Wide Open Cinema

Christian Marclay's CLOCK at LACMA

2011-08-11T16:02:00.000-07:00

Christian Marclay's 24-hour video piece THE CLOCK was presented at LACMA (Wilshire Ave., Los Angeles) through the month of July of 2011, allowing viewers to watch a work which precisely charts the passing of time through thousands of shots of clocks and watches pulled from films and television programs, all laid out to be played synchronous to actual local time. Most days, museum goers were limited to viewing the part of this piece that is up during the museum's open hours. An 8 hour chunk of this thing must be a pretty exemplary part of it. The museum also offered 2 opening and closing events where THE CLOCK was run for its entire 24 hours. Due largely to the time constraints of parenting, I rushed out to see THE CLOCK on its final night in Los Angeles, Thursday, July 28. I believe the entire museum was open to the public for free that night, although only the Marclay piece, projected in the 600 seat Bing theater, was an all-night affair, starting at 7PM and ending at the same time on Friday. I don't know if Marclay made his CLOCK with a preferred starting point or is it intended to have no definitive beginning or end, up to the curator or viewer. En route to the Museum Row of Wilshire Boulevard around 9PM, I considered that "being there" for the midnight moment might be a highpoint of the piece and hurried to catch what I could leading up to that. Any time after midnight might be a bonus or like the cigarette after sex for some...

There was a line of about 75 people qued on the stairway leading up along the stepped fountain outside the theater building. It was exciting to see so many people interested in what is essentially video art; the theater is full inside and there are almost another hundred people waiting in line for insiders to depart. The staff did a great job of keeping track of the theater's capacity; I don't know how they decided to fill the hall, maybe allowing 550 people inside at any time. The room was full to capacity, viewers came and went, but it was orderly and civilized. People chose their moments to leave. There were no riots. I sat down at 10:09PM, checking my telephone--yup, 10:09--as I turned it off, and was swept into a 2-and-a-half hour tour, not of a clock but of every imaginable image of clocks, with thousands of tangential action, asides and punctuation shots to make the piece move and "work".

I think THE CLOCK is about the plurality of time, how we each have the story of time running across us, all checking our timepieces and connecting with the little meanings that time has for us in our individuated worlds. Nam Jun Paik may have shown a single clock, second hand running, for 24 hours and called it art (if he had done the piece), but Marclay has done what is only possible today in the world of huge portable hard drives, culling images of clocks from innumerable films to stitch together a quilt of film history grander than almost anything else rendered by a filmmaker. The meticulous nature of Marclay's Clock connects it to a history of duration-oriented film and performance, though with film long duration can be an hour or 45 minutes, as Michael Snow's WAVELENGTH or Hollis Frampton's ZORN'S LEMMA. In performance some connecting points might be Marina and Ulay's walking the Great Wall towards each other or Linda Montano's year-long performance/deprivation pieces. Although piecing together a huge video piece might seem very different, certainly not a BODY ART like those just mentioned, perhaps OUT OF BODY ART and symbolic of the time we live in, so much of our lives sucked into the ethercable. And Marclay is no minimalist; I'm sure I've heard the term MAXIMALISM bandied about over and under his name. (What is Maximalism? Well, if Minimalism relies on very limited materials to make its claims, Maximalism could be considered a kitchen sink genre, a field of art-making where "everything goes" and quite often at the same time. Mash up land.) Marclay's Clock also comes out of a long line of found footage filmmaking, the use of pre-existing footage to make new statements (see Bruce Conner's work and Jay Leyda's classic little film book FILM BEGETS FILM). A healthy tradition. I don't want to think about whether Marclay had to secure rights to any of the thousands of shots he used, some of them in brilliant HD video it seemed; the image quality was very good for this kind of work. Found footage collage films often suffer from low quality duplication OR they try to use that aspect as a new Quality (see Craig Baldwin) that implies the distance from an official source and permissions.

And now to discuss SOUND. Since Mr. Marclay started his visible "career" as a musician, playing turntables in the Lower East Side improvisation scene of the 1980's (see John Zorn) and has produced numerous records and CDs before turning his eye more recently to video. (Although he has used video along the way to document other aspects of his work and has always worked on images presentable to the gallery/museum world. Marclay is a talented art entrepreneur or else his level of productivity is so high that he does not stand still for long. He lives in Europe and New York, say no more.) SO, as a musician or SOUND ARTIST, you can be sure that the soundtrack to THE CLOCK is rife with as much audio mayhem and frisson as CM could summon from his thousands of selected shots. He may have added sound effects for punctuation or forced himself to a set of rules limiting himself to the materials at hand. The snatches of dialog heard (during my 2 hours and 35 minutes) never seemed random, but rather elements of some kind of larger crossword puzzle unfolding through film history. Quite often a shot showing 2 people would come up, a troubled look on one of their faces, then turning to the other and asking existentially: "What time is it?" to be replied most certainly by the other with something like: "It's 10:42." Much of the pleasure of "watching THE CLOCK" (besides spending some of your work day in daydream) is in dashed expectations like those; a build up of suspense is dropped in the pratfall of the everyday. And the audience loved it. The humor in all the little mis-associations and screwball juxtapositions rippled across the full theater. Single shots contained little visual and auditory puns and then were followed rapidly by 3 more going in different directions. Every actor you could think of was represented in the interval I sat through.

And MIDNIGHT was spectacular, as I'd hoped. The buildup, crescendo and release into a quieter, new sequence of meaning was quite an experience after waiting for it for almost 2 hours. I can only imagine other significant daily representations: 8AM, 12noon, 5PM: they all may have terrific little collage dramas encoded for them. Each moment of the day given its little moment on screen, a star for a few seconds. I've seen reviews of the piece range from "boring" to "masterpiece" and I'd put it somewhere in between with moments of both. I've only seen one-tenth of the thing, what do I know?

THE IDEA and audacity to create (a 24-hour clockpiece video collage) something so grandiose may be enough these days to make a successful art piece. There is great hunger for new, innovative work in the world. I wonder how THE CLOCK would play in a smaller gallery installation or on home video. Sold to 6 museums for $150,000 each I wonder if THE CLOCK will come down from its tower anytime soon. It's impossible to evaluate given the current conditions of its presentation.

Sincere thanks to the staff of LACMA for this unusually good art experience.

Bill White's Reviews for The Seattle Post Globe

2011-06-14T23:34:00.000-07:00

My friend Bill has written thousands of reviews for the Seattle Post Intelligencer, and when the paper stopped printing about 2 years ago and he was laid off, he and some colleagues decided to continue what they do as the Seattle Post Globe. Bill continues to view and write about legions of films I will never see. He wrote a short remembrance of my Filmers Almanac project in his blurb for the youTube sponsored movie "Life in a Day".

http://seattlepostglobe.org/2011/05/21/siff-pick-of-the-day-for-saturday-may-21-tom-tykwers-3

Sunday, June 12, 2011

Screening today at the Cinerama at 6:00 pm

Life in a Day

When an an apparently fresh idea surfaces in the mainstream, it often has an antecedent in the distant obscurity of an earlier decade’s avant-garde. In the eighties, for instance, David Lynch plundered Kenneth Anger’s “Scorpio Rising” for the visual and sound motifs in his otherwise pedestrian detective thriller, ”Blue Velvet.” Now we have, as the gala closing film of SIFF 2011, “Life in A Day,” an assemblage of blips from filmers around the world, all shot on the same day. Three decades ago, an adventurous young film-maker from Boston accomplished something very similar. His “Filmers’ Almanac” covered one year, with each filmer choosing one day on which to shoot a three-minute roll of Super-8 film. Whereas the material for “Life in a Day” was instantaneously delivered through today’s internet technology, the rolls of film to comprise “Filmer’s Almanac” were acquired through detailed and extensive mail correspondences, by which O’Toole became acquainted with his 365 contributors. Rather than a festive screening at a film festival, “Filmer’s Almanac” was screened in a room on a college campus with some very hardcore cineastes in attendance for the multi-projections that continued for several wondrous hours. I am looking forward to seeing what kind of world-beat extravaganza the mainstream has assembled out of the 4,500 hours of footage submitted to Youtube by 80,000 people from 140 countries. The 95 minutes chosen from such a wealth of material is bound to be a reductionism of real life into the carefully selected imagery meant to represent a particular point of view towards all the peoples of the world. O’Toole showed his film unedited, and the activities of his 365 filmers reflected the unity of all peoples rather than a colorful array of cultural differences. One thing to remember when watching this movie: Thirty years ago, one guy without any money did the same thing and received nothing for his efforts except the satisfaction of accomplishing a crazy mission.

SpaceUp San Diego February 12, 2011

2011-02-19T22:13:00.000-08:00

On Saturday, February 12, I traveled to San Diego for the SpaceUp unConference, a gathering of people interested in space exploration. As I researched past and current space histories the past year and a half, SpaceUp stood out as a new and exciting nexus of information about citizen movements to get into space. This is a post-NASA world to some extent, although I think we as a society are struggling to balance public and private interests, we are in fact in something like a civil war over issues of the value and purpose of government and the place of corporations in our culture.

I found the video and photo documents of last year's (2010) SpaceUp to be quite intriguing and so had a strong interest to attend this year. I decided it would be a valuable forum to pitch my memoir-film concept about growing up under the space program, the child of a space writer. The rapid T-5 talks presented last year were a bit of a phenomenon, particularly Andy Cochrane's "Space is Boring" rant, which kicked some strong opinion and energy into the meetup. I expected a fairly friendly audience and an opportunity to get a document of me presenting my story pitch in public. While I only attended the afternoon and evening of Day 1, I had a great experience at SpaceUp and think it is a terrific annual forum for space enthusiasts from all walks of life.

The Price Student Union Loft at UCSD turned out to be an excellent venue, with 30-minute seminar sessions running in adjacent rooms, the center being a large bar-restaurant with a staging area. It was just the right size for the number of attendees, which was probably around 100, including organizers. Funny to enter the building and find SpaceUp across the hall from a student group rehearsing The Vagina Monologues. How diverse.

Pretty soon I was standing around a group discussing the topic "Making Space Sexy", which didn't draw me in initially but I observed from a distance and eventually took some part in. Many good ideas were shared, some questions like: why should celebrities and other millionaires have access to space before well-trained scientists? I expressed my concern that we are a schizophrenic culture: on the one hand rewarding hard work over time and on the other offering lotteries and get-rich-quick answers to the same questions. A woman from England told us how baffled she is at Americans' blase opinion of space. It dawned on me later that we are so caught up with cyberspace that we have largely lost our farsightedness, can longer peer into space (or is it the city lights that blot out our night vision?).

Another seminar session was titled Space Exploration and the Arts, in which a small group discussed everything from the literature that initially got them into space (Ray Bradbury and the recent Red/Blue/Green Mars series came up) to the most recent television depictions of space travel: Firefly and Defying Gravity. The same room then hosted a group discussion of how commercial projects could lead the way and finance continued scientific progress in space. There was talk of space as a manufacturing zone that can withstand pollution byproducts in ways the Earth's atmosphere no longer can.

A nice vegetarian buffet meal was offered, at least no one around me noticed any "space meat". I also had a pint of Stone IPA and a Racer 5. The mood was mildly festive and a lot of people seemed familiar with one another from last year's gathering. There were about 6 members of the SpaceX private spacecraft venture at the conference and quite a few other professionals. SpaceUp seemed a bit like a recruitment and job fair opportunity for some who were there; several young student enthusiasts were there to meet and greet representatives of companies they'd like to work for. I paced a bit and worked on my prepared text.

I spoke with a handful of people, met Chris Radcliff, organizer and liaison for the event. Talked with a photographer named Michael, who told me that there was also an air show going on that day celebrating 100 years of aeronautics in San Diego, that his wife and kids were stuck in related traffic. We also talked about the excellent PBS special ASTROSPIES we had both seen last year.

Around 7PM the T Minus 5 talks began, starting with a discussion of the group from Michigan University who have succeeded in launching their own cubesat, a small satellite payload. For a full survey of the T-5 talks you can go to:

http://www.ustream.tv/channel/spaceup-sd-pod-one

And to view my particular presentation:

http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/12659844

I was sure at the time of giving the talk that I had botched it. I do not frequently speak to assembled audiences. The attendees seemed much more interested in current space-related activities than 30 or 40-year old stories. Fortunately, these video documents show that I WASN'T HALF BAD! I generally communicated my piece and did so with some humor, stumbling a few times.

I had a couple of great coversations after the T Minus 5 segments. I was talking with Andy Cochrane, who gave another lively talk called "Space Is F@@king Dangerous" to close the night's event, telling him how impressed I was with his Powerpoint expertise. Again, his "Space Is Boring" address last year helped enliven the whole conference, and this year he received a good ovation again. Andy is a young filmmaker living in Los Angeles and his approach to presenting is informative to me, as someone who wants to win over supporters and financers to make film. His talk this year was good, including several "slides" which contained video clips in them, so he worked in a few surprises beyond the static 15 slides up for 20 seconds each. Andy said he hadn't slept for several days, and his talk may have suffered for that a little because he seems to make a weird factoid error in saying that we've only explored to 380 miles, when he must mean we only have a quasi-permanent presence at that distance.

Anyhow, another conference attendee and part of the oragnizing committee, Dave Dressler, approached Andy and me as we talked, and I was certain he wanted to speak with Andy: star of last year's conference and he'd just closed out this day, but Dave turned to me, told me he'd appreciated what I'd said and we had a great talk. After a short while, Dave commented, "Yeah, I could see that you are kind of living in your father's shadow," which was a small revelation to me, just having it put that way. This project of telling my father's story, and my own alongside it, has become a consuming goal. It speaks to having grown up under extremely interesting circumstances, with a father whose involvement in the heavy activities of the period I did not appreciate or understand then. Having drifted apart since my parents' divorce, I didn't have an active or helpful paternal voice in my life. This project is a way to redress that.

More soon.

David Sherman's "Wasteland Utopias" at Echo Park Film Center

2010-10-15T21:27:00.000-07:00

Wednesday, October 13, 2010

I have lived in Los Angeles almost 5 years and had not visited the EPFC until this night, and it was about time. Friends drag you out of your myopic auto-biopic. And what a pleasant surprise to find the film center such a refreshing and non-dysfunctional place. It's a small screening room, but really laid out nicely. David introduced me to Lisa Marr, a Canadiene and one of the center's founders, who introduced the show and talked about the film center's 9 years of history. It was great to see filmmaker Bill Daniel, just moved to LA the week before, and Ross Lipman, who works at UCLA's film preservation lab and has been in LA 9 years. We watched David's 90-minute video documentary on Wilhelm Reich, the Sonoran desert and developer Del Webb over a good Panasonic video projector mounted near the ceiling.

I had seen "Wasteland Utopias" previously on the dvd David sent me six months ago and liked the film then, even as presented on the 22-inch cathode TV at home. But seeing the piece on a large projection screen really brought it to life; the combination of ghostly video effects and found footage came alive in a kind of aesthetic battle on screen. David uses classic found footage assemblage techniques and then overlays that with a field of keyed video, itself a combination of home video and primitively telecined 16mm movie film. The resulting "lo-fi" quilt tells the story of a speculative meeting between real estate baron and developer Del Webb and visionary psychologist Wilhelm Reich in the Arizona desert sometime around 1955, after Webb had envisioned mega-retirement village Sun City and Reich was fleeing persecution for his radical approaches to body-energy-health on the East Coast (having been driven from early Nazi Germany in the 1930's). Webb believed he could turn desert into fertile suburban dream tracts while Reich was interested in "cloudbusting", using artillery canon-like tubes and wires grounded in water tanks to try to encourage the formation of rain clouds. Slightly similar in their messianic drives, Webb was an arch-conservative old school American war profiteer while Reich promoted liberation of and by the orgasm, and was hounded into hiding, in part for his Communist party past, and finally arrested for illegally selling Orgone Accumulators, the self-help "energy therapy" boxes he designed and promoted (made from "layers of organic and inorganic material"). He died in prison, but remains a lightning rod persona akin to Marcuse and Foucault, and his classic writings --The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933) and The Function of the Orgasm (1942) principle among them-- remain regular university reading. All of this history is very well covered in "Wasteland Utopias" and illustrated using found footage, often overlaid by a cataract of B-roll video material, perhaps representing layers of the filmmakers life as they intersect and diverge from the material being researched and depicted. The film is dense and in some ways difficult viewing: the lo-fi video treatment might seem at first a technical deficiency. The first viewing I didn't fully connect the layers of the filmmaking process. This second viewing on the larger screen allowed me to appreciate how well the applied aesthetic fit the story at hand. The ghostly video feedback-like overlay worked as a representation of the orgone accumulation process, from within "layers of organic (film) and inorganic (video) materials". There is also some history of electro-shock therapy brought into the story, in an aside very close to the filmmaker's life, which similarly relates to the filmmaking technique. It's rare to see a film whose aesthetic principles so elementally parallel the subjects they intend to depict. David described the piece as a cine-essay and also explained that rather than presenting a thesis and then setting out to prove it, he is presenting several possibilities any of which might fall through one's hands like water (my analogy). The found footage presented a series of strong narratives, particularly in the telling of Webb's company's building of Japanese-American internment camps. There was another beautiful sequence which presented a lyrical poster image for the entire film: a slow motion shot of a young boy rolling naked in negative process and seen through his keyed shadow areas is a kind of meta-found footage screen or wall or quilt, like the catalog of films we see through the entire piece. This film is certainly worth seeing for anyone interested in Wilhelm Reich; it's doubly interesting for students of film and video language.

Jalopy Hour West Coast Premiere and DVD Release

2010-08-23T15:58:00.000-07:00

On Wednesday, July 28 JalopyHour had its West Coast premiere screening at the Historic Raleigh Studios in Hollywood. The event coincided with Frank Schneider's visit to Los Angeles to work on Jeff Plansker's "pocketradio" films, a set of shorts which might be considered JalopyHour2, depending on your birth weight. Frank played a pivotal role in JalopyHour, which was shot 12 years ago in New Orleans and was finally finished 2 years ago, and then production of the dvd took another long set of months: getting the whole package rendered correctly. It's a beautiful disc set, with booklet, which we are quite proud of and just beginning to seek out distribution and possible television screenings.

The July screening was in the small Mary Pickford screening room and was mostly for friends and acquaintances, people who had worked on JH or the current "pocketradio" pieces. A bottle of proper absinthe was on hand. The screening was hugely successful in the sense(s) that the film looked fantastic (it was a simple dvd projected using a Wolf Cinema projector which rendered the piece as clear as to approximate 35mm projection) and the audience appreciated it. Promotional copies of the dvd set were gifted to each attendee. We then sauntered into the Hollywood night and proceeded to close a few bars.

Please visit www.jalopyhour.com to order your own copy of this lost and found film.
Available now.

East/West: Stereo Views

2010-02-03T15:26:00.000-08:00

While in Berkeley last week, my friend Fred Schnider told me about his recent attendance at a gathering of the SF Stereo Photography Society at the Exploratorium and how thought provoking it was. He reminded me of when I had been minorly obsessed with stereo images, around the time of the Berlin Wall's fall. I made a cheap stereo device out of two 110 cameras mounted on a piece of linoleum and carried it around Germany in 1991 trying to capture the twin Germanys as one was being absorbed by the other. I was also working on a super8 film about The Wall and American Nuclear Power containing images of protests at the Seabrook plant in New Hampshire and then sledgehammers dismantling the Wall in Berlin. All of this material remains somewhere in my archive to be unearthed, made sense of and possibly uploaded somewhere.

In researching the subject just now I came across the blog "cursive buildings" by poet/photographer Joshua Heineman, who has taken a series of antique stereo photocards from the NY Public Library and created 3D gifs from them, digital images which jump back and forth between the 2 frames of the stereo image and more or less successfully translate the 3D image into 2D media. I had seen some of this trick online in images by filmmaker Scott Stark and there is also similarity to Ken Jacobs' "nervous system" film performances.

Stereo photography is of particular relevance today as James Cameron's REAL 3D Avatar empire prepares to take over the moving image world, a far cry from the novelty photography of the Victorian era and the enthusiasm of photo club collectors and stereo camera buffs. It's great to see the development of cheap and easy to use solutions for producing decent 3D imagery that can be shared freely on the web.

The fall of the Berlin Wall seems a remote memory, but I think the ideological divisions remain as entrenched and misunderstood as they were then. A "post-communist" world hangs itself out to dry in the belief that economic growth is limitless and every day that climate change policy is forestalled takes us closer to the edge. The stereo view was always to me the "blend" (a word Obama has used) of capitalist and socialist modalities. We might never get to see this balanced view come to pass, so avid are the hardcore capitalists (tea baggers and 2nd coming-ists), but at least we can watch the Titanic go down (again) in REAL 3D.

DUMBO Arts Jalopy Hour Premiere

2009-12-17T22:15:00.000-08:00

On Saturday, September 26th, 2009, Jalopy Hour was premiered in a Brooklyn bookstore exhibition space (Powerhouse Arena). It was a beautiful weekend in New York, with entirely mixed weather. I measured 3 celebrity sightings in my crossings of Manhattan: Willem Defoe, who I often see around Houston Street, the Clintons at a restaurant north of Greenwich Village, and Elisabeth Moss of Madmen on the Upper West Side. Jalopy Hour was shown thanks to the kindness of Caspar Stracke, of Brooklyn or Berlin or Mexico City, who has curated VideoDumbo the last several years. It is a video festival that keeps expanding in scope and Caspar, with wife Gabriela Monroy together a VJ duo called Mostra, almost single-handedly mounts a festival which would take 10 people to produce anywhere else. Caspar can be seen carrying the video projector from one venue to another just in time for the next scheduled screening, an absolutely personal approach to festival coordination.

Anyhow. The screening went well, in spite some classic snafus. The dvds which were to be ready and for sale were not, due to unforeseen difficulties arisen with the printer-manufacturer. (We have since pulled the job and moved it to another company, a process currently underway...) We had also hoped to screen a blu-ray master of the film, which we had with us, and I picked up a blu-ray player in Manhattan especially for the screening, but for some gosh darn reason, the player would not recognize the disc. So we played an SD disc from Caspar's laptop which sufficed in the heat of the moment. The small audience of about 50 really played a big part in the film's playing, they seemed to truly understand the film, laughing at every appropriate moment. It was very encouraging that a film so delayed in its public life could have such a warm first reception.

Here are Caspar's film notes for the event:

Jalopy Hour is the result of a decade-long collaboration between commercial director/filmmaker Jeff Plansker and the experimental filmmaker/sound artist Owen O'Toole. It was originally conceived as an imaginary TV series shot in different American cities, exploring their respective cultural histories by the use of an absurdist lexicon borrowed from Ernie Kovacs, Lord Buckley, and Buster Keaton.

The project soon grew into some sort of Rousselian monster, a grotesquerie whose governing logic was perversely withheld from the viewer. British and French elements are carefully blended with absinthe and decadence, transporting us back through the early 19th century, as America's identity crisis was played out under the shadow of Old Europe.

Plansker and O'Toole eventually locked their project onto the one city whose vibrant historical nexus reflected the exuberance of a transplanted European colonial culture mutating into something altogether new: they describe New Orleans as "the only city where Jalopy Hour could be filmed, being the only American locale possessing the sense of stepping into another time, of preserved antiquity and colonial decay, of conflict resolution reached through the mouth of a bottle."

Jalopy Hour was filmed over 12 sweltering days in June, 1998; initially intended as a half-hour "pilot" program, it now lives as a short film. After several years on hold, Plansker and O'Toole eventually continued their collaboration and edited several versions from the raw material; the result was a long-form edit and a series of short vignettes. Both edits of Jalopy Hour are included on the DVD, along with several scenes that didn't make the final cut. This collection of puzzle pieces itself encourages the viewer to assemble them into a personal composition; only with a careful reading between the electronic scan lines can the complexity of this collaborative tour-de-force be fully revealed.

http://www.videodumbo.org

Madmen After 3

2009-11-09T14:17:00.000-08:00

We have been active fans of television program MADMEN, created by Matt Weiner, for the past 8 or 10 months, seeing the first 2 seasons as dvd video from our Public Library and Netflix. It has been sooo nice to see television that is worth watching. (I will have to comment elsewhere on Ken Burns' new National Parks epic, also fabulous.) I don't have much of a stomach for cop shows or CSI-style guns and hospitals interactions, and I don't go for Soprano mafia dramas, even though it is an appropriate metaphor for modern life, plus I realize Madmen's Weiner came from the Sopranos writing stable.

Although Madmen has been up and down, leaving you wondering what happened to half of the characters introduced in previous episodes, the general truth to period (the early 1960's) and quality of acting and story has remained at a very high level, and finally sets the bar for television back up where it should have been. I realize we are perhaps in another golden period of television, partly brought on by an economy that demands budget entertainment. If the human race is condemned to a future of television, as the Intel Corporation said in September: The Future is TV Shaped, then let it continue in this vein of quality. I remain amazed at how many people I meet have shows they watch, calling them their own, how important TV remains to people. Television as a medium remains hugely successful and I think challenges the personal computer for distinction as the end all of our technological path. Even now as I type on this laptop I wonder: Is this a personal computer or really just another mode of conveyance for television content? A youTube window opens up to answer me...

Anyway. Madmen is the best television I've seen since Twin Peaks. And like Twin Peaks it has had its ups and downs: the silly lawn tractor over the foot episode for instance, as Twin Peaks had some very silly motorcycle romance themes. But when Madmen is good, and it has tended to be about 70% of the time, it's very good. reminds me of the cinema of Douglas Sirk, high melodrama wrapped in well researched historical baggage. The first season followed current events of the period really well, with a particularly good playing of the Cuban Missile Crisis. This recent season, which I have not seen all episodes of, also had an adept handling of the Kennedy assasination, which was a date I felt they were avoiding or forestalling for months. The show slagged a bit as the writing team figured out how to move through 1963 towards that gruesome day, which many of us consider The End of Democracy Day, and now it's all mafia movies coming from the GOP. The political references speak to the "reality" presented on this show, a real window on that important era. Makes so-called "reality TV" look like a true joke.

Gabor Body: Europe's Hollis Frampton

2009-09-14T19:58:00.000-07:00

I know it's a bit facile to equate 2 important artists like this, so forget the title. Made you look. Frampton and Body did both leave this earth too early, Frampton at 48 and Body at a shockingly young 39.

Body's influence was huge in Europe during the 80's and he produced a huge BODY OF WORK (a better title) that demands revisit and evaluation. I think of American Postcard, the great feature film he made about the US Civil War era, which toured the States in a program called The Other Side: European Avant Garde Cinema, and which I had the good fortune to see (at the Boston MFA, around 1984). A great film, part Muybridge and part LeGrice, a film containing faded passages lost in effects of early photography and cinema. There I go again, referring to other artists. But the echoes of other great work is so strong in the BODY of work. Great BODYs attract.

Gabor Body produced a large number of films which always seemed ahead of the curve in both subject matter and technique. He initiated the hugely influential video magazine INFERMENTAL. He made early computer graphic films. I'm sure he is revered in Budapest, but that is a very wide hemisphere from here. There is very little material on Gabor Body here in The Web, especially considering his futuristic work and thinking. I have unboxed the wonderful compendium book that Vera Body gave me after I hunted her down in Cologne, and I promise to write more about the book in a future piece here.

This appears to be the official website:
http://www.bodygabor.hu/bg_rol/?id=114

It appears that the Berlin Film Festival will include his last film in a series about Pre-Fall-Of-The-Wall Films this season:
http://altfg.com/blog/film-festivals/berlinale-2009-after-winter-comes-spring/

And I also found this material on his life, with a few minor video klips:
http://www.newmedia-art.org/cgi-bin/show-art.asp?LG=GBR&DOC=IDEN&ID=A000000257

May the world blossom with new openness to the work of the great overlooked filmmakers. More walls to be demolished.

Infinite Animation: Adam Beckett

2009-08-18T00:06:00.001-07:00

Just in from the screening of films by Adam Beckett at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. I was a little late, getting caught in Depeche Mode Hollywood Bowl traffic and then left my lights on when parking and had to call AAA for a jump start. Had a Winchell's donut while waiting since I was parked directly in front, across the street from the Academy on Vine Street.

Adam Beckett was an animation genius who went from Antioch College to Cal Arts to the Star Wars crew. He died unexpectedly in a fire at the age of 29 and one can onlky imagine what he would have done had he lived longer. He had already become a master at the optical printer and Oxberry stand. His films use all of the great deep potentials of those machines, from matte effects to incredibly complex overlays. He did things that looked like video art feedback with film.

The screening presented new prints provided through the restoration work of Mark Toscano at the Academy and funding from the iotaCenter. I missed the 3 loop projection provided for audience entrance. The prints looked very good and have aged well, remaining full of life and a deep understanding of sequence in time, of process and pattern. There was some minor softness at some points to the focus and color chroma which may have been part of Beckett's art, involving long non-stop overnight stints at the animation stand, drawing as he ran the pages through the camera stand. Projection of this work could be challenging, as Beckett has forms morphing from edge to edge of the frame, so most projectors would have a hard time keeping the entire frame in focus.

Adam Beckett's work is what animation is all about, I mean: it is essential work. Large format drawings which begin with seemingly simple loops patterns of morphing shapes and/or words and letters and then grow into much larger and deeper pattern pieces, the artist drawing more design between what he started with, then deepening it again by creating matte and color filter effects with multiple passes through the printer. "From the kernel to the cosmic", someone quoted him saying. All of the pieces describe processes of evolution and cyclical return and work at theme and variations taken from small-ish tidal pools of graphic material. Beckett could take a small group of drawings into the animation chamber and come out with cans full of new motifs and orchestrated chaos on film. It was a pleasure to see this presentation, with Beckett's mother in the audience and many alumni from the Star Wars technical crew together to talk olde times.

Reminded me of studying animation with Flip Johnson at the Boston Museum School beginning in 1981. I was getting into pattern drawing for animation and may have headed down a similar path, although I don't have a head for numbers the way Beckett evidently did. Unfortunately the animation department at the Museum School was more geared towards exploding frogs so I moved on to running through stadiums with super8 cameras.

The Making Of Jalopy Hour, part 1

2009-02-20T22:41:00.000-08:00

Jalopy Hour was shot in New Orleans during June of 1998. It was intended as a short comic film/TV pilot (30 min +/-). The filming turned out to be more difficult than expected and communication skills between the principle participants broke down. Frank Schneider, the one real actor among us, admits to being partly possessed by spirits either from the City of New Orleans or the African mask he slept with. I had met Frank in an "action theater" class and invited him into the project to act and coach the rest of us into some sort of acting.

Jeff Plansker and I drove from LA to NO in November of 1997 with the goal of finding some old loft-like building we could rent for the first 6 months of the year wherein to develop ideas into the film. We drove through an amazing blizzard in a mountain pass in New Mexico while listening to Art Bell talk about recent UFO sightings near Seattle. We did succeed at finding a great old building near Magazine Street in NO. I moved from Berkeley to NO the first week of 1998. The owner of our rental was kind enough to put me up on a couch until I found an apartment. I got to know New Orleans while waiting for my creative partner to show up. Jeff had gotten dragged into doing a car commercial, the first in a long line of those. I followed the Mardi Gras parades and fortunately had some visitors, Jazz Fest etc. Jeff came to town a few times during the first 4 months and we argued over red wine about how to make the film. We did agree to operate a pirate radio station and invited an expert friend in who set up a fully functional 100-watt station in our building. There were some memorable radio nights, like when Andrew Blustain visited and we broadcast the audio from the entire 2001 film. The radio station was to be the workshop for our film ideas: that we might spin some records and then rant, and in recording those rants find the seed material from which to write the short film. Unfortunately we were never all there long enough to make that pattern happen. We did bolt some rough ideas into place which became the working film treatment. Then Jeff called in the troops and a slew of people arrived from LA to help make Jalopy Hour Jalopy Hour.

To be continued...
Please see a portion of Jalopy Hour at www.jalopyhour.com

Antique Film Project

2008-06-27T00:48:00.000-07:00

About 15 years ago I became aware of antique recordings, 78s and Edison diamond discs. I heard a radio show on my old station WMFO while driving up to Maine where the DJ played sides by The Happiness Boys, Ernest Hare and Billy Jones, from the 20's and 30's. I was hooked and slowly began researching the topic. I now have a very good collection of antique music on LP, CD and in 78 form, and also have 2 Edison players, a cylinder and a disc player. After studying avant-garde music for 25 years I came to see antique music as avant-garde simply because the so-called new music was losing its newness to me, so little is really ground breaking. Looking back to the beginnings of recorded sound became equally if not more exciting. Old music was new to me. I began a radio show at KZYX (Dark Matter) which presented both antique and avant-garde music in a freeform manner, as I pleased to present it, sometimes with wonderful results. The abutting of antique recordings up against truly new experimental work could be glorious in the frission generated, or could fall flat. A weekly radio show can't always sound inspired, especially if you work a day job at the same station, which I did for 3 years.

The interest in antique music could not help but spill over into my interest in film, and they both being roughly contiguous: the history of recorded sound roughly coinciding with the history of filmmaking; there are many connections. Antique music is naturally the soundtrack material for old films, or could be. I made many notes towards making a film about antique music, focusing first on the Happiness Boys, then conceiving of a section called Chinese Radio, and then I imagined a final section on current HiFi equipment and the people who follow it, perhaps to include selections of very modern music also. These ideas have not been realized. But they have metamorposed, just like the found footage in my collection, which has aged and some has been destroyed. There is still life stirring in those ideas or the ghosts of those ideas.

Reading recently about my friend Alex MacKenzie's use of a hand crank projector in performance, mimicking the earliest of film show techniques, has me re-excited about the possibilities. Alex and I have agreed so many times on our belief that film performance can be a more vital approach to film; that finished film reels represent the mechanized methods of distribution and repitition that have strangled our culture under consumerism. Have we just failed to successfully manufacture film products? Yes and no. The inability to make product may be just as much a refusal to allow film to become product or the struggle to keep it from being only that.

Dealing with elements of antique film seems like another way to turn against the grain of standardized film culture, although there has certainly been a trand also in this direction, especially with all the "100 Years of Cinema" hoopla. It is wonderful to see filmmakers like Guy Maddin successfully bridge the antique film image via hand held super8 cameras with electric computer editing (I find his editing a bit antagonistic actually, the Darren Ornofsky effect...). Shooting new film using stylistic elements found in antique film, while not always innovative, can certainly be a source of renovation in film language and use.

An Antique Film Project would attempt to collect and preserve reels of film footage shot before the sound era or through and including the 30's. (At this point almost any 16mm found footage teeters on the edge of "antiqueness", so maybe dates are pointless. I have a few reels of Spanish Civil War material that was to married to some travelog super8 of mine from Spain and called A Climate For Rebellion. Unfinished at this date.

Found and Lost Footage Etc.

2008-06-27T00:08:00.000-07:00

The Film Prayer by A.P. Hollis was written in 1920. Hollis made the poem available to all non-theatrical film distributors to promote better handling of film. Hollis never copyrighted the poem.

"I am celluloid, not steel, Oh God of the machine, have mercy, I front dangers whenever I travel the whirling wheels of the mechanism. Over the sprocket wheels, held tight by the idlers, I am forced by the motor's might. If a careless hand misthreads me, I have no alternative but to go to my death. If the pull on the take-up reel is too violent, I am torn to shreds. If dirt collects in the aperture my film of beauty is streaked and marred, and I must face my beholders--a thing shamed and be spoiled. I travel many miles in tin cans, I am tossed on heavy trucks, sideways and upside down. See that I don't become bruised and wounded beyond the power to heal. I am a delicate ribbon of film - misuse me and I disappoint thousands; cherish me, and I delight and instruct the world." -- A.P. Hollis 1920

I found this quote on a film projector-related website today. Seems like a good place to start.

I use film. And so I collect films (mostly 16mm), not avidly or fervently, but I stumble across them and pick them up occasionally if I see a reel that looks interesting. I have found some wonderful films, perhaps most notably a 16mm educational film on the Amazon, called something like The Sleeping Giant. Incredible color and great lush scenic photography from the 50's I think. I have had to move numerous times over the past 10 years and this collection of films (and records and a good piece of my past, machines and cameras etc) has had to move with me, sometimes into not ideal storage situations. Leaky garages and storage spaces, poorly cooled closets. The last house had a garage which flooded the day after we moved in, soaking the bottom 6 inches of maybe 20 boxes containing books and films, original super8 reels and found 16mm reels. The Amazon reel was one of those, altered forever. Fortunately there are other prints of that film out in the world. I cannot promise to protect anything from the elements, as much as I'd like to say that I can.

I have 3,000 LP records which get decent treatment, but aren't always kept in optimally air-conditioned space. Many of them may be getting "lip warp", where the bottom edge of the disc, that sitting on the ground, begins to curl and makes the start of track 1 on either side sometimes untrackable. There are also several boxes of 78s that I take with me and the heat cannot be good to them; I hope to transfer them over to digital media but it's a cumbersome process.

Back to the films. I finally have a room that seems to be water-tight and I may be able to archive/organize all these little pieces, and find out what made it through the many moves and what didn't survive. There are prints of the films I myself made, the original super8 reels of the Filmers Almanac. There are several reels of found footage, educational films I gathered often with some re-use in mind. I also had a small collection of feature or featurettes on 16mm but I had to sell most of them because I lost faith in my archival abilities and didn't want to see films get ruined. 2 Japanese features with Takemitsu soundtracks. I still have a nice 16mm print of Peter Watkins The War Game that I'd like to show soon.

Wet Gate was a major instigating force for finding new reels of film and we cut out material for use in performance as loops, largely for the quality of sound on the strips. Film preservation often came up as a topic on Wet Gate performance tours; we encountered art world curator people for whom preservation is an important topic, and each of us has different takes on preserving film. My own attitude has remained largely that film, like other materials, has a finite lifetime, especially if played over and over as loop. So I lost my sense of need to preserve and maintain and pretty much came to see film material as something like paint or pencil that I could use and use up if needed. Of course the line was generally drawn to include old prints that were not rare or particularly special and to leave good, projectable reels of film alone, safe from the loop cutter.

Over the past year or so I have moved towards wanting to project No Film, simply using the projector as an interrupting light source to be manipulated, seeing the projection of light as a pure form of (futuristic) communication. This may have partly been a result of not being able to properly access film clips from a collection. But with the new (old) garage I have I am excited to think how I may rediscover footage. And also generate new footage. There is a Steenbeck in storage waiting for me to bring it into service once again. There are several unfinished films on hard drives awaiting final cutting also.

I use film as an artist uses paint and pencil, or magazine photos. It is material collected for use in the studio. It has perhaps lost its connection to film-time and history, being boxed and carried over distances. Standing on 2 feet perhaps I will see with both eyes and be able to recognize material appropriate for "appropriation", that overused term from 90's film art. Better said: material that may be ground down and partially destroyed, turned into something else, degraded, even de-based: emulsion taken off the film base. Is there no respect for history here? Have I lost hope, that the future may want to see exact replicas of what was? How much is worth preserving in a culture that seems bent on suicide (via the automobile and coal power plants)? Is the decadence of my film archive chaos a symptom of this disbelief?

The wonder of film is that it can be so many things, serve so many purposes. I always hoped to make influential films that might make the world a little better, to serve as an educational force. Great films do that. (Perhaps aspects of the Flamethrowers, the Almanac, Wet Gate have served...?) To be continued.

Lessons of The Videomaster by Skip Blumberg

2008-01-23T00:02:00.000-08:00

Just watched Skip Blumberg's Hommage to Nam June Paik, a nice document focusing on the wake. Nam June's Wake... run riverun. Uptown to where the black clad artists comb their hair before paying respects to such a man, open casket, who single-handedly wielded the porta-pak that invented video art. Wielding his own modern-day porta-pak on the streets of NYC, Blumberg asks the people he meets at Paik's wake what they learned from Nam June, inserting little graphics and inset frames of clips from historical Paik video like "Global Groove" or 1984's international satellite telecast "Good Morning, Mr. Orwell". In the gallery-like setting of the wake, students rub shoulders with dignified art stars and come away equals in Paik's democratic kingdom of video. The disc includes documentation of the event held at the Guggenheim Museum to honor Paik, a beautiful performance by Yoko Ono that is the crown jewel of this dvd.

A blow-by-blow description of the Paik wake and Guggenheim event can be found at Yoko's website:
http://www.a-i-u.net/paik_rev.html

Miranda July 1: Me and You and Everyone We Know; Learning To Love You More

2007-10-09T17:20:00.000-07:00

I was on a Film Arts Foundation panel with Miranda July about 7 years ago in San Francisco. I don't recall exactly the subject, perhaps distribution of film in the future or alternate forms of film presentation, but we 3 Wet Gate members were there along with Miranda and several other artistes. I do recall that Ms. July directly contradicted something I said and I felt that the way she did it was authoritarian, it pissed me off and I lost some respect for her then. I'd heard of her work distributing women's film and video on VHS tape collections and bought 1 years ago at Amoeba records for its inclusion of Naomi Uman's "Removed", an old porn film reworked with nail-polish remover to erase the female image. She has since directed a major independent feature (Me and You and Everyone We Know) which won a number of major awards and now has a group of printed page publications coming out, including the "arts education" book Learning To Love You More. Clearly, July is an energetic and innovative person, and she is moving fluidly from the margins of the art world into a vocal role in the culture at large. I respect her for it and wish her the best.

I liked Me and You and Everyone a lot and recommended it to everyone I know, but was disappointed that July made some story decisions that made the film unviewable for older and perhaps slightly more socially conservative persons. There is sexual language in the film that is simply too crude for most older audiences and I'm sure there were lots of walk-outs at the theater. At the same time I realize the film is largely/partly about children having sexual lives or that there is no definite time at which children should or shouldn't be exposed to the truth of the sexual world. There is a current of film using extreme sexual situations I think for gratuitous effect or in a kind of cold cool that demands that the viewer push themselves through new ways of thinking about sexuality, or be offended and leave the room. While I'm not too easily offended by frank sexual material I am turned off by smug tough guy use of it, and I felt that from this film, some of the same things I feel from Todd Solondz films and other current young directors. I simply believe there are ways of saying things that don't alienate a whole portion of the viewing public. There are so many good sequences in July's film that I felt it was a failure to have to make a small section of it lurid in a Pink Flamingos kind of way. I wonder if July's decision to co-write the film with visitors to her website, collecting comments written there and shaping them into a script, allowed her subjects to get out of hand. The idea of co-writing a script with many semi-anonymous others is certainly innovative and pushes the usually auteurial film-making towards the more collectively creative. But something in the way of soul, or accountability perhaps, can be lost.

Miranda does translate previous video art pieces of her own very nicely in Me And You, showcasing her personal vignette style of video-making as a recurring motif in the film and depicting her character as one trying to connect to a museum or gallery curator with varied success. It's a nice autobiographical storyline and perhaps the best depiction of "what is a performance artist" in recent film.

I saw 2 new books by July at Vroman's Books in Pasadena recently, a book of short stories and this art book, "Learning To Love You More". It looks like an intriguing collection of assignments for art school students and the products of such assignments and I think this could be very useful for teachers and students of creative process. Again, July has opened her authorial access into a show of works and ideas by a lot of the young and unknown people and students she interacts with. She has taken some ideas basic to Fluxus, particularly the idea that a work of "art" can be a score or instructions open to interpretation by a multitude of other people. The creative act is not so much a lonely studio creation, but is the social nexus or network created through ideas and communication itself. Like a new telephone. Could be good, could cause unwanted long distance charges. Could ask us to review the work of Yoko Ono, Joseph Beuys or Linda Montano. I also can't get my head around the Learning To Love You title. Smarmy. I like the proposition that art can be psychologically healing, but July comes across a bit like an inflatable doll with such a title, willing to be bent into any position to please. Or appear that way, Bambi-eyed, only to slam you down later in a dark alley. The provocation is good PR but presses the Oh No button. What, you? Love me? You didn't at the Film Arts round table. I guess my reaction is par for the course, to barter in cliches.

The world has become a big magazine rack and everything on it is instantaneous and disposable. Ironic? Well, nice in a mean kind of way.

Amazing Documentaries: The Take

2007-09-11T17:50:00.000-07:00

We crossed paths with Avi Lewis in Perth, Australia when Wet Gate was there for some concerts as part of the Revelations Film Festival, July of '05. Lewis was showing his recently completed The Take, a documentary of worker takeovers of factories abandoned by bankrupt owners in Argentina. I didn't have a chance to see The Take back then nor speak much with Lewis, but finally saw this impressive piece of independent documentary work and must recommend it to anyone interested in social change and true progress. Indymedia activists Lewis and Naomi Klein went to Buenos Aires during the chaotic period after 2001, when the country saw 5 different presidents fail to right a series of financial collapses in the country. Carlos Menem was the last and worst of these, actively selling out the country's resources to foreign interests and allowing a huge flight of existing capital from the country. This is summarized in The Take as background to a series of worker take-overs of factories in the country, whereby working people sought to take control of their labor. A great team of activist filmmakers worked under exceedingly difficult conditions in a country under financial seige by its moneyed class and haunted by living specters of dictatorship when activists were disappeared. A tremendous testament to the seemingly endless abuse of power in another country forced to its knees by the "loans" of the International Monetary Fund. Required viewing.

Amazing Documentaries: Henri Langlois, Phantom of The Cinematheque

2007-09-11T17:39:00.000-07:00

Another wonderful history lesson in a can: this portrait of the life of Henri Langlois, founder of the Cinematheque Francais in Paris. Contains wonderful historic footage of Langlois through periods of his life: during the German Occupation, how films were acquired, stored and preserved(?), building a huge national treasure of a film library and providing screenings of essential cinema which taught generations of young filmmakers where to start. Great footage of turbulent 1968 Paris, when Langlois was under seige by more conservative social forces and demonstrations mounted in support of him featuring Godard, Truffaut and academic-revolutionary Daniel Cohn-Bendit. A great slice of French cultural history and necessary viewing for film collectors and preservationists.

Amazing Documentaries: The Agronomist

2007-09-11T16:07:00.000-07:00

Finally had the chance to view this tremendous piece of history by Jonathan Demme, who I don't tend to think of as a political filmmaker, but this is great work. The heart breaking life story of radio activist Jean Dominique, who played a large role in the democratic uprising in Haiti through his radio commentaries at Radio Haiti, the station he founded and which acted as a voice for the people. The film serves as a succinct history of Haiti in the 20th century, with summaries of the years under dictators Papa Doc Duvalier and son, Baby Doc, and how the US has meddled in the affairs of this poor country for so long. Also chronicles the rise and fall of Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the country priest who became Haiti's first democratically elected president. But the center of the film remains Dominique, a uniquely firey personality who you'd expect might be an actor or theate director, just so much life in his eyes and his speech. A beautiful portrait of a life stopped short by the thuggish repression that has paralyzed Haitian society for too long.

Brand Upon The Brain!

2007-06-29T22:46:00.000-07:00

Thanks to the local papers we were reminded of the appearance of this traveling minstrel show of a film at the LA Cinemateque's Egyptian Theater and we saw the blessed performance of Sunday night, June 10. It turned out to be one of the cinematic events of the year; so many people were involved in pulling off the live soundscore that accompanied this silent film by Guy Maddin. From the lost city of Winnipeg, Canada, Maddin has carved a unique spot for himself in the film festival circuit, making antique-style B-movies using super8 film equipment, a major accomplishment in the digital era. And of the several I have seen Brand Upon The Brain is certainly the most coherent and conceptually solid, though this could be a product of the beautiful live presentation.

A chamber ensemble of piano, strings and winds and 2 percussionists play a beautiful score by Jason Staczek and this ensemble is augmented by a live foley crew of 3 persons making all of the sound effects live. The film was full of little sonic nuances and shadings; every action was sonically performed in some way by the foleyists on every sort of noise device: wooden steps and doors, spring and wind devices, cheap toy megaphone. The detailing given to the sound was tremendous and all of the elements worked together. The piano playing was particularly intricate.

The film was composed in 12 parts, "A Remebrance In 12 Chapters", and was further divided by silent film style title cards. But the crowning touch to this evening's show was the presence of German film legend Udo Kier, a dashing man with a beautiful voice which added another layer of text as spoken narration. "The Past, the past...", Kier intoned dreamily as the hi-con black and white imagery flowed past. We saw a super8 transer to video projection of very high quality that night, but there is also a 35mm film print, probably transfered from that video copy, which i hope to get to see, with Isabella Rosellini as narrator. The film has toured to many festivals and had many guest narrators.

Brand Upon The Brain tells the story of a man returning to the lighthouse orphanage run by his crazed mother and the many deviant specifics of his childhood there. Strange love triangles and midnight trysts are complicated by Maddin's usual over-the-top circular story-telling style. It is simply marvelous to see super8 film being used to such great ends. The full throttle climax ending of the film was thrilling.

There was excellent publicity done for this weekend of screenings; it was evident by Sunday that buzz had spread about this event. The 600 seat theater was packed to the rafters and the room was excited. (I saw Tati's Playtime re-release in this theater on their giant 70mm screen.) I may have been a bit fatigued this Sunday night because I reacted a bit negatively to Maddin's hectic editing style. He constantly messes with the flow of the film, presenting a jumbled, chaotic nightmare which in some ways is saved by the beautiful live score. (I was reminded of Darren Ornofsky's "Requiem For A Dream" which I think descended into a editing bloodbath towards the end.) But I do look forward to seeing Branded Upon The Brain again and changing my first impression which was, after all, bombarded by the whole live sound cinema of this unforgettable event. The excitement and involvement of so many people in the performance of this film tells me I may have been seeing through tired eyes.

The Lion Still Has Wings

2007-05-15T17:07:00.000-07:00

In 2004, my friend and film collaborator Jeff Plansker was invited to make a short film using Sony's new HD Cine Alta video camera, in recognition of his work as a director of commercials. A strange honor, in that Sony provides the camera and a technician, but the director/production co. must pay for the production; a clever way to promote the use of HD video with users and I guess a good opportunity to work on an open project for the director. For several years, Sony organized a series of short films made this way as their "Dreams" project, screening the results in LA, NY and Cannes. I believe 2005 was the last year of Dreams.

Jeff told me in the fall of 04 that he was trying to work with a writer-collaborator on a short story for the project, and perhaps I would be called on to make music for it, but come 2005 they hadn't come up with a clear story, and the project was due by the end of February. I was called in as clean-up crew, invited by Jeff to develop the alternate project idea. We consumed a few bottles of RGW (really good wine) and put some ideas on paper. We wrote the piece in 2 days, pre-produced for 2 days, shot for 2 days, and edited the film in 2 days. It was instant filmmaking, a pretty exciting way to work.

The theme of that year's Dreams project was "Flight". And we retained one idea from the initial story Jeff had been working on: that of filming in a actual airplane interior, which exists as a set in West Hollywood i think. We removed all language from our film vocabulary and decided to make a music piece. Of course we started kicking around ideas inspired by Fluxus events but then wound up narrowing in towards something closer to Stockhausen. Jeff had heard of a choir that was willing to work on film projects and I came up with an editing scheme that could collage the actual singing of the chorus into an experimental audio piece.

The Truncated Turbo-Pascal Editing System is a new method for randomizing the edit process. About 10 years ago I had some ideas about creating random templates for video-film editing after being first introduced to the Avid system. I believed that company might have been interested in developing a series of plots or patterns that could be applied to any digitized film footage to come up with interesting sequences which human intervention would pass by or just miss in the almost infinite combinations of possible edits. I met with an editor in LA (Bobby Briggs, if i remember correctly) who heard about my idea and was interested, but nothing ever came back to me about my proposal (to create templates for a digital editing system). I may have written once to Avid also, with no response. Anyway, this new project allowed me to make a breakthrough with the same idea. I quickly developed a new way to apply random numbers to a film bin with the help of editor Noah Herzog, whose nimble mind quickly understood what I was trying to do and we applied the System to this project.

So, the shoot days went well; it was a nice, relaxed project. Unfortunately, the one area I didn't think through or get enough info in advance on was the fact that this fancy HD camera has 8 or 9 tracks of audio built into the tape. So, we had stupidly hired the usual DAT recorder boom and tape op guys ("sound speed"), who did get us a decent stereo recording of everything we shot, however: 2 stereo mics could have tapped directly into the video recorder and made the audio compositing (finishing, putting together) so much easier. We also could have used a multi-mic surround recording approach but didn't think of it. really, Sony dropped the balls by not educating us about the sound properties of their system; and we were making a SOUND piece! I think the mic built into the camera captured a mono audio track.

The film we made: THE LION STILL HAS WINGS, consists of 3 sections, each of which directly derives from the experience of airplane flight. In the edit room, we applied the TTPES (Truncated Turbo-Pascal editing System) to the main segment, the 2nd section, of the film, in which the choir sings inside an airplane. I brought Jeff's brother's old casio into the plane set and played the octave of notes beginning with a low e-flat and going up from there. With each note, the choir would collectively repeat the note after hearing it until we had recorded 2 octaves I believe. Some variations and chords were built with the help of the choir director. The Turbo-Pascal system neatly divided the choir shoot into 91 shots. We used a random number generator to determine the sequence in which these shots were placed and their length in frames (up to 91 frames). The result had some tremendous collisions and, with some massaging of the material by Mr. Herzog, became a beautiful audio piece. Matt Dunlop did an amazing job of converting the stereo tracks from DAT to the camera-mic edit version we first created. A lot of very good people helped make this film, which I consider an instant film. It wasn't free, in fact it was quite costly to produce. But I think it's a nice indicator of what is possible.

Nods to Carl Swanberg for the gorgeous reel-to-reel machines.

Please view THE LION STILL HAS WINGS at www.lionstillhaswings.com

Wet Leaves: Wet Gate Plays Canada 2006

2007-04-25T17:00:00.000-07:00

Peter's Negativland contacts in Toronto, Darren and Nadene of Deep Wireless, invited Wet Gate to perform at their SOUNDplay Festival this October. The trip was made possible largely by adding stops in Montreal and Kingston, where 2 other festivals were able to book us and defray costs. Shipping 3 guys and their projectors and sampling equipment can get expensive. Steve sourced out a big, cheap suitcase at Ross to house the Eiki slotload, a choice I joined him on. Peter opted for a hard plastic toolbox, which seemed to work out, but I found its plastic handle too brittle and breakable. Anyway, we made ourselves portable; projectors on the fly.

We Know Each Other So Well
2 weeks before, I travelled up to SF from LA to rehearse. We spent 2 nights working on new material and conceiving an outline for a Canada show. We watched the documents of our Rotterdam and Exploratorium shows and pulled basic ideas from those. This is basic Wet Gate process, feeding on recent past. I like the fact that tins of film loops from the last show(s) contain much of what will be used on the next one; anyway, the most interesting and current material rises to the surface. I had found a number of films on themes of ice and fire and brought some loops to our meeting. Steve deftly cut some additional loops from these films and Peter pulled a few nuggets from his archive.

24-hour Bagel Town
Customs is a drawn-out affair entering Canada, with a gymnasium sized atrium roped off into about 30 rows of zagging line which took 45 minutes before reaching the Customs desk. Steve and Peter had arrived about an hour before me, and found the bar. Tired Montreal Pop volunteers took us into town and our host accommodations. I lucked out and was housed with Dave Douglas, a genius professor of film at Concordia University, who spent a lot of time showing us around as well as educating us on Canadian film history. One of Douglas's focuses is Cuban film and he visits the Cuban Film Festival when he can, sometimes bringing Canadian films with him. Douglas got some grant money to publish on dvd a series of early Canadian independent films, most notably works by Larry Kent who might be seen as Canada's Cassavettes. He lives close to the 24-hour bagel epicenter of Montreal, and so several times we grabbed late bagels and watched Larry Kent films.

Our show was part of the Film Pop Festival, an offshoot of the Pop Montreal music festival showcasing upcoming bands as well as presenting older artists like Roky Erickson, Gary Lucas and Ramblin' Jack Eliot. We played on Sunday, October 8 at the Portuguese Association, along with a series of short music-films made in association with the National Film Board of Canada. Canadian cities are fortresses of internationalism, with cultural centers for many immigrant communities dotting their maps. These centers are available for rental by groups to put up music shows and festivals, which gives the events an interesting hybrid homegrown feel. Although some of the NFB audience left before we played, we had a good show which was well-received even though it seemed many didn't understand that our sound comes entirely from the filmsound until someone asked a question (we had a lengthy Q+A) afterwards. We were referred to as the Wet Gate Collective in Montreal for some reason; I think they like collectives, Montreal being a rebellious town.
[See an article -"Looper Troopers"- in the Montreal Mirror which interviewed Peter and Steve at http://www.montrealmirror.com/2006/100506/film1.html]

Lakeside Park
A day off in beautiful autumn weather allowed me to walk up Mont Royal to the lake park there, a bit like nirvana. Bought a Sun Ra + Walt Dickerson LP. While Peter and Steve tended towards poutine stations, restaurants serving french fries covered in gravy and lard or cheese, we all concluded that Montreal beer was tremendous.
Friends of Steve's, Matt and Sonia, invited us to their home for Thanksgiving dinner, Sonia offering us a fantastic vegetarian lasagna and more incredible hospitality.
[A brief history of Canadian thanksgiving: "The history of Thanksgiving in Canada goes back to an English explorer, Martin Frobisher, who had been trying to find a northern passage to the Orient. He did not succeed but he did establish a settlement in Northern America. In the year 1578, he held a formal ceremony, in what is now called Newfoundland, to give thanks for surviving the long journey. This is considered the first Canadian Thanksgiving. Other settlers arrived and continued these ceremonies. He was later knighted and had an inlet of the Atlantic Ocean in northern Canada named after him - Frobisher Bay. At the same time, French settlers, having crossed the ocean and arrived in Canada with explorer Samuel de Champlain, also held huge feasts of thanks. They even formed 'The Order of Good Cheer' and gladly shared their food with their Indian neighbours. After the Seven Year's War ended in 1763, the citizens of Halifax held a special day of Thanksgiving. During the American Revolution, Americans who remained loyal to England moved to Canada where they brought the customs and practices of the American Thanksgiving to Canada. There are many similarities between the two Thanksgivings such as the cornucopia and the pumpkin pie. Eventually in 1879, Parliament declared November 6th a day of Thanksgiving and a national holiday. Over the years many dates were used for Thanksgiving, the most popular was the 3rd Monday in October. After World War I, both Armistice Day and Thanksgiving were celebrated on the Monday of the week in which November 11th occurred. Ten years later, in 1931, the two days became separate holidays and Armistice Day was renamed Remembrance Day. Finally, on January 31st, 1957, Parliament proclaimed... "A Day of General Thanksgiving to Almighty God for the bountiful harvest with which Canada has been blessed ... to be observed on the 2nd Monday in October." from twilightbridge.com] We enjoyed a game of film trivia I concocted using David Thomson's Dictionary of Film, reading excerpts from the entries and guessing who was being described. Kept us busy for an hour! Matt's dog also afforded us the opportunity to later discuss the subject of pitbulls as pets, with Peter and Steve I think somewhat cavalierly defending ownership of these dogs while I argued that there should be some rules about owning dogs which have been bred and trained to fight in close city quarters.

Tuesday, we took an evening train to Toronto, which was a bit confusing because they try to limit baggage to 2 pieces on this train and we each carried 4; but it worked out fine, after a telephone rep for the train told Peter, "go for it, live boldly", and we found an escalator to the train platform and I pretty much demanded access to that. The train attendants were generally quite kind. The ride was long and dull; I amused myself by drawing cartoon coinface images of Peter and Steve. The weather turned as we left Montreal, bringing an early winter to the Great Lakes region and 2 feet of snow to Buffalo, NY.

Projector Museum
I remember that Montrealers told us that bike safety was better in Toronto than Montreal, though in Toronto people told us stories of cyclists being dragged under the back wheels of turning buses. Avid bicyclist Jim (Bailey I believe, member of URG, the Urban Refuse Group) met us at the train station and guided us to Nadene's minivan and we were off to the Grange Hotel, a funky 6-floor brick dormitory between Queen and Dundas, a good central location. We found the Java House restaurant and installed ourselves there, for constant breakfast and other meals during out stay. Wednesday, we did a morning radio show on CKLN with Ron Gaskin, who as "Rough Idea" hosts concerts around town. Peter and Steve toyed with a projector and sampler, mixed by Ron into a living interview with us, classic freeform radio. After breakfast, we visited Art Metropole, a media center/bookstore opened by notorious art group General Idea back in the 80's (they fetishized poodles and published a magazine called FILE that was fairly big in the art world back then). Then went to the CBC Center in the business district and ogled their collection of old film and radio machines, the displays on kids TV shows and the sound effects world, a wonderful little museum that i hope is never hidden away. Steve spent 25$ to go up in the CN Tower and we later met up at the Goethe Institute to see Michael Snow (CAT synth) play with Alan Licht (guitar) and Aki Onda (cassettes and samplers), a Rough Idea event. While it was not an ingenius setting of noise improvisation, there were moments towards the end where soft tones from Licht's guitar played mutually with Snow and Onda's somewhat lighter approach. The arced array of amps behind the musicians didn't help sound dispersal in the room, a small round cinema auditorium. Thursday we loaded our equipment into the Latvian House on College St., where the SOUNDplay festival would host 3 concerts using Darren Copeland's multi-speaker diffusion array. Later that night I took off and visited the Orbit Room (Alex Lifeson's bar on College) for an hour or so, catching a set by Chris Caddell's Hendrix-style trio.

Friday the 13th
Friday was concert day. We had a good sound check and a bit of bickering over how our projections would fit on the screen. The days of travelling together were adding up. I tried to leave it to Steve and Peter to discuss everything ad nauseum; there wasn't room or time for all 3 of us to talk. David Ogborn presented some beautiful music to the prelude segment of Fritz Lang's Metropolis, using computer music and 3 soloists on voice, violin and trombone. Wonderful use of the surround system and chorused samplings from the live instruments, particularly voice. Our show was a bit of a calamity; very quickly our sound began over-modulating and breaking up and it was not clear where it was coming from. Evidently, our lines on the system mixer had not been adjusted for proper levels, even as I had tried to get a good headroom for peaks at sound check. But none of us thought to trim the gains back to line level, and so when we pushed our levels in performance the sound broke apart. This wasn't the only sound problem of the festival; Saturday night was plagued by similar over-modulation noise and surround sound related computer glitches and crashes. After Peter wrongly deduced that the sound problem was in my line (understandable because I was the last one he heard breaking up), I ripped apart my sound gear to remove a previously faulty effects unit, thinking it might be acting up again. I was hobbled for the remainder of the show, but I guess we did OK. There was great informal discussion afterwards, and I met with Jonathan Pollard, who had invited me in 1990 to show the Filmers Almanac in Pleasure Dome's first season (Pleasure Dome IS a collective which has been showing experimental film across Toronto for over 15 years), and John Porter, Canada's greatest super8 filmmaker, said HI and gave me a copy of his Visiting Filmmaker Map of Toronto (see super8porter.com).

Saturday was night 2 of SOUNDplay, beginning with Michael Snow's trio, with his son Aleck and John Kamevaar. (I'm assuming anyone reading this would be a little familiar with Snow's work, he is the most well-known living Canadian artist, painter and musician, and filmmaker known for classic avant-garde films Wavelength, Back and Forth, La Region Centrale etc.) Snow's remarks for this performance: "We are going to sound flicker". (Sunday's soundPLAY would be a screening of "flicker" films and a panel discussion.) While the trios music was interesting at times, splayed out on the surround speakers, it was largely a wall of noise-chatter and was interrupted by computer crash-like glitches. Aleck Snow snuck in drum machine samples. Michael's CAT synth issued staccato sine wave pulses and we don't know what John Kamevaar did while sitting at his laptop.

Perhaps the most interesting person at SOUNDplay was Louis Dufort, a Montreal electro-acoustic composer who tries his hand at all sorts of giant projects, including operas and harbour symphonies (a form popularized by Newfoundland's biennial Sound Symposium and visionary Canadian composer R. Murray Schaefer, author of "Tuning The World"). Dufort had presented some video samples of his work at Gallery 1313 a few nights before. He now presented 2 beautiful audio pieces, Grain du Sable for the tsunami victims of 2004 and Hi_res, both of which were dense explorations of the possibilities of new music coming from the computer (MAX/MSP base). Unfortunately, Dufort's presentation was again interrupted by surround computer problems. He also showed a single-channel version of a multi-channel video+sound work called Flesh, in which he plays with porno image and sound loops and which I found less interesting.

Saturday closed with a performance by trio PHH!K, whose uncertain stance between worldbeat-jazz and academic new music was uncomfortable; it was a taste of the 1980's, with lyrics lifted from Marshall McLuhan and "Que Sera Sera" twisted infinitely ala Ursula Dudziak or Annette Peacock, with gurgling Kurzweil and MIDI saxophone rounding out the anachronism. One highlight of SOUNDplay was seeing Bill Daniel, the gypsy-tex filmmaker who did a long residency at ATA in SF, also in Toronto showing his Bozo Texino film at cine-cycle the same night we played. I have finally seen Bozo Texino, thanks to Bill's willingness to trade dvd for drinks, and it's a beautiful film about tramp life on the rails, with gorgeous hi-con B+W footage taken from wide-swung boxcar doors all across North America, great interviews with spokesmen of this dying outsider breed of wild person, and great train sounds. Anyone interested in trains should see this film (go to Bill's website: http://www.billdaniel.net/, it's very cool). Saturday we visited cine-cycle, where Martin Heath and Janet Attard (cine-cycle t-shirt stencil artist) showed us around. An old 19th century horse stable, cine-cycle is a wonderful alternative film space, hidden in the alley behind the fancy 401 Artists studios building.

The Big Apple and the Garage
Nadene lifted us to the airport Sunday where we conscripted our own minivan for the trip to Kingston, a third and final show in Canada, this one in a municipal parking garage. The weather remained above freezing. We did make a stop on the highway at The Big Apple, a famous tourist trap offering mediocre apple pie, coffee, a putt putt course, a gifte shoppe, and a giant red apple about 30 feet high, that you can sometimes walk into, but we couldn't. The Tone Deaf festival had kindly gotten us each a room at the Kingston Days Inn, ahh. Then we made our way to the parking garage, met host Matt Rogalsky and set up, wind-proofing the place a bit using local detritus (nice work, Steve). We ran to get food and returned to watch Wendy Luella Perkins lead a group circle in voice, percussion and garbage (plastic bags, tin cans). Peter and Steve couldn't stand it, but I rather liked the open aspect of the piece, inviting everyone to sing with each other or to themself (to keep warm). A circle of paper bag lanterns pushed the seasonal ritual aspect; it was pleasantly feminine, somewhat mysterious and uncomfortable, but good in a lysergic kind of way. You were left looking at yourself in response to a piece which is really no more than the people collectively assembled there.

Following this, Wet Gate did one of its best shows in a long time, at least in my opinion. (Steve felt differently.) Perhaps it was how shitty I felt our Toronto show had been, that I had been crushed by the problems there (wanting to give Toronto a great show) and the 10 days trapped traveling on top of each other, now was the release. I do think it was a very good show and it was ironic that such a simple set up, again in freezing weather and on a cold concrete floor for hours, could make for the best show of our 3 Canada dates. Matt gave us wood TV dinner trays for our electronics, classic! I had fun ripping apart sounds inside that parking garage. The goodness of that show salvaged what was a pretty difficult small tour for me; I mean, performance-wise Montreal was even, Toronto a bit negative, and Kingston quite good; that balances out a bit above even. Throw in the personalities of 3 "grown men" acting like school boys across Canada and you have destination Mars, an asteroid belt. Once the third show was done, we could relax a bit and gaze at the October Ontario foliage en route to the airport home. Pearson airport (YYZ) is a maze of circling overpasses; we eventually got the rental to where it was going, wheeled our projector bags through Customs, enjoyed a final Canadian airport meal and ale and said goodbye. I flew to my new town, Los Angeles.

Post Intelligencer
Wet Gate has been a wonderful off-and-on project for me, a way to bring together many of my interests and keep a performative aspect to film going in my life. It's a good occasional band. I would love to see us use Wet Gate more as an umbrella for greater collaborations, under which we can work as individual artists and mix with other artists in unique combinations, which might bring excitement back to working with each other. I think filmgroup silt has grown considerably in recent years as "solo" artists, using the strength of their siltiness to go off in new directions individually, and then return to group work out of the strength gained from the separate studies. Certainly the members of Wet Gate lead independent creative lives; I'd like to see our independence grow in relation to one another. Otherwise the group concept can be stifling. I could hardly get a word in edgewise with my 2 coffee fueled companions on this trip.

There was a rumor of going to St. John's for the Sound Symposium 2008; Peter said Gayle Young of Musicworks had mentioned that possibility. I'm all for it. I've always wanted to "do" the Sound Symposium. I love Eastern Canada, having visited Cape Breton 2 summers when I lived in Maine. But I would want to see Wet Gate as the vehicle that gets us there and then be free to do my own work, which requires attention and nurturing. (The Wet Gate group is almost instant and easy, we grew out of a stump fully grown.) I would imagine going there, presenting a Wet Gate performance, and then being free to do other work, perhaps compose a radiophonic piece on my own and collaborate with another visiting artist.

The idea that Wet Gate is viable as a serious source of financial income is laughable to me; it entails much more input than return financially. This Canada trip almost broke even, and that's good for Wet Gate. This is not a cash cow we're milking, even if it can be productive until doomsday. Of course, we each must measure our sense of what we put in and what we take out, which is the reality of all relationships. Unfortunately, under present kill-bill capitalism, funding matters in what art you are "free" to pursue, or how intensely you pursue it.

Wet Gate: 16mm Projector Band

2007-04-25T15:47:00.000-07:00

In 1995, a woman named Laurence called to ask if I would take part in a performance of hers, opening for the Seamen (a Survival Research offshoot) at a club in San Francisco. She had gotten my name from NY filmmaker Bradley Eros, a common friend. A few days later I met Steve Dye and Peter Conheim, who, along with David Sherman and Mark Gergis, had been hired as projectionists for an "act" she did called "ReInventing the Wheel", where she hung a few bicycle wheels from the ceiling and we projected wheel imagery loops. It was a small disaster. But I enjoyed meeting Steve and Peter, who'd known each other for some years and were discussing "what a projector band would be like" as we loaded or unloaded our projectors that day. As they kicked it around, I said: "OK, let's do it. I'll be in the projector band with you." Did we have any idea how much loading and unloading of projectors we would do for the next 10 years? Well, we did probably about 30 concerts, some excellent and others not perfect.

Wet Gate has occupied its own interesting niche as a film performance group playing 16mm projectors as musical (and image) instruments. Each of us has been obsessed by THE LOOP, the beautiful economy of a film (or audio) loop, turning one short filmic phrase into an endless or unlimited (duration) piece of film-time. We each brought our own personal attractions to working as a group. Steve Dye had done experiments with Press-on Letraset patterns and how they played when applied to the optical sound region of the film strip and brought that process to Wet Gate, which has been a major aspect of our performance since the start. (I forgot to mention that we agreed that Wet Gate's philosophy of performance would be playing sound which is generated ONLY by film passing over the optical sound head on the 16mm projector.) Steve also plays clarinets and homemade wind instruments and studies West African drum and dance. Peter Conheim was a serial-looper, working with Mark Gergis and friends as Monopause, a band of lo-fi post-prog anti-rockers out of Oakland. He started the record label Electro-Motive to release music from the underground Oakland music scene (get "Live From The After World" at www.electromotiverecords.com/). Peter also scored a huge archive of educational 16mm films when the Berkeley School System threw its collection in a dumpster and he was alerted of it. Today, Peter is the most obsessive 16mm collector I know and he has helped revive the Guild Cinema in Albequerqee, NM the last few years. He's also working regularly with Don Joyce and Negativland. Peter's Negativland contacts opened many opportunities for Wet Gate concerts. My own (Owen) contributions included experience with multiple projections from my Filmers Almanac project, building custom screens using artist vellum papers, an interest in mirrors as a projection tool (O'Toole) and a studio in Berkeley where we rehearsed for several years. We each found films and brought carefully clipped loops to show off to each other, like a kind of contest. We invented ways for projectors to speak together as an ensemble, learning how to segue from one sequence of images and sounds to the next. Projectors were adapted for line out audio, eliminating amplifier noise. Notes from rehearsal improvisations were hammered into setlists, often just prior to a performance. Bay Area filmmakers Gibbs Chapman and Maximillian Godino became some-time members of Wet Gate. The group enjoyed a type of artist-in-residency at Craig Baldwin's Other Cinema New Experimental Works shows. The Bay Area flourished as a center for experiments in multiple projector film art, now sometimes called "Performance Cinema" in university syllabi.

After peaking in the late 90's, Wet Gate gathered less often to invent new forest fires. We each had other projects and life turns. I moved to Mendocino County for several years. We did a performance for 2003's Faits de la Lumieres international projection day, projecting onto the satellite reception dish at KZYX, the radio station I worked at (see www.wetgate.net/ for documentation of that and other band history). And we started receiving calls of interest that took us to Australia in 2005, Rotterdam in early 2006 (see my review of that under Wet Gate at www.filmersalmanac.net/) and then a tour of Montreal, Toronto and Kingston, Canada in October of 2006. So Wet Gate remains a working group, even if that is occasional, the only 16mm projector optical sound band on planet Earth.

Berlin Alexanderplatz (Fassbinder, 1980, WDR TV)

2007-04-13T23:59:00.000-07:00

If you studied film in the early 1980's, you had to deal with the New German Cinema, an incredible upswelling of creativity in film generated by public funding for filmmakers who had a lot to say. Perhaps it was about time for a generation to express the... yup: angst, of growing up in post-Hitler Germany. The biggest of these film authors remain Werner Herzog, Wim Wenders, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, although many deserve notice: Hans Jurgen Seyberberg, Alexander Kluge, Volker Schlondorff, Margaretta vonTrotta, among others. Fassbinder was the most phenomenally productive, making about 40 films before burning out at age 37, his heart giving out from overwork, drugs and alcohol. The baroque sophistication of Fassbinder's later work is overwhelming, involving beautifully staged melodramas pulled from the lives of Fassbinder and his actors to some extent, often filmed by a moving camera through glass windows and doors. Berlin Alexanderplatz is a monumental piece of film work, 15+ hours made for German television, quite possibly the greatest film ever done for television. I remember it finally playing on public TV in Boston, what an event that was, and its first film screening at the Harvard Film Archive. I saw it again in a marathon screening at the PFA in Berkeley in about 1997, part of a Fassbinder retrospective. And I've been viewing it recently, dubbing low-fi VHS copies over to dvd. I remain impressed at the amazing accomplishment of this piece and know it has been an influence on my own attempts to make film, to try to conceive grandiose or epic projects and see if they take wing. Of course, making films is complicated, from writing to acting and set designing. Even for a super8 film there are many elements that can be controlled or left open to chance. Fassbinder's work allowed for little chance operations. I just wanted to register here the effect left in me from viewing this work. It's a kind of monument to aspire to.

As If It Were Your Own

2007-04-13T23:34:00.000-07:00

Arriving in Northern California in early 1993, I wanted to make a first feature film on super8. Easier said than done. I had a series of vignettes that seemed related, aspects of my own story as a sound artist and radio programmer, and i began shooting film and collecting footage I'd previously shot along with some educational film footage. At first the material was called "The Plagiarist", after the radio show I'd hosted in Maine, but i gradually changed the name to "As If It Were Your Own", another Maine title I had used in a New Music America festival exhibit. I hired Alan Mukhamal to blow the super8 film up to 16mm and showed some of the rushes at Total Mobile Home, the basement cinema at friends David Sherman and Rebecca Barten's house. David, Rebecca and I coined the term "microcinema" together to describe their little theater. We did a lot of things together including a re-make of Guy Debord's anti-film "Hurlements in Favor of deSade". They have since moved to Bisbee, Arizona where they presented an underground film festival for a few years. They also helped make "As If", playing on-camera parts and advising me. Caspar Stracke, a young German super8 filmmaker I met through the Almanac, visited and helped build sets for "As If", acted as cameraman and acted on-camera, man. Mark Gergis, Oakland musician and s8 filmer, also appears in the footage. I acquired a Steenbeck 16mm editing flatbed from a convoy of Steenbecks imported from the BBC by some clever San Francisco filmmakers and sold into the community. Also acquired a Westrex 16mm fullcoat mag recorder (16mm audiotape) when Palmer Films, a revered SF film sound company went out of business. I edited and edited. Then Y2K arrived and I fled the Bay Area for Mendocino County. This film material got shelved. I am just beginning to apply the digital razor to old VHS copies of the material, to give some life to the lost project. I think the desire to work in long form may have been a huge stumbling block. The need to be grandiose, do something big. I could easily have broken the material down into a series of short films, which could be shown in any series of permutations, in fact I considered this but never switched over or finished any 1 short film. Clearly this material refused to be my own, but we'll see who has the last laugh. And don't bury the film with me.

They Have Poisoned The Drinking Water

2007-04-13T23:11:00.000-07:00

In the last days of October, 1992, I went to Russia with my Russian friend Leo, a pianist I met living in Portland, Maine. I had long wanted to travel in Russia, pissed off at the political theater which determined that American and Russian citizens should fear and despise one another. Leo had visited several radio shows I hosted and we mixed his improvised piano playing with my tape loops and samples. He said we would do some concerts in Russia. I hoped to make some sort of film there, maybe collaborate with a Russian filmmaker. The first weeks there seemed like interminable partying; Leo was having a homecoming and "October Days" is a long series of celebrations of the 1917 Revolution. Leo's friend Radik, a filmmaker who did a marvelous adaptation of a story by Daniel Kharms (the great satirist), announced his wedding for New Year's Eve and I agreed then to stay for 2 months. Perhaps a mistake. I definitely poisoned myself with alcohol during that time, and food cleanliness was always questionable, although Russians do their best in periods of great limitation brought about by the unwieldy State Market distribution maze. But i did meet some wonderful people, traveled to the town of Saratov which had been off the map for "westerners" for years, we did several strange concerts, one of which was amazing, at an art opening in the Union Hall gallery in Moscow, a huge exhibit hall. I saw theater and a great concert by the group Vezhlivi Otkaz (Polite Refusal), who were like a Russian Pere Ubu, great musicians. All sorts of difficulties occurred on this trip and almost every day was dramatic. It was a series of headaches experienced inside the cave of Russian winter. It was lonely and painful. I began editing a video piece on a super-VHS system as soon as i returned to the US (and moved to Berkeley, California) from the super8 film and video shot in Russia. I semi-finished a 1-hour version of the piece, titled "They Have Poisoned The Drinking Water", but was never quite satisfied with it as complete. It has remained mostly shelved until now. I am just beginning an edit down of that piece into something more compact. Hopefully it will have something to say; we see too few images from the Russian world. Is it still sunk in the 19th century, as it was in 1992? I wonder.