabulous performance; his interrogation, joined by two actresses (excellent as well, but sadly uncredited), infuse the proceedings with an undeniable energy- part cinema, part theater, all unapologetic agitprop.

Orson Welles’ Sketch Book, Episode 4, Part 2

Orson Welles’ Sketch Book, presented by Stefan Drößler, offered defiance of the state in an altogether different form. Produced in 1955 as a series for the BBC but sadly lasting just six episodes, Sketch Book proved once again (as if it were necessary) that storytelling was second nature for Welles. Here, he’s alone, addressing the camera directly, with occasional cutaways to the drawings he’s making to illustrate the story. In the episode screened at Orphans (filmed a day after his fortieth birthday, and the day before his third marriage), Welles offers an extended riff on the erosion of privacy and the rise of state surveillance by way of a rather funny anecdote in which he claimed to border agents that he was carrying in his bag a small atomic bomb. Behind the antagonism towards these petty bureaucrats was his ever-present mischief, undiminished from the days of his infamous The War of the Worlds broadcast.

Perhaps my favorite presentation was Thomas Elsaesser’s Islands of Media-Memory and Natural Remains: Pathways to a Berlin Cine-Chronicle. Natalia Fidelholtz of Storycorps (who’d initially reviewed and catalogued this material), began by presenting what seemed like little more than documentation of a cozy bourgeois idyll from the 1940s- charming yet not so unusual, save for the color stock on which it was shot.

Elsaesser then took to the podium, revealing that these were home movies of his family, shot on an island in Berlin proper during the Second World War; knowing this, the footage appeared in an altogether different light. There was little if any indication of the hardship or fear one would assume visible during that time; the period documented in the films was in fact one of courtship for his parents- Elsaesser himself was born in 1943.

Photograph courtesy of Thomas Elsaesser

Proceeding with further backstory, he recounted memories of his architect grandfather Martin Elsaesser and other family friends who appear before the camera. Unusual amongst those contemporaries unaffiliated with the Party for his decision to stay in Germany, the Nazi years were for the elder Elsaesser an internal exile, fallow in terms of commissions but creatively productive nonetheless.

It was fun to see one of the greatest of film historians incorporate Wikipedia screen grabs into his PowerPoint presentation, and fascinating to contemplate the emotional resonance of this footage for Elsaesser, gazing at his own prehistory. Given his tremendous contribution toward our understanding of the New German Cinema, there’s a beauty in locating a fragment of the real history from which it arose. And to follow the notion of familial origins that the term “orphan” implies, Berlin Cine-Chronicle reconnects an island of apparent (if not actual) bliss to the mainland of calamitous history.

"Genre Collage" by People Like Us

2010-02-03T19:50:00.016-05:00

Still courtesy of People Like Us

In the current issue of Film Comment, I've written about a new work by Vicki Bennett, aka People Like Us, entitled Genre Collage. For those who know her previous video work, Genre Collage is a bit of a departure in a couple of ways: less compositing, with a greater reliance on straight cutting; the source footage is derived from narrative features, as opposed to the industrial and educational material that was typical of her past work. She's currently touring the world with it (it includes a live music component she performs on site), and New Yorkers will have a chance to see it on April 14 at Issue Project Room. Please have a look- the article can be found here:

http://www.filmlinc.com/fcm/jf10/peoplelikeus.htm

The Magnificent Seventeen

2009-12-31T16:44:00.019-05:00

Still from I Fidanzati by Ermanno Olmi

In an early episode of Jean-Luc Godard’s Histoire(s) du Cinema, Serge Daney suggests (speaking of the series) that as a member of the New Wave generation, Godard was uniquely positioned historically to attempt such an ambitious project:

“...there are suddenly too many films to see or catch up on this heritage-turned-monster that was the history of cinema. Before the 60s you had only four or five main countries producing films but then cinema became a world-wide industry. It’s impossible for a young person today--short of spending 10 to 15 years watching films--to catch up on everything they haven’t seen whilst also establishing an axis on which to situate their own history…”

Though I’d argue that pre-1960 cinematic history wasn’t quite as contained as Daney would have it, his characterization of the present is right on the money. This rings especially true as 2009 comes to a close (and along with it, the decade); have you noticed that at times like this, people like to make lists? Film Comment magazine requested a number of my own, to be tallied and puréed into spreadsheet form along with those of dozens of other film writers, with the result being a series of master lists representing some sort of cine-critical mass- “best films of 2009”, “best films of the decade”, “best of the avant-garde”, and so on. It’s time-consuming but fun, yet I can’t help but notice how little it resembles the sum of what I actually watch, which involves not only a lot of happy wrestling with that heritage-turned-monster, but looking beyond what most people think of as “cinema.” With that in mind, here’s a list of favorites seen this year, regardless of when (or how) they were made:

1) I Fidanzati- Ermanno Olmi: Love and longing expressed through flashbacks and an exchange of letters, Olmi’s follow-up to the just-as-great Il Posto is set against the “economic miracle” of early 60s Italy; so heartfelt, and so perfectly crafted- how did he do it?

2) Joy Division’s Transmission (performed by Steel Harmony): Rolling slow through the streets of Manchester, this steel drum ensemble plays the shit out of one of the very best songs to originate from that city. Part of Jeremy Deller’s Procession, it sings with all the joyous abandon found in a New Orleans funeral parade on their way back from the cemetery. Thanks to Amy Monaghan for this.

3) A Lecture- Hollis Frampton (Anthology Film Archives 3/28/09): A recording of HF’s 1968 illumination of spectatorship and the cinematic apparatus, originally presented at Hunter College; if that wasn’t enough, it was sandwiched in between an excellent introduction by Mike Zryd, and followed by Ken Eisenstein’s brilliant presentation linking Frampton’s lecture with Jorge Luis Borges’ The Aleph.

Still from Final Thoughts: Series One by Steve Reinke

4) Final Thoughts: Series One- Steve Reinke: A compendium of short videos that hang together as a surprisingly coherent whole, Reinke forges ahead with his often funny, sometimes shocking, yet always smart associative method, despite a (facetiously?) asserted “death of the reader.” Some of us are still hangin’ on there, Steve.

5) A Divided World- Arne Sucksdorff: Synthesizing plein-air cinematography and close-ups staged in the studio, this all-but-forgotten Swedish master depicted animals struggling for survival over the course of a winter night. Reminiscent of the river scene in Night of the Hunter, this is nature film as glorious contrivance; it really shouldn’t work, but it does- magically. Big thanks to Scott MacDonald for sharing this rare print.

Still from The Masseurs and the Woman by Hiroshi Shimizu

6) The Masseurs and the Woman- Hiroshi Shimizu: A pair of blind masseurs seek work by following a seasonal itinerary between mountain and seaside resorts; along the way, their encounters with spa clientele and staff--as well as the frank treatment of daughters sold off into prostitution--are drawn with compassionate nuance. Shimizu seems to have understood something about blindness, and even more about seeing- his visual sense is truly exquisite.

7) Promised Lands- Susan Sontag: She made films too? And how! Thanks to Light Industry for resurrecting this 1974 documentary gem about the Yom Kippur War and its aftermath. While Palestinian voices are conspicuously absent, it’s somewhat mitigated by what we do hear and see, including a deeply affecting look inside an army psychiatric hospital where battle-traumatized soldiers undergo treatment.

8) White Lightning-The Fall (music video): Someone had the right idea here: great song by the Big Bopper, ripe to be the very hit that gave the world George Jones; the mighty Mark E. (Jones’s heir apparent, at least in the saloon) seems unusually sober here, unlike the cartoon lightning and lovably dopey rear-screened bikers. Chug-A-Lug, Manchester style, could be the perfect a follow-up. Why aren’t I a record producer?

9) Anita Needs Me- George Kuchar: Don’t let the very un-Kucharesque title fool you- young George, circa 1963, makes good on his promise that, “your emotions will be squeezed.” John Waters said it alright- how much longer must GK wait for that MacArthur grant?

Drawing for On a Phantom Limb by Nancy Andrews

10) On a Phantom Limb- Nancy Andrews: This film is an autobiography, as one intertitle reads; really, it’s one harrowing chapter. Live action and various forms of animation are combined for this account of a grave medical emergency in which, as the filmmaker says, I thought I’d died. Lucky for us, she didn’t, with the film as an added bonus. Andrews is absolutely one of the best filmmakers out there now, and this one is among her most powerful- stay tuned for more about it in the coming weeks.

11) Doublestream (Part II of Caspar Stracke’s Circle’s Short Circuit: Torsten Burns reedit)*: In celebration of the original version’s 10th anniversary, Stracke has initiated a new reedit, assigning each of the five sections to an individual or team (Burns, Jenn and Kevin McCoy, eteam (Hajoe Moderegger and Franziska Lamprecht), Leslie Thornton, and myself); as the project nears completion, it’s hard not to be excited, especially after viewing Burns’s contribution, a delirious homage to the DeLorean as a modern dance video. Of all his work I’ve loved over the years, this is close to the top- look for this new version in 2010.

12) Multiple Sidosis- Sid Laverents: Man With a Movie Camera, as reconceived by a former vaudeville performer/one-man band. This small-gauge tour-de-force documents its own birth, or more precisely, the song that drives it. The meticulous layering of both music and image was all done at home--with patience, with love, and with goofy humor--in a San Diego suburb. Sid lives!

13) Sweetgrass- Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Ilisa Barbash: See my post from October 14. Happy to say, Sweetgrass will have an honest-to-goodness New York theatrical run at Film Forum beginning January 6, 2010.

Still from The Earth is Young by Michael Gitlin

14) The Earth is Young- Michael Gitlin*: Back in October I was fortunate to have been asked to moderate an after-screening discussion with the filmmaker at 16 Beaver. Studying it closely after a first viewing back in the spring, I was deeply impressed by Gitlin’s risk-taking approach and the film’s ability to challenge our presuppositions and stir debate, which it did, in spades. A terrific film, and a marvelous evening all around.

15) Our Hitler: A Film From Germany- Hans-Jürgen Syberberg: This neo-Wagnerian mini-series appeared on German TV the same year we Americans watched Roots; dirty laundry on prime time, but only Syberberg had the gumption to cast his arch-villain as a ventriloquist's dummy. “Filmed theater” is one of the harshest put-downs one can toss a filmmaker’s way, but in the case of Our Hitler, it works perfectly- all 7 ½ hours.

16) Return to LH6- Ken Jacobs: Another Light Industry highlight, the Orchard Street preacher described a time when analytical projectors were a classroom fixture (and before they would become one of his primary creative tools), when the film studies discipline was still up for grabs, and how an influential pedagogy grew out of personal aesthetic concerns.

Still from Leon Morin, Priest by Jean-Pierre Melville

17) Leon Morin, Priest- Jean-Pierre Melville: An emotionally complex, sexy, and at times very funny tale of the lives of French women under Vichy rule, with Jean-Paul Belmondo playing a parish priest (yes, that's right) in an even finer performance than his justly famous turn in Breathless just months before.

Happy 2010 to all!

*-Is it immodest to list these items that I have a direct association with? In both cases, it seems dishonest not to.

Mr. Hulot and Mr. Schaeffer*

2009-12-12T23:37:00.013-05:00

Shortly after the release of Jacques Tati’s Mr. Hulot’s Holiday in the summer of 1953, Paris was hit with a massive strike that paralyzed municipal services, including trains moving in and out of the city. Parisians unable to leave town that August during the height of the summer season had Tati’s film as a vicarious substitute, and it seems safe to say that for some, this groundbreaking comedy was the better option.

Part slapstick, part social satire, Tati depicted in hilarious microcosm an uptight nation unable to relax. Unlike the seaside hijinks contained within Jacques Henri Lartigue’s incomparable photographs, Tati’s shoreside inn-mates are a crabby bunch, incapable of leaving their workday rhythms behind. In the words of André Bazin, we’re witness to “…a feebly whirling duration turning back on itself, like the cycle of the tides… a conventional pleasure more rigorous than office time.”

These looping rituals are underscored by Alain Romans’ infectious song of summer, emanating so playfully from every possible source, both within the story space and outside of it; this is just one aspect of a meticulously wrought sonic fabric that would become the director’s trademark. Tati inverted the usual hierarchy of cinematic sound, with noise given unprecedented importance, and human speech relegated to a subordinate role.

In the years immediately preceding the film’s release, fellow countryman Pierre Schaeffer was sounding out his own hierarchical inversion by way of a radical new approach to composition called musique concrète; here, the staves of traditional musical notation were jettisoned in favor of working directly with the sounds of the world recorded onto shellac disk and magnetic tape. These and other pioneering methods were intended to “…open music up to all sounds”, sending pitch-perfect conservatory-trained performers running in the other direction.

Some years before, as Goran Vejvoda and Rob Young have recalled, Schaeffer had engineered the radio broadcast announcing the Liberation of Paris by Allied forces. Embedded in that program of news, music, and patriotic readings were coded signals agreed upon beforehand that, in a relay of sonic joy, directed parish priests to set their carillons ringing. It’s lovely to imagine this moment—seemingly straight out of a film Tati might later make—as one the director would carry with him for many years to come. The truth though was that Tati, who in the war’s early days wrote a scenario proposing his own fantasy inversion of a Germany occupied by the French, had wisely fled Paris to the village of Sainte-Séverè the year before to avoid recruitment for “volunteer duty” in a German factory; he missed the Liberation, but managed to find a setting and inspiration for later use in his first feature, Jour de Fête.

Jean-Luc Godard once wrote of Tati that, “He sees problems where there are none and finds them.” With his drastically pared-down shooting style that some mistook as primitive, Tati, along with his onscreen envoy Mr. Hulot, together joined forces to turn the tide of habit. The radical director teaches us the rules of their new game at the same time we begin to play it. In Mr. Hulot’s Holiday, this play includes noisy ping-pong matches and a recalcitrant old car. Both Tati’s cinematic conceits and Hulot’s character were grounded in a commitment to tireless observation, and Tati’s achievement was that through the two together, their eyes and ears become ours.

In the period following his Liberation broadcast, Schaeffer experienced his own, recounting in a 1984 interview with Tim Hodgkinson that, “I was horrified by modern 12-tone music. I said to myself, ‘Maybe I can find something different… maybe salvation, liberation is possible.’ Seeing that no-one knew what to do any more with Do-Re-Mi, maybe we had to look outside of that…”

Jean-Christophe Thomas has written that musique concrète, “maintains a unique way of hesitating between poetry, literature, and sound art”; I would add that there’s a bit of cinema there as well. Sadly though, Schaeffer in the end felt as confined as his listeners by having been “born in Do-Re-Mi”, and the impossibility of “distancing oneself from the dramatic.” In later years he expressed doubt that his compositions could be rightfully considered as music: “Unfortunately it took me forty years to conclude that nothing is possible outside DoReMi… In other words, I wasted my life.”

Perhaps Schaeffer’s failure was less with the music itself than in his inability (or refusal) to embrace the dynamic mutability of musique concrete that Thomas identified as hesitation. And wasn’t it significant to have taken those crucial first steps? Better to think of it instead as an unfinished but ongoing project.

(This is an expanded version of some program notes originally written for a Pratt Film Society screening in 2005.)

A newly restored Mr. Hulot’s Holiday will be screened as part of a Jacques Tati retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art from December 18 – January 2, and at selected theaters elsewhere.

John Kilduff’s Let’s Paint TV

2009-12-12T17:26:00.012-05:00

The seeds of Jacques Tati’s cinema are contained within his early cabaret mime routines performed throughout the 1930s in France, and later across Europe. Colette witnessed his act (perhaps at Tati’s peak, when he was billed with the likes of Edith Piaf and Maurice Chevalier), which so impressed her that in June 1936, she wrote in her journal:

Henceforth I believe that no festive, artistic, or acrobatic spectacle could equal the displays given by this astounding man who has invented something which includes dance, sport, satire, and pageantry. He has created at the same time the player and the ball and the racket; the balloon and the person inflating it; the boxer and his adversary; the bicycle and the cyclist. His hands empty, he has created the accessory and the partner. His power of suggestion is that of a great artist… In Jacques Tati, horse and rider, all Paris will see, living, the fabulous mythic creature, the Centaur.

Tati’s onstage multitasking was performed in the service of the mime’s peculiar brand of theatrical illusion. Jour de Fête, his first feature, affected a shift from busy-ness to business. Struggling with an efficiency scheme based on American industrial methods, a provincial postman (the prototype for his Hulot character) juggles letter-sorting and bike riding duties all at once; regardless of difficulty, the point is to never stop moving.

If Jour de Fête showed the imposition of Taylorism upon one man's workday, John Kilduff and Let’s Paint TV comically embody the way we live now. Forever on the move, Kilduff’s powers of suggestion are something altogether different (but more about that shortly.) Dressed in a three-piece suit, he appears each weekday on his live webcast (11:00 AM – 12 Noon PST at Stickam.com, or via Skype: letspainttv), keeping brisk pace on a treadmill while he takes calls from viewers.

And paints.

And cuts hair.

Or blends drinks.

Or irons a shirt.

Or plays ping-pong.

Or carves a Jack-o-lantern.

All (more or less) at the same time.

Through it all, there’s something of the same irrational optimism described in Barbara Ehrenreich’s new book, Bright-Sided; unlike the "success stories" that appear there, however, none of Kilduff's activities are performed especially well. He is, as Nietzsche once said, “human, all too human.” Knowing this, he advises viewers to, “just half-ass it sometimes… half-assing it is sometimes your best bet here at Let’s Paint TV…”

The live video behind him is a fabulous mess, with greenscreening as crude as it comes. Cameras move spasmodically, switching spontaneously between shots in something resembling rhythm. A captivating, space-filling energy is generated, occasionally locking in with sounds of the treadmill whirring, Kilduff’s almost-out-of-breath voice, and the flashing title urging viewers to LIVE 323 255 9490 CALL NOW!

Endlessly upbeat and with an apparent sense of purpose, we might take him for yet another purveyor of self-actualization and alternative spirituality- if only his clothes were clean. Covered in paint that never made it to the painting (thanks to the forces of distraction), the suit is the giveaway: creativity and commerce, substance and appearance make for an uneasy coexistence. Chugging along at a steady 4.3 miles-per-hour, Kilduff distills every infomercial, business motivational speech, Landmark Forum recruitment effort, and fundraising telethon you’ve ever seen. The rhetoric and urgency are there, but thankfully, nothing’s for sale.

If his abilities are of a not-so-exceptional mortal, his affability in the face of idiotic callers—intent in hearing themselves swear on the air—is that of a saint (and not a little contagious.) His insistence on “staying positive” is different from that same message heard at an Amway regional sales meeting, where a hectoring, top-down manner is used to deliver veiled threats.

Kilduff’s personal website shows us his other creative endeavors; most surprising is that, unlike the paintings we see on the show, his other canvases, painted in an antic expressionist vein (and presumably on a break from the treadmill) are really quite accomplished. More consistent with his on-air persona are the many talents listed on his online acting resume, such as, “goofy dancing, oil painting, Host… Pogo Stick, Soccer, Softball, Swimming - ability – general… Disc Jockey, Improvisation, Licensed Driver, Mime.”

There’s an affinity between Kilduff’s show and the guerilla performances of Reverend Billy Talen; while taking a different tack from Talen’s incisive and overtly political oratory, both men use archetypically American models—the BlackBerry Man, the Southern Televangelist—as Trojan horses that deliver a brand of fun that somehow feels illegal. As in the Shopocalypse of Reverend Billy, Kilduff revels in anarchic spontaneity, casually summed up on an episode of Let’s Paint TV:

It’s not supposed to be figured out first- you’re supposed to do it first- you’re not supposed to think and do actions- you’re supposed to do actions and then think about it later… I don’t recommend doin’ that with the Iraq War, OK? OK, let’s take another call…

Tiger Woods Chase Sequence

2009-12-05T20:08:00.014-05:00

A month or so ago I promised comedy for my next postings; even if this wasn’t what I’d envisioned, I think it still qualifies:

Lumiere or Melies? Discuss.

Seriously though... “Speculative news” goes at least as far back as Alfred Jarry’s The Passion Considered as an Uphill Bicycle Race (a conceit later borrowed by J.G. Ballard for his The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race). Subject-wise, this Tiger Woods car crash video, produced by Hong Kong-based Next Media, lacks the sacrilege of the Jarry or Ballard pieces; whatever shock effect the video carries is in the hilarity of its visual imagination and as a queasy portent of things to come. In my new media critical studies course we spend one day on readings and discussion about Photoshop, video compositing, and photographic truth-value; while students are generally moderate when it comes to the ethics of altered images, I come away with a sadness that they’ve never known a time when questions of photography’s truth-value were NOT met with cynicism or believed to be naïve. So why am I not upset with this video? Perhaps if it were something of real consequence, rather than a professional golfer being chased in his Cadillac SUV by his golf-club wielding wife through their gated community outside of Orlando, my attitude would be different. Maybe this is just the treatment the story deserves? Unless of course R. Kelly is available for some more hip-hopera...

2009 Flaherty Seminar: Part 3

2009-11-01T15:09:00.008-05:00

The only thing more surprising than the fact that Alexandr Rastorguev’s Clean Thursday was made at all is that it’s been shown freely outside of Russia. A look at the funding sources of this deeply unflattering portrayal of occupation forces in Chechnya suggests a government much more tolerant of criticism than the one we know now. But no, that can’t be it: for the usually secretive Vladimir Putin to allow this film international distribution only shows the depth of the former prime minister’s cynicism; if outside support ever existed for their mission of extinguishing the Chechen uprising it should effectively be destroyed for those who view the film. Accustomed as we’ve become to the restrictions exercised by our own military to shape and control its image following the embarrassments of Vietnam, the film’s candor is both remarkable and altogether unfamiliar.

All this may suggest that Clean Thursday (aka Pure Thursday and Maundy Thursday) rates as a Grand Statement in the history of war on film, though this is far from the truth. Its scope is as narrow as the set of disused railroad cars where much of it is set. Retrofitted with laundry and kitchen facilities, the old train now functions as a supply base situated close to the battlefront. The spatial confinement is not unlike that seen in submarine movies, save for the exterior scenes/cutaways relieving us from the claustrophobia of its interiors. The depiction of conflict (with exception to the opening sequence) is confined to name-calling and arguments over the quality of the food.

The film opens with a brief shot of the military outpost set against a mountain, cutting to an extended run of scratched black leader accompanied by the sounds of machine guns and heavy shelling. Allah Akbar!, one man cries, amidst frantic radio communiqués; later in the sequence, images of older women appear in semi-steady rhythm- the mothers of the troops perhaps?

The image alternates between black and white and color stock, yet even with the latter, a single hue is generally dominant. Steam rises, water drips; tanks and personnel vehicles leave their deep ruts on the surrounding land. The men try and make the best of it: moments of real tenderness playing with a puppy, in letters to home read aloud, and, to my surprise, a lengthy shower scene where they scrub one another’s backs and shave each others’ heads. At other moments it’s clear to what extent they’ve adopted the necessary mindset, desensitized to their enemy’s humanity; at their worst, it’s as though Leon Golub’s mercenaries have come to life. As one soldier puts it:

We thought that when we came here, the presence of our troops here... such power would demoralize everybody. Bullshit! They don’t give any fucking shit! Wild people can’t be demoralized... It’s impossible to deal with these animals without weapon. It’s cruel, but they are animals.

Other statements conflate warfare with sexual domination, most notably in a sickening and remorseless account of how a female Chechen sniper was repeatedly raped (and subsequently died) after capture. At other times, the conflation appears in the language itself:

We must rape if we came here, but not to play with tits.

Its language is without a doubt one of the most striking features of the film; I’ve refrained from schoolmarm-ish insertion of [sic] next to each linguistic invention above and to follow- the subtitles I quote are just as they appear in the film. Proper sentence structure is left far behind; the coarse masculine essence that David Mamet thought he owned has been captured here once and for all. Stupidity and wit are indistinguishable, with neologisms—dacksuckers, bustards—worthy of Joyce, or Norm Crosby, or Stanley Unwin.

On the walk over to the discussion following the screening, there was much talk of how “bad translation” diminished appreciation of the film for some. I had a hard time accepting that it was really as simple as that, since the raw expressive power of the language seemed too perfect to be accidental (and was it really possible to separate objections about the what that was said from the how?) Those conversations continued into the discussion proper; unfortunately, Rastorguev was unable to attend the Seminar, but he did forward an apology through programmer Irina Leimbacher that confirmed his disappointment with the quality of the subtitles’ translation. The artist’s intentions are nice and all, but I still felt the crudeness of language to be a vital part of the film’s power, conveying the same sort of brutality used to carry out their mission. Both sides had abandoned civilized discourse—in all its possible aspects—long ago and, as co-participant David Dinnell very astutely suggested, “...perhaps syntax is the first casualty of war.”

2009 Flaherty Seminar: Part 2

2009-10-14T23:05:00.007-04:00

Filing out from an off-campus screening at the Hamilton Theater Tuesday night, we were caught amongst a mass of teenagers there for a special midnight show of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen; it was all a bit like a staged reenactment of one of the final shots in the film we’d just seen, Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Ilisa Barbash’s magnificent Sweetgrass. The scene in question shows a vast mob of sheep driven on the hoof from summer pasture and now bunched up at a railroad crossing close to market. Amidst the cacophony of bleating and bells clanging, the men whoop it up to celebrate the end of their journey. Not known at the time of shooting, it’s later revealed that this 150-mile long trek across streams and over arduous terrain to public grazing lands in the Absaroka-Beartooth Mountains (and back out again) would be their last.

still from Sweetgrass by Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Ilisa Barbash
Courtesy of the filmmakers

My initial trepidation—based on the first several shots—had been that this would be yet another quasi-structuralist “slow western”; thank goodness my initial assumptions were wrong, for this was a film that called for nimble improvisation and dynamic response to a subject not known for its ready compliance to documentary filmmakers (or to anyone, for that matter.)

Castaing-Taylor and Barbash returned to Montana three times to track (or, as they prefer to call it, record) the sheepherders’ journey through landscape that tests the limits of endurance, not just of humans, but of their horses and herding dogs as well. Aristotle had it wrong when he called shepherds “the laziest” of workers; their responsibilities are in fact never-ending. Even bedding down for the evening offers no real respite, as grizzlies pay frequent nocturnal visits to the herd.

Despite all that’s been made of the lightness and portability of modern equipment, anyone who knows of filmmaking’s difficulties under the best of circumstances will intuit the technical obstacles faced with shooting in such a remote locale. During the Q&A afterwards, Castaing-Taylor spoke of carrying their gear on horseback and accessing electricity from a car battery brought along for that purpose, a degree of hardship reminiscent of that faced by Eadweard Muybridge and other 19th century land survey photographers (and so vividly recounted in Rebecca Solnit’s River of Shadows), carrying not just the heavy glass plates, but also the wet-plate chemistry and darkroom itself in which those exposed plates would be processed.

An irony of the film is that only through sensing this invisible effort behind the camera will many of its viewers ever truly relate to the very different effort expended in front of it, activities so utterly foreign as to qualify as ethnography. Hannah Arendt’s distinction between work and labor is useful here; the latter, she wrote, “never designates the finished product, the result of laboring, but remains a verbal noun to be classed with the gerund.” Put another way, labor is by definition a never-ending process, never offering the satisfying permanence that is a thing; work, on the other hand, produces “a work” to be claimed as one’s own.

still from Sweetgrass by Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Ilisa Barbash
Courtesy of the filmmakers

As subjects, the sheep posed unique technical challenges, ever-moving across windswept vistas (and displaying an occasional flare for comedy, as when they break that cardinal cinematic rule by staring straight at the camera). Ernst Karel’s sound design is extraordinary, and crucial to the film’s success is his deployment of wireless radio mics to bridge great distances and allow a paradoxical sonic intimacy across these vast open landscapes. The extreme disjuncture of audio/visual perspectives is powerful, as much for a practical response to the exigencies of livestock and landscape as for more expressive purposes, like conveying the loneliness of the sheepherder’s day-to-day routine.

At times we hear close range conversations amongst the men; in other instances, there are musings and muttered curses, having forgotten (or no longer caring) that they’re not really alone. “...Fuckin’ mountain climbin’ goat climbin’ cocksuckin’ MOTHERFUCKERS!!!” These and other epithets are directed at the herd, and later there’s a cellphone call—heard but mostly unseen—from one of the men to his mom from the top of a mountain. Funny, yet at the same time heartbreaking to hear such a tough character at wit’s end while we gaze down this beautiful mountainside; the sheep in the distance resemble maggots, scattering ever further. The dog, ordinarily darting to and fro, barking and nipping to contain them, is unable to stand, his paws worn raw from the journey. How easily it can all fall apart, as the full scope of their responsibility is laid plain before us.

The current glut of the passive observational within exploratory nonfiction filmmaking might be ascribed in part to James Benning’s influence; while I admire his work (and most especially the restless inquiries into narrative form apparent in his earlier and lesser-known films), I find that the locked-down stasis, extended shot duration, and mistaken equivalence of disengaged eye and heightened perception adopted by many of his less imaginative devotees—all in the name of rigor—too often sell their subjects short. By now, the duration of a shot as determined by the manufacturer of the roll on which it’s filmed is really a gesture more academic than radical; at what point, really, does “rigor” become “rigor mortis”? Happily, Sweetgrass avoids this.

Rigor mortis is in fact the necessary precondition for Pawel Wojtasik’s Nascentes Morimur (Autopsy), a video that delivers just what’s promised by its title. Like the second autopsy ordered up by Michael Jackson’s family (and before the findings of Jackson’s first had even been written), I initially asked myself, was this really necessary? After all, there was Stan Brakhage’s The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes as its obvious precedent. And yet, once again... the hesitation I felt in watching its opening shots quickly fell by the wayside. Opinion was perhaps the most divided here amongst any work screened at this year’s Flaherty, as some saw Wojtasik’s video as a too-formal treatment of such highly charged material; on the contrary, I found the dialogue Wojtasik created between his work and Brakhage’s earlier film to be altogether illuminating.

Those who’ve braved that difficult encounter with The Act of Seeing... may know of the struggle Brakhage had in making it; he once told an audience that, “Having turned into my forties I had never seen a dead person, except once as a child... I was feeling the breath of age down my neck and had a sudden strong compulsion to at least look at the human innards, to look at death in the sense of what happened to others.” Despite this determination, he begins tentatively, with many shots in the first several minutes framed in ways that mask or otherwise obscure the autopsy itself. As the film progresses, we see him gradually overcoming his fear, moving boldly toward scalpel and saw. Several autopsies are performed, and Brakhage makes it a point to present this as an ongoing process. In truth, the film is in many ways more about the living- the work the autopsists do, and Brakhage’s attempt, for his part, to be equal to the task. Much more, in other words, like a day in the life of the morgue (with an appropriately grungy look, shot under lower light on grainy stock) than how an autopsy is performed.

still from The Act of Seeing With One's Own Eyes by Stan Brakhage
Courtesy of the Estate of Stan Brakhage and Fred Camper (www.fredcamper.com)

Wojtasik felt it important to remain with a single body throughout (despite having shot four different autopsies, he just used footage from the first), and concludes with its torso stitched back up again. In the opening shots of Nascentes Morimur (which were shot to invoke The Act of Seeing...), there’s none of the nervous energy seen in Brakhage’s camera work and editing. Wojtasik’s bodily presence is that of careful control, though much of this is achieved through post-production. The light is clear, colors are vivid and marked by deep shadows. Movement is slowed as we settle into steady, deliberate rhythms; the image shifts in and out of focus, and each gradual fade to black is like an exhalation. All this is bracketed within a slowly contracting and expanding frame, opening wide to reveal glistening viscera, and narrowing again to an abstract sliver of color. In a certain sense, it’s an autopsy of an autopsy.

still from Nascentes Morimur (Autopsy) by Pawel Wojtasik
Courtesy of the artist

Nascentes Morimur is quite clearly an act of defamiliarization, not only of what we know about our own bodies, but also of whatever we may have learned of the autopsy procedure by way of The Discovery Channel or some other source. A remarkable shot near the end of the video shows both chest cavity and head not only opened and emptied, but flesh and muscle turned partially inside out to resemble some rare and monstrous orchid; I’m reminded of the bold theatrical gestures Pietro da Cortona’s anatomical engravings, where a cadaver holds the muscles of his rib cage as though displaying the fine silk lining of a custom-tailored dinner jacket for all to view.

Plate 4 from Tabulae anatomicae (1741) by Pietro da Cortona

Perhaps the most difficult viewing in the entire autopsy procedure (and seen in both works) are the steps taken to access the pineal gland; like a flight recorder for the human body, this tiny spot at the center of the brain is said to contain more information about the circumstances of death than any other part. To get there, the forehead is incised, and the face pulled back like a stubborn rubber mask; from there the skull is slowly cut with a rotary power saw and the brain removed. Never have I been more thankful for silence than here.

In The Act of Seeing…, Brakhage abandoned all aspirations of reanimating a no-longer-living being cinematically, as with his Mothlight or Sirius Remembered; instead he used film as an instrument to redirect that “breath of age” felt down his neck so he could “whistle or at least sing when moving through the graveyard.” In 2001, he expressed disappointment—despite having shown at the Seminar on three occasions beginning in 1967—that the film, “…isn't something that would satisfy the Flaherty people. Again they have rejected The Act of Seeing With One's Own Eyes. Why?” What he meant by “rejected” is not quite clear, but his statement plainly suggests a desire to be taken seriously (though on his own terms) as a documentarian.

Interestingly, Wojtasik approaches a way of seeing that Brakhage himself advocated in earlier films, and most famously in his Metaphors on Vision that, “does not respond to the name of everything but which must know each object encountered in life through an adventure of perception”, and away from that, “...which mirrors the movement of the individual toward death by its increasing inability to see.”

http://www.horschamp.qc.ca/new_offscreen/brakhage_montreal.html

2009 Flaherty Seminar: Part 1

2009-10-08T21:29:00.001-04:00

Ideally I’d be getting this down as it’s happening (or shortly after), but as anyone who’s attended the Flaherty Film Seminar knows, there’s very little time there to write. The pace is both exhausting and invigorating, and the risk of drawing from memory is that certain particulars can get lost in the rush of sensation and passionate debate. An average Seminar day includes six to seven hours of screenings, and when not watching films or sleeping, most likely you’re discussing--while still processing--what you’ve just seen and heard.

Along with its intense schedule, the Flaherty puts both gourmands and recovering alcoholics to the test: the former, with what’s not there, and the latter, with what is. Meals are taken in the dining hall of the host college (Colgate University, this year and last), and like most cafeteria food... let’s just say it brings back memories. Drinks are served after the evening discussion at Bill’s Bar, so named for legendary MOMA film curator/librarian Bill Sloan; there, friends are made, beer is spilled, and conversation continues long into the night. Those needing sleep are best advised to spend a week somewhere else.

The cycle of meal/screening/group discussion is repeated thrice daily with occasional variations- that you can count on. What you can’t count on knowing is what you’ll see at a particular screening until the title credits appear. Aside from the name of the programmer and three or four featured filmmakers announced beforehand, the screening schedule is kept a closely-guarded secret.

The Flaherty's been likened by some to a cult (facetiously, for the most part), and by others to a family; founded back in 1955 to honor the memory of filmmaker Robert Flaherty, it operates on the principle of non-preconception, the idea being that approaching work blindly is the best way to combat whatever prejudices one might bring to a particular filmmaker, subject, or approach (as is shown in my next post.) This was a wise move on the part of Frances Flaherty and the Seminar’s co-founders, for it’s one of the few places where the self-imposed ignorance of the moving image community’s various splinter factions toward one another is directly confronted.

Despite the Seminar’s reputation for being anchored in the world of humanist documentary, a look at its history from the beginning reveals not just a commitment to challenging nonfiction filmmaking (early screenings of Jean Rouch’s Le Maitre Fous and Chris Marker’s Le Joli Mai are two of the better-known examples), but also to the avant-garde (like Robert Breer, Bruce Conner, and Gregory Markopoulos), along with the boundary-blurring work of Shirley Clarke, Peter Watkins, Robert Kramer, Su Friedrich, and countless others. Recently I learned that a most fascinating genre hybrid, and for me one of the revelatory treasures of the Seminar--Kent MacKenzie’s The Exiles (shown last year prior to its long-overdue commercial release), had originally been screened there shortly after its completion in 1961.

Hollis Frampton once described the beam of light emanating from a projector as, “all films... if we want to see what we call more, which is actually less, we must devise ways of subtracting, of removing, one thing and another, more or less, from our white rectangle.” To sit in a darkened theater on a bright sunny summer day to watch films of some bright sunny summer day somewhere else is at times fairly comical, and an inescapable part of the Flaherty experience. The Seminar hinges on the belief that, for that week at least, the benefits of partaking in this carefully chosen distillation of experience (and the various subtractions from that white rectangle) outweigh whatever’s lost in shutting out the world at large; this has certainly been my experience, and what follows are some thoughts on a few of the highlights from this year’s Seminar.