Interview with Caroline Martel

From Industry/Cinema, an installation by Caroline Martel (2012)


The July/August issue of The Brooklyn Rail includes a recent conversation between myself and Montreal-based filmmaker Caroline Martel, whose new installation, Industry/Cinema, is on view at the Museum of the Moving Image until August 12. The interview covers a good deal of territory, primarily focusing on her 2002 film The Phantom of the Operator; in it, she discusses her use of archival material, the role of the telephone operator in the histories of technology and labor, and the challenges of writing creative voiceover (amongst other topics). She also talks a bit about Wavemakers, her just-completed feature documentary about the Ondes Martenot. The interview can be found here:

2012 Flaherty Seminar, Part 1

notes from the flaherty 2012 cinema cult summer camp by Neil Young

As an institution founded on the principle of "non-preconception", the Flaherty Seminar often plays host to a tussle between that notion and the more pragmatic need of giving the year's offerings a name. As problems go, it's a small one, but what often occurs is that participants fall into the annoying habit of using the year's thematic tag as a yardstick against which the work is measured, in lieu of considering the films on their own merit.  Open Wounds, this year's selection, was as good (i.e. open-ended) a name as any in recent memory, and yet what emerged was far more complex than anything those two words could contain.  Masterfully assembled by Pamplona's Punta de Vista artistic director Josetxo Cerdan, this year's chosen work offered a wealth of new discoveries (along with a few familiar faces bringing new or little-seen works), transcending whatever else the ostensible title might suggest.

One unstated but unmistakable thread emerged early on, for which the limited cellphone reception on host Colgate University's rural campus seemed a portent: a general disorientation was felt again and again, as though our collective GPS had been disabled. How many of us will allow ourselves to be lost, to be left to our own devices?  How lost are we willing to be, and for how long?  These and other questions would hover over the course of the week's proceedings.

Still from Ah, Liberty! by Ben Rivers

Rebecca Solnit offers a useful etymological insight when she writes, "The word "lost" comes from the Old Norse los, meaning the disbanding of an army, and this origin suggests soldiers falling out of formation to go home, a truce with the wide world."  Ben Rivers's The Coming Race, the opening film for this year, summons such an image, with its slow legion of men traipsing up a mountain. The filmmaker's primary gesture here is to play on the ambiguity of the question: just who has issued these marching orders?

In another Rivers film, Ah, Liberty!,  kids run amok on a property strewn with disused machinery,  while the very distinctions between interior and exterior are skewed by porous, doorless, windowless architecture and a car that's driven through water.  Again, Solnit: "Children seldom roam, even in the safest places.  Because of their parents' fear of the monstrous things that might happen (and do happen, but rarely), the wonderful things that happen as a matter of course are stripped away from them.  For me, childhood roaming was what developed self-reliance, a sense of direction and adventure, imagination, a will to explore, to be able to get a little lost and then figure out the way back."  Ah, Liberty! seems to ponder the question of--to put it crudely--what separates freedom from neglect; with this, I was reminded of Hirokazu Kore-eda's Nobody Knows. Both of Rivers's films, with their enigmatic onscreen behavior and absence of exposition, guarantee a certain disorientation and at the same time risk that their audience may never return. Much to his credit, Rivers has a strong intuitive sense, alert to that undefinable threshold of going too far.  

Still from Sip'Ohi- El Lugar del Mandure by Sebastian Lingiardi

A more intricate scrambling of our narrative compass-points occurs in Sebastian Lingiardi's Sip'Ohi- El Lugar del Mandure, a shaggy-dog story in the spirit of Diderot.  This film, about the act of storytelling and gathering of indigenous folktales amidst the Wichi and Toba people in northern Argentina, protracts narrative closure in favor of interruption, anti-climax, and nested structure.  Its shifting relay of narrators catalyze ongoing tensions between the voice as heard within the unique form of writing that is cinema, and the desire within the film to preserve an oral tradition--fluid by its very nature--from disappearing altogether.

Within this self-invented "land of the lost", it's only natural that there be some attempt at navigation; in his Paralelo 10, Andres Duque offered a haunting portrait of a woman who enacts a private solar mapping every day on a street corner in Barcelona. While the slow choreography of her gestures are all that is visible from the cars speeding by her, Duque's camera reveals their significance; like a De Chirico painting come to life, she carefully aligns the shadows cast by the set of translucent drafting triangles in her hands with cryptic markings on the median pavement.

Still from Paralelo 10 by Andres Duque

Participants who return to the Flaherty take part in a related endeavor, coming face to face with the paradox of "inviting surprise"; though much the same might be said of those drawn to avant-garde art in general, what sets the Seminar apart is the blind trust it requires. There is something ritualistic to this, a kind of fort-da game that is left to the individual to fill.

Watching 'Mothlight' with Mom

Pastel portrait of my mother (oblique detail), 1949


Today would've been my mom's 88th birthday- this is for her.


Certain details are foggy now, but I do remember this: in November 2003 a call came from my sister Cathy with the news that our mom was back in the hospital.  I had almost become accustomed to this, happening as it was with increasing frequency; now, the prognosis was bleak.  I immediately booked the flight to Atlanta, worried I wouldn't make it there in time.

The prospect of travel has always tricked me into thinking I was about to enter some space of greater productivity.  This time though was different; hastily getting ready, I resisted the usual impulse to load myself down with work.  But I'd been assigned to review the first by Brakhage DVD for The Wire so, out of necessity--and anticipating a need for escape--I brought the disks and my laptop to write.  Forced confinement on a plane could be great for reflective thought, yet it could just as easily be a chance to stare at an Eddie Murphy movie without sound over a neighboring passenger's shoulder.  Once I got there, well... there was no telling what to expect.

Mom had moved to Georgia back in 1994 to be close to Cathy and her family and to escape the Cleveland winters.  She'd finished out her nursing career doing hospice care, a terrible choice for someone who'd had plenty of personal loss herself and never developed the professional detachment needed in her field.  Life had knocked her around good, but she managed to fight back with incredible grit and tenacity.

She lived alone, and there was no way to get her keys to drop my stuff off; from the airport I headed straight to the hospital via the MARTA train running out to suburban Decatur and then called a cab.  When I got to her room it was clear the doctors weren't kidding- she was weak, fighting for breath, but glad I was there.  I spoke with the doctor, who reiterated what I'd gotten secondhand: she was suffering from a congestive heart condition and emphysema, thanks to the Kools she consumed by the carton for as long as I could remember.  The meds prescribed to help with her breathing jeopardized her heart, and the beta blockers for her heart constricted air flow- careful calibration was needed to maintain balance.  Even if that worked, the doctor said, it might just be a matter of days.

Right away too I could see there was a softer edge to her, and she seemed to have made her peace with what was to come- that in turn helped me to relax a little.  We made small talk about my journey there and whether I had eaten.  She spoke kindly of the care she was getting--this in itself was unusual--and of her desire to die at home.  I'm not sure how I responded.

There was talk of practical matters like sleeping on her couch and where her car was parked.  She asked about my life, and what I was working on; I mentioned the review and offered to show her a bit of the disk.  It surprised me that she responded with such interest, as intrigued by the laptop as by the films themselves.  Mothlight seemed like a good choice- short, direct, and with recognizable imagery, it was also--along with Pull My Daisy and Richard Serra's Color Aid--one of the very first experimental films I'd ever seen.  I propped up the laptop on a spare blanket so she could see it without having to move.

Purists would surely object to such a set-up, I remember thinking, and that was fine by me.   After that I found I had less patience with the finicky arguments on Frameworks and amongst cineastes of various stripes about native formats and artists' true intentions and how film shown on video is so debased that it is better not to see it at all.

We watched quietly, and I explained its intentional absence of sound.  As its images zipped by she was rapt, and even seemed to perk up a bit; we had found some common terrain.  She reached for my hand.  "Are those dried flowers?"  Right there the connection was apparent: the film was taking her back through her own years of craft activity.

It had all started as a practical matter: adept with a sewing machine, she mended our clothes and sometimes made new ones.  I can't be sure, but I think from that she resolved to try her hand at carpentry.  For my dad's last time at home she built a ramp to get his wheelchair in and out of the house.  With three kids and little money for furniture, she built my brother and I a desk and put together an unusual bunk setup for the bedroom we shared.

By 1970 the craft bug had taken hold, beginning with weekly ceramics classes and quickly moving on into self-directed activity at home.  Artist?  Hobbyist?  I don't know how I'd describe her- the IRS never cared, since she wasn't making any money with it.  Working as a nurse, she was constantly butting heads with supervisors wanting her to work faster and spend less time with each patient; her conviction was that the care she was giving could not be assigned a time limit.  She was incredibly stubborn, with a temperament clearly geared toward something else.

The transformation happened quickly, as ideas were lifted from craft fairs and small-press publications.  Before long, our house had become a workshop filled with materials: buttons, ribbon, pine cones, tiddley-winks, styrofoam, balsa, golf tees, Q-tips, googly-eyes, emery boards, sable brushes, volatile solvents, and cans of aerosol snow.  No medium was off-limits- there were ceramic leprechauns, god's eyes, Christmas ornaments, and always, at any one time, dozens (maybe hundreds) of decoupaged plaques.  The imagery was eclectic, filched from Currier and Ives reproductions, holiday cards, Hummel sales brochures, and gay-90s saloon humor printed on imitation parchment, edges carefully charred to disguise their recent manufacture.  Even our wooden furniture went through the rough treatment of 'antiquing'- whipped with metal chains, scuffed with the electric sander, and pocked with a nail set to simulate worm holes, along with countless other techniques for surface distress.

At some point she opened a shop in our living room called McGee's Closet (a reference to Fibber McGee and Molly, the once-popular radio show she listened to as a child), selecting my sister as prime co-conspirator.  I now understand something of how the term cottage industry was derived, fitting here too for the fact that that our house was a converted vacation cottage just a short walk away from Lake Erie.

I had little appreciation, and even a vague sense of shame about it all-- this was long before art-school prejudices entered into the equation.  With friends I did my best to direct activities somewhere else-- there was no way I could explain this little house with barely a place to sit and all the stuff that made it that way.  Years later, the gift shop below the Experimental Television Center in Owego would bring back memories as I dodged all its boxes cluttering up the stairway they shared.   During residencies there I often thought about the relationships between what went on in the upper loft space humming with Sandin Processors, time-based correctors, and one-of-a-kind video gear, and the activities in the shop below, seemingly locked in a state of perpetual Christmas.

Despite the handbills she made, McGee's Closet was a bust.  There were occasional visitors, but they weren't there to spend.  As with my mom, these women (I can't recall a man amongst them) saw the craft world as a place where ideas and techniques were there for the taking- notions of originality and creative territory were simply not part of that unspoken discourse.  But despite that, production continued, and the unsold goods were eventually given as holiday gifts.  Later, when we all left home and the yard was free, she began a garden; the herbs and flowers grown there were hung upside-down to dry on clotheslines strung up across the dining room.  Her interest shifted to potpourri satchels, dried flower arrangements, and all-season wreaths.

At times I've wondered about Stan Brakhage's kids and what it was like to grow up in their cabin with its edit bins, clotheslines, and other small-gauge paraphernalia.  Were they embarrassed by their dad's eccentricities, running with an axe up a mountain, cavorting with his crazy friends, refusing a proper burial for the family dog?  Were they chastised for bringing up Disneyland at the dinner table?  Did they ever sneak over to their friend's house to watch the Broncos game?

After Mothlight was over Mom asked questions about how it was made and if there was a story of some sort in it she wasn't able to see.  Brakhage's commentary that accompanied the film could answer that much better than I could, and so we listened to that:

"Here is a film I made out of a deep grief... I said, these crazy moths are flying into the candlelight and burning themselves to death, and that's what's happening to me-- I don't have enough money to make these films, and it's destroying... I'm not feeding my children properly because of these damned films, y'know?  And I'm burning up here-- what can I do?  I'm feeling the full horror of some kind of immolation, in a way..."

Observing 'The Observers'

Below is an essay of mine entitled Observing ‘The Observers’, written for the DVD release of Jacqueline Goss’s magnificent first feature; the film will begin its week-long run tomorrow night (through May 16) at Anthology Film Archives, with the filmmaker in attendance. Also screening on the same bill is The Lakes by Jesse Cain (also responsible for The Observers’s superb cinematography). Also tomorrow night (May 9) at 7:30PM, you’ll have a single chance to see three of Goss’s best short video works. I can’t recommend these works enough!



Turbulent winds can break off the fragile branches of a stellar
crystal as it falls, and often the branches regenerate during the
descent, but even after reaching the ground these fragments
can suffer further modification: winds can disintegrate each
crystal by abrading it against other crystals so that, when the
fallen remnant comes to rest at last beneath the microscope
of the observer, the specimen often bears little resemblance
to the original particle formed high in the ionosphere.

from Crystallography by Christian Bök


Mount Washington Weather Observatory (or MWOBS for short) proudly boasts of being “Home of the World’s Worst Weather”.  With a 360-degree view atop the 6,288-foot peak that is its home, it might be thought of as a machine for visual investigation, not unlike a camera.  In winter, a great deal of energy is spent in fighting the fierce blowing snow and keeping instruments operational; in summer, there’s more time available, and that’s used for transcribing old weather logs into the MWOBS database.

The Observers is a fact-based fiction that centers on two meteorologists, each facing the extremities of a single season as they see to MWOB’s day-to-day operations on their own.  The film begins in winter, in an atmosphere of near zero visibility; under such conditions, the rising sun itself seems to struggle.  Amorphous snowdrifts are kicked at and hammered with fists, revealing solid built structures underneath- The Woman in the Dunes, with snow instead of sand.  Both films, after all, are anchored firmly in the physical world- dry or frozen granular substances in all their variety; the force and sound of the wind; how these things align and conspire against the body, towards a shape-shifting landscape.

Unlike that film, however (or the book from which it originated), The Observers is a story that resists being read as fable.  Perhaps that difference resides in the way the entomologist and the woman of the title live out a nightmare vision of permanent monogamous coupling, a pure Sisyphean futility from which there’s no escape.  Goss’s observers, in stark contrast, are inextricably bound by nothing but their commitment to meteorological fact.

Weather is the line that connects Johann Wolfgang Goethe and John Constable and Francis Beaufort to George Kuchar and Kenny Goldsmith and Willard Scott; there’s not always such a clear distinction between science or art or devotion.  With the meteorologists in the film, there’s something monk-like about their activity; for the one stationed atop a mountain in summer, her solitude seems heightened as she goes about her routine amidst the groups of tourists visiting the peak.  Without offscreen love to pine for, or the reflective surfaces of a journal (i.e. Diary of a Country Priest) for one's inner voice to bounce off of: they are vigilant in their observation, and prayer-like in their report.

Another work that connects to Goss’s film (less through resemblance than actual origin) is Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Great Carbuncle; it is, so far as The Observers is concerned, that “original particle formed high in the ionosphere”.  Acknowledged by the filmmaker as a direct inspiration, Hawthorne’s story is set on the same mountain as the film, but its brilliant gem now a lockbox of the sort used to hold petty cash.  Like Bök’s snowflake, the gem of this Twice-Told Tale (which, before Hawthorne, had been an old Indian legend) has been abraded and regenerated beyond recognition. 

In Goss’s film, the mysticism that permeates The Great Carbuncle is stripped away, which is not to say it’s without mystery of its own.  Less the long-sought-after treasure of Hawthorne’s story than a carefully guarded secret, the lockbox in one way acts as a kind of Rubik’s Cube for the two meteorologists; though we never see the box actually opened, how do we know that it never really is?

Hawthorne’s story is radical in its refusal of a satisfying narrative closure; similarly, The Observers chooses skillfully drawn ellipses in favor of clear resolution.  In a time of total exposure typified by Google Earth (and, in another way, by the observers’ existence atop Mount Washington), the actual substance of what’s inside the box is far less important than its continuing existence.

Jim Supanick
March 2012

Films by Abigail Child

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"

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

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