Wide Open Cinema

Richard Linklater's BOYHOOD

2014-09-10T12:18:00.000-07:00

The idea of shooting a film just a few days each year over 10 or 12 years is a great one and I'm glad I was able to see BOYHOOD in a theater, which I don't get to do much these days: see movies on the big screen. (The Laemmle Playhouse theater in Pasadena had some projection errors, digital skipping which bordered on "give me back my money" annoying.) While the film doesn't live up to claims of being a Masterpiece, it was a pleasant experience that mirrors some of my own life attitudes and the presentation of Ellar Coltrane, as the Boy under the cinematic microscope, was remarkable, or just plain good luck, that he turned out to be such a likable young man.

Watching a three-hour movie about a family feels a lot like watching condensed television, which allows the longer-term intimacy of years of growth or "development", to use industry jargon falsely. In my mind, Linklater has succeeded in taking a television timeframe, Texas split family grows up with hardship and happiness over the years, and condensing it to fit into a movie concept. There is not a lot about this picture that couldn't have been done for television. There is some language and there is some dope and cigarettes and alcohol, but the drama is pretty straight up: narrative cutting between characters talking about life issues and growing up. And this is a big part of life: how parents impart to their kids the information needed to navigate life's ups and downs. Some do it more successfully than others, we do the best we can, etc. Linklater shares what he knows of parenting and his daughter plays the Boy's sister. I think she did a good job.

The film is entirely chronological. We see the Boy (named Mason in the film) fluidly grow year after year and never move backwards. The ceaseless Forward-ness of BOYHOOD is what drives the film and any "message" that is built in. Mason expresses the fact that everyone is constantly telling him what to do in a scene with his mother's 2nd or 3rd husband, and it is here that the difficulties of parenting and being a child overlap. It is so hard not to keep telling your child to watch out for that sharp knife, don't touch the matches, stay on the sidewalk, sit down and eat, don't drink your milk so fast, brush your teeth and get in bed, watch out. We are self-programmed out of fear to forever over-protect and it becomes hugely annoying to the growing-up child. So you back off, try to give the child space. Imagine a camera trying to do the same thing for its subjects. Add a drone or two with GoPro cameras to watch the children for a few hours every day.

Stan Brakhage talked about a child who is filmed every day of his life and a filmer who films, or must always watch that child growing up. There is no "Brakhagian" optical invention in BOYHOOD, in the way that Terence Malick's THE TREE OF LIFE had hallucinatory creation sequences. (I just discovered this: http://www.fandor.com/keyframe/the-secret-experiments-inside-the-tree-of-life after looking for an article I read about an antique lightbox construction Malick used to create galaxial images for that film, which I can no longer find.) Perhaps it's good that Mr. Linklater doesn't raid the experimental toolbox... I do think that BOYHOOD shares something with TREE OF LIFE beyond their lengths. Film and Life are parallel processes. BOYHOOD raises some of the same themes and issues outside of its basic story, and without resorting to lightshow. It is a traditional, narrative movie benefiting from the unusual timequirk of punctuated filming.

Boys experience peer pressure, to smoke and drink and talk raunchily about sex, but some make it through with their dignity intact. The meatgrinder of modern life tenderizes but doesn't always destroy the sweetness of youth.

Linklater's signature approach to film is in the random voices he gives chance to rant on pet subjects, conspiracies, and there is some of that in BOYHOOD. The fluid hand off from one character to the next from SLACKERS (editing/narrative strategy) is replaced by the fluid appearance of Mason from one year to the next and the viewer begins to seek out that moment, when the camera has landed on the next new Mason. It is a fun hop, skip and jump across a life. But it is presented rather matter of factly; no fireworks were abused in the making of this movie. It is a sober assessment of Growing Up but Springsteen did not supply the soundtrack. Many bands did provide songs for the soundtrack: Wilco and Arcade Fire, it is a survey of current pop carnations. It works like television music. Soundtrack available on Nonesuch Records.

LEGO Movie Delivers!

2014-02-12T11:47:00.002-08:00

OK, it doesn't bring pizza to your seat, but there are plastic croissants and hotdogs, super-expensive coffee, a TV show called "Where's My Pants?" and diverse LEGO theme-neighborhoods all united by a script of high level parody and seeming self-awareness. Made by the creators of Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, The LEGO Movie is NOT an OFFICIAL LEGO production, like Ninjago or Chima which are featured on the Cartoon Network, but is instead a product of Warner Brothers' animation department. The creators explain that they wanted to make an homage to the many LEGO videos made at home by fans, with a wink to the crude animation techniques used in fan videos, rather than the streamlined computer rendered productions usually made with LEGO's imprimature these days. As Ninjago begins a new series run on CN, it's fascinating to see a full-length animated feature made with the bricks but independent of the Mothership, at least on initial inspection.

The LEGO Movie has its own look, something between the stop-motion of fan videos and the seamless computer graphics of the LEGO video franchise. Perhaps the closest analogy I can make for the current explosion of LEGO video would be the waves of water which wash through The LEGO Movie. There's not a lot of water, like there is in LEGO CITY videos, rendered as digital liquid. In The Movie, the water is clearly made of individual lego bricks, often the small 1-block barrels sliding or glissading (sliding on ice) over each other in water forms. The LEGO Movie traverses many realms, as if its mission is to step on all territory. Which is exactly what LEGO appears to be doing: there is so much lego product out there now, they have cornered such a large section of toy market, that it sometimes seems the DNA of the world is turning to LEGO bricks. (Even Frank Lloyd Wright is memorialized in a lego set or two.) Don't forget that a giant plastic ocean is off the coast of Oregon. The Movie is both a celebration and a not-so-subtle critique of the prodigal bricks.

It's chaotic. The Movie starts up in the town of Bricksburg, where Emmett Hardhat begins his workday along with legions of other minifigures. It's a lockstep world where the masses are encouraged to always follow instructions yet keep a chipper attitude, as voiced in their mutual feelgood theme song "Everything is Awesome" (A Katy Perry-esque anthem) and the reality TV hit "Where's My Pants?" There are a lot of laughs as one scene follows the next in seemingly increasing speed and humor. The humor has a distinctly dark character, on a level written to adults, like old Warner Bros cartoons. There's something for everybody. They threw the kitchen sink at this project. Mark Mothersbaugh (DEVO) did much of the music. Morgan Freeman voices the blind mystic AND there's a Wormhole that Emmett must fall into to recover the important Piece of Resistance. And then there's Will Farrell. It just keeps on going. Throw something at legos and it will stick.

The grand conflict between Order and Chaos is unleashed upon the audience as a tsunami of little bricks. Adults tell kids what to do all the time, kids just want to have fun. A subtle critique of lego sets where every piece has to be placed according to instructions, which is VERY fun for my 6-year-old, but only once! Then, you can take it apart and it's recombinant DNA. Or a huge bin of undifferentiated legos clogging the universe until kingdom come. A storm is brewing on the horizon.

Kids definitely thought The Movie was too long, although I tried my best to get Evan to stay for the credits, a mainstay Extra for animated films since Pixar began making use of the closing screen time. It's great to see new animation powerhouses open shop; I think Pixar is highly over-rated and have not moved the medium forward in almost a decade, since their Renderman software was a novelty. The good vs. bad morality dramas seem like ancient history. And while LEGO Movie does fit within that Rubric's Cube to some extent, it also explodes enough of your expectations to open new windows. It's great to see a fun hybrid (live action/computer) movie that tries to do so much and gives at least two sides of the story to some extent. The pros and cons of a great toy gone viral. Perhaps it's from outer space after all.

If you haven't seen The LEGO Story, a unique 17-minute history of the company, I highly recommend it: http: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdDU_BBJW9Y

World Citizen Alex MacKenzie's Intertidal

2013-12-20T00:30:00.002-08:00

Alex MacKenzie travels with two Kodak Pageant analyst projectors. On airplanes, one is a carry-on, while the other is fitted into a checked suitcase. He sets up the projectors behind the audience within the cinema, tonight on a table mounted stably atop four chairs. His soundtrack is on a portable digital recorder which he times to the chapters of the presentation. The film itself is two 400 foot reels of 16mm, fitted inside one small 35mm reel can. It is a perfectly economical system, organized for travel.

Alex spends his summer in the British Columbian Gulf Islands, where he is building a cob house in the woods. He has shot a bunch of film in the coastal zone there, the intertidal area between high and low tides. Intertidal runs about an hour on the two analyst projectors, which function as something between film projectors and slide projectors. Alex has made a handful of projector performance films for this system and I'd say he pretty well has it down. Beginning with two projection frames side by side, he slides one projector to overlap the other. He uses gels and lenses to bend or expand a projector beam, executing the changes with clear intention. Although each performance is unique and unrepeatable--the beauty of film performance being that for each show the projected piece comes out differently--there was a clear map or score to the piece.

Found footage of the moon opens, from an early film. Then riding the ferry out to the islands. Austere wooden bridge structures lean into the frame, suggesting the borders between man's kingdom and that of wild ocean. There are always two frames. Life is not a single strand of thought pictures. There is always overlap or relationship, between what we see and what we remember, or the two images of a (faux-)stereo pair. Intertidal was not shot as a stereo film, but suggests that by virtue of its presentation. There are panorama shots, oddly unmatched wide-frame images of waterfront areas and hills. Maybe the twin projections represent man on the one eye and the ocean through the other. They take turns. We are introduced to a tidal area and the lifeforms hidden within. Crabs, sea stars and jellyfish have swim-in roles. Kelp was given its own chapter. The chapter divisions give sensible pacing to a varied catalog of ocean and coastal images, as well as a series of Rayograms produced by laying materials on film. The greatest drama comes with the crabs, both hermit and the normal shelled variety. Two hermit crabs fight, with one big boy appearing to dominate thoroughly. Is this mating behavior? Another sequence shows crabs on the back of a jellyfish, seeming to ride it like a bus or a surfboard, though Alex said the jellyfish would likely be their food.

Intertidal is partly an homage to naturists Ed Ricketts and Jean Painleve. Ricketts was a friend of Steinbeck and John Cage, a bohemian in the Kerouac tradition who traveled the west coast and studied marine biology, but he was cut down early in a car accident. Painleve is known for his underwater films today. He may have started as an assistant to Bunuel and Dali on Un Chien Andalou; Alex says he wrangled ants for the shoot.

The Intertidal soundtrack was made by Scott Morgan, aka loscil, whose ambient synthesizer pieces clearly demark the chapters of the film and offer a kind of sonic focus to our sea-gazing. Like the footage, the music drifts in and out of phase in arrhythmic loops, requesting a hypnotic willingness from the viewer.

The footage is run through the projectors at varying speeds, sometimes atuned to the musical flow and sometimes not. MacKenzie slowed and sped his machines and the filmed waveforms responded, surf rushing towards shore and then freezing or slowing to a crawl up on land. The ocean world pounds stone into sand. Intertidal has both primitive and progressive qualities. Primitive because the hand-processed 16mm black-and-white film throws us back to the 1940s and 50s, the era MacKenzie refers to in the work. Progressive because it is clearly a bitter-sweet celebration of the beauty and power of a natural world which we are so quickly using up. The power of Intertidal is its forthright reflection of the natural world. In an era where so much media threatens to control, pacify or overwhelm its viewer, Mackenzie understands that less is more.

The entire film is hand-processed, giving it a seen-through-seaweed quality. While much of the world turns to HD video for immaculately rendered tourist postcards, MacKenzie is laying rock salt on film and exposing it to the elements. His two projector system is a time machine back away from the HD video surround dateline, to when 16mm cameras were first being picked up and turned towards little personal moments.

The LA Film Forum held this screening on December 5, 2013 at the Velaslavasay Panorama, an old theater near USC which is dedicated largely to pre-cinema entertainment. Upstairs, there is a wrap-around panorama of Antartica or the Arctic. Truly unique, like a slice of New Orleans in Los Angeles. (I still haven't been to the Museum of Jurassic Technology, which Alex has visited and he says is a wonderful theater of allusions.)

It was great to see the crabs. The next day, my child Evan asked to see The Three Stooges on youTube and we found one called A Pain in the Pullman, where the Stooges get hired as entertainers on a train. They bust into a bigger star's cabin and find a crab dinner and champagne. The 3 rubes can't decide if the crab is a spider or a turtle! And they set themselves to eating the crab shell, tossing away the meat inside. Parallel crabs.

In Space No One Can Hear Your Soundtrack

2013-11-01T23:14:00.001-07:00

My first view of Gravity was the terrifying trailer that showed the space accident that forms the centerpiece of the movie's action. I wrote to friends that I didn't think I wanted to experience that kind of space terror, akin to my boycott of The Blair Witch Project because I didn't want to be frightened from going out into nature alone. But as the Gravity movie approached, I became excited about its release, clearly a great special effects job of creating a simulation of spacewalking. Anything that touches on the personal and the grandiose in space is up my alley, so I became determined to see this movie, although I get out to movie theaters about 10 times a year lately. I glutted on film when I was younger, so it all evens out I guess.

I discussed scheduling a film screening with a few friends. Should we see it at (former Grauman's) Chinese Theater, recently retrofitted to IMAX? Should we avoid the 3D effect and view it as a 2D movie valued for its content, photography and montage?

(Ira Flato is talking to astronaut Chris Hadfield right now about the movie on the radio in my kitchen...)

It took 2 weeks for me to find a time I could peel away and see Gravity. Jeff Plansker and I went to the Santa Anita mall in Arcadia for a 1:25PM screening of the 2D version. I would have been OK with seeing it in 3D or IMAX but Jeff preferred the 2D version greatly.

There were a million previews, including Ben Stiller's new Walter Mitty movie, which actually looks kind of nice, for Ben Stiller.

Gravity begins with a few statements about space: that there's no sound, for instance. However the soundtrack does a Hitchcock scare-you build into the title graphic and then suddenly goes silent, I think a minor abuse of the sound band and a hint at what was to come. Don't get me wrong, there was some brilliant sound design in Gravity, and it should have been left that way. Adding a musical score, with symphonic elements and over-arching drama and tell-me-when-to-sneeze cues, was a big mistake on this movie. You've got to wonder who signed off (the director) on the soundtrack. It comes very close to ruining a beautiful picture.

The visual effects and scene-making are astounding. The sense of being space-suited and out-of-doors from your spacecraft in the vacuum of space, is fleshed out incredibly well. This is what computers can do now, create a verisimilitude of image down to such small details, that you are fooled into being there. The shots of whirling, wrecked space stations are just unbelievable.

The shots of Sandra Bullock crying are tearfully well-done. I thought of video artist Bill Viola, who spent 10 years filming images through the distorting lens of a drop of water, and Gravity cops his lick and goes another step in one swift minute of film. I also flashed to Man Ray's famous photo (of Lee Miller) with glass beads in her eyelashes. It was loaded film, so to speak.

There's a lot to like about this film. It is so visually realistic. The earth-orbiting footage must be straight NASA video from the space station, paid for by American citizens. Maybe the film ticket should be discounted. Maybe all space movies should be discounted. We live to see this stuff and think big about the universe we live in.

I had another thought while watching the ending shots of space debris raining down into the atmosphere. Gravity is an appropriate homage to the astronauts of space shuttle Columbia, who died coming back into the atmosphere when one or more of their heat shield tiles failed to protect the cabin from the extreme heats of re-entry. The film could be called The Girl Who Fell To Earth. The whole film follows Bullock as she dives from one jetty in space to another, making her way down the ladder from orbit to entry to landfall. It is a timely plea to clean up our earth's clouds of orbiting space junk. Bullock's use of the fire extinguisher is inspired. She does some gorgeous floating in men's underwear.

There is limited dialog in the film, a nice break from the ever-talking movies. Bullock does over-narrate a few scenes, but this could be forgiven as the kind of crazy you might go as you freeze to death in space. And then the soundtrack kicks in, the most grievous error being the Avatar-ish tribal anthem at the end, and we're pushing the same old buttons again. Response 5. Response 7. Rip away the soundtrack and release the film again with just a subtle sound design version. We all deserve that kind of expansive view of space rather than one limited by a series of lazy music choices.

The Century of an Eyesplice

2013-10-28T13:07:00.002-07:00

My graphic score to the scenes and events in Un Chien Andalou.

On February 22 of 2000, Luis Bunuel's 100th birthday, we presented "The Century of an Eyesplice" at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley, under the curatorial guidance of Kathy Geritz. A newly restored print of Un Chien Andalou by the Eastman House was screened, along with Simon of the Desert, Viridiana, and a tattered print of Chien Andalou with a soundtrack I created for the occasion. We had a cake made to look like the "diagonal box" and Eric Gergis played the accordeon. David Larcher was in town and we had martinis afterwards at a bar across the street.

The soundtrack was composed from various sources, many olde records, in recognition of LB's original soundtrack using 78rpm records of Wagner and tangos. I hired Gibbs Chapman to help me cut the audio; he taught me to use ProTools. The basic soundtrack was transferred to 16mm magnetic stock and played on an interlock projector at each of three major presentations of the piece. I acquired the interlock machine and a Westrex mag recorder at Palmer Films liquidation sale just months before. I also acquired a print of Chien Andalou from a liquidation sale at distributor Budget Films. Film was liquidating.

The first screening of the new soundtrack was in Berkeley on Bunuel's birthday. I used a contact microphone to amplify tabletop objects as another layer of sound on top of the basic "bed" tracks. The film seemed to me to be about the terror of household objects. The razor is the first "wild object" of the film. Sound effects of cutlery were slowed down to sound like swordblades as Luis sharpens his razor. Or perhaps it was a recording of fencing. The slice or eye-splice is a burst of piercing controlled feedback.

The man rides a bike, his goofy musical theme sampled from a music box toy (It's a Small World After All). The man is a wind up toy himself, and the same winding key might open the absurd box he wears around his neck. The bicycle is also imitated by rolling a squeaky wheel on the contact board, a piece of wood with piezo disc contact microphone attached. Staples in the wood are plucked to approximate ant-legs, running in and out of a hole in the man's hand. This image, from Dali's dreams, is so contemporary; I think of it often as I watch young people stare into their palms, consumed by smartphones. A nylon wire (fishing line? kite string? raquet string?) was stretched when the woman grabs a tennis racket to fight the man off. An antique vocal madrigal is played to accompany the dragging of the donkey-skinned pianos, a religious procession. Hundreds of vinyl pops were digitally erased from that recording.

The second screening was a week later at The Blinding Light in Vancouver. Alex MacKenzie built an entire Surreal City series around the event. And the third screening was at ATA in San Francisco, where I used firecrackers during the gunfire scene; they were exploded in a box at the top of the stairs and their realism surprised even me.

The man falls into his field, onto the back of a statuesque female nude which disappears and he is carried off by some passers by--the don of this parkland and his garden workers. A beautiful propellar plane engine sound accompanies the fade to black. A door opens and the woman enters to stare down the death-head moth on the wall. I found an exquisite, sparse loop sample from an old record which fits the black and white film emulsion here like a glove. And then a chopstick was vibrated along the edge of the soundboard; it flutters like large insect wings. I sometimes sampled that and slowed it down to great effect.

There is a scene in which the second man (the Challenger?) comes to the house, rings the doorbell (actual martini shaker with ice recorded and mixed with bells), he is let in and when he enters the room I used live radio to accompany his actions. At the Berkeley screening the radio insert found a BBC news voice saying: "Mad cow disease", which was in the news at the time.

I continued to work on the soundtrack and sent a few copies out on VHS. I tried to create an alternate version of the film but got bogged down. Only recently have I gotten around to remixing the piece for web presentation. Please view it here.

Un Perro Andaluz, 80 Anos Despues

2013-10-23T22:43:00.000-07:00

2009 was the 80th anniversary of the Bunuel/Dali film UN CHIEN ANDALOU, known in Spain as Un Perro Andaluz, and recognized today as a universal surrealist masterpiece. Although made in France, the film is in many ways a Spanish import, as Bunuel moved between Spain and Paris, writing the scenario from their dreams at Dali's home in Cadaques. Bunuel made the film with his mother's generous gift from her savings, her escudos, the nickel coins with a shield on the back. Bunuel premiered the film in Paris equipped with stones in his pockets to repel attackers. The 80th anniversary found the Tabakalera center in San Sebastian working with the Filmoteca Nacional on an exhibition and symposium to discuss the film's history and present a film restoration made from the original film materials. See here.

Maybe a year ago, I stumbled across a BFI blog where film enthusiasts and archivists were discussing recent dvd and blu-ray releases. The BFI had produced a dvd of L'Age d'Or which included Un Chien Andalou in the set, and somebody offered the information about the Spanish restoration project. I have been looking to import this book+dvd for at least the past 9 months. The set is a catalog for the exhibit which opened in San Sebastian and visited a few other Spanish cities. The restored film is online and looks gorgeous in the small frame. I had a new Holy Grail: finding a hard copy of this restored film. I looked online at bookstores in Spain and Spanish amazon, the European amazons and asked European friends. It is still difficult to import a rare book, even with the internet. The cost, 30 or $40 on the street in Spain, would probably approach $100 from a large bookstore, with shipping and import fees. I decided to wait and see if it would turn up via some American distributor or museum store. Every few months I remembered to look into it. This summer (2013), I called Schoenhof's in Cambridge, probably the biggest importer of foreign books in the US, where I had bought many Spanish books during my years in Boston, and asked them about ordering it; still around $100. Then I checked ABEbooks, the consortium of independent booksellers online, and someone in the US appeared to have a copy of the set: the 2 book volumes, 46-page Basque summary and the dvd of the restored film--the complete edition, at $65 + $10 shipping. On further inquiry, shipping would be an additional $8.70, bringing the total to $83.70. Still not cheap, this seemed a fair price for something I had been searching for so long. It arrived only a few days later. It is another classic piece for a Bunuel collector, a hardboard case holding 2 books and the film. I have an entire large bag filled with books on and by Bunuel. I have a multi-region dvd player. The last incredible film find was when I discovered that Hollis Frampton's films were out on a Criterion dvd. It was an incredible year for film. Don't ask me to borrow either of those dvds.

Film Department Letter

2013-04-11T10:36:00.000-07:00

I wrote this letter of introduction when applying for an art school film job a few years back.

Thank you for looking at my materials as I offer myself for consideration to teach film (there).
What do I think I could bring to your film department?
I have a great love of film and an even greater interest and concern for the lives of people looking for ways to express themselves with film. Of course we are at a time when film as THE MEDIUM is rapidly being displaced by digital means; knowing computers is more important every day. A professor of film at an arts college must know how computers can be used to solve problems and expedite production of ideas into moving pictures.

I have feet in both realms: the digital and its parent analog.
I have collected films and film machines for 25 years and have learned something from each of the formats. I studied animation with Flip Johnson using Bolex cameras, pegboards and lights. Richard Lerman taught filmmaking and sound and became a friend. I taught myself to use the JK optical printer. Soon after, I switched to super-8 filmmaking, which is largely a do-it-yourself media, although some "teachers" included the young German filmmakers, my peers: Matthias Mueller, Jurgen Reble, Caspar Stracke, and all the European, Canadian and American artists I spent time with (Yann Beauvais, Cecile Fontaine, Mike Hoolboom, Alex MacKenzie, Bradley Eros, Jeanne Liotta). I lived super8 film for several years, traveled to numerous festivals. I experimented with many telecine routes, from "Do-It-Myself" to Bob Brodsky's service. I have owned many super8 cameras and projectors and used most existing filmstocks. I bought ORWO super8 cartridges in East Berlin.

Unfortunately, I don't recommend super8 as heartily as I once did, largely because the number of reliable or repairable cameras and projectors has declined. With a good camera, super8 remains a tremendous image making medium, but please have it rendered to digital video ASAP. Super8 projectors are largely unreliable at present.

I've always believed in COLLABORATION as an important avenue of creativity and I've sought out other artists with whom to work.

Parallel to filmmaking, I have studied and practiced RADIO as an art form. I decided somewhere early on that a radio transmitter is a PROJECTOR for sound, and I've always found radio to have great commonalities with film as an expressive tool. My soundtrack work grew out of radio shows I did at the same time as making films; the concurrent practices feed off of one another.

Using film as a PERFORMANCE medium is another area where I've had a lot of experience, beginning with the ALMANAC project, where I used 2 projectors to present the work. I have soaked myself in Gene Youngblood's Expanded Cinema tome and am a great proponent of breaking the single-channel stream of film presentatrion. Working with Wet Gate, where we developed the use of the 16mm projector as a performance instrument in concert, has been a great outlet for my need for a true film practice. (Wet Gate will perform at the Berkeley Art Museum as part of their Friday Night series on January 29th, 2010.)

I do, however, appreciate and champion well made single-channel films. I am not quite the dilettante I was even 10 years ago.

The past 10 years I have tried to function in the wild world of community and commerce, first working in Public Radio and then creating soundtracks for film and television, often for commercials. Again, with a foot in 2 different worlds, I have stayed in touch with the experimental art world while trying to bring my skills into the larger film industry. Perhaps like Paul Sharits and others who wanted to see if they could apply experimental principles to more commercial (or accessible or just distributed) work, I moved to LA 4 years ago. My most recent new project involves writing the script for a teleplay or original series, based on my father's life. I have ongoing relationships and projects with creative people which I am nurturing.

I have always seen film as a great communicating force and have wanted to inject myself into that, into the great machinery of projectors and television screens that can reach people all across the world. Here in Los Angeles that means beginning with a script, so that is an important starting place. I don't mean to say that film cannot contain or even be based upon improvisational elements. When I was younger. film was much more of a diaristic medium for me, whereas now I want to consider carefully each time I engage the film apparatus. It's too expensive a medium at this point.

Hollis Frampton: Incidental Holographer

2013-01-05T14:17:00.001-08:00

Although I never met Hollis Frampton, the American film maverick who died of cancer at the age of 48 but left a legacy most 100-year-olds would be proud of, I studied at his feet. And later at his footage. But at the start it was mostly footnotes. While the early-1980's did provide some wonderful growth in the arts: artists' book publishing, performance spaces opening, multi-media forms emerging, the art of film was showing its first stages of decline, largely due to increasing costs, but also with the new interest in portable video, among other causes. So a lot of the great experimental film of earlier decades was not being actively screened. I'm talking Boston. There was Saul Levine at Mass Art showing his personal favorites. There was New York, where almost anything could be seen in the course of a year, but I couldn't live in New York, my birth city. The only way I found to internalize the great works of avant-garde cinema was reading about the films in books by P. Adams Sitney (Film Culture Reader) and Amos Vogel (Film as a Subversive Art), among others.

The two filmmakers whose ideas jumped off the pages of those books and bit me the most were Stan Vanderbeek and Hollis Frampton, both visionaries and meta-film activists. Vanderbeek, after a period of playful animation and collage films, turned to ideas for presentation including his Cinedome, which envisioned a geodesic sphere intended for projections; the interior was an ocular theater. Vanderbeek went so far as to imagine the cyber-future where films could be beamed in from elsewhere on the globe, collaged or mixed with any manner of other projected film on the spot. It was a beautiful vision, one which inspired a number of my own attempts at multi-projector harmony.

Frampton was a more traditional maker, cutting his films to A and B roll perfection and trying to wrestle every bit of mind muscle he could from one standard 16mm projector, just as he had gathered the images while gripping the camera. Singlehandedly. Frampton's major opus, Magellan, has every bit the same spherical intelligence as Vanderbeek's Cinedome. Magellan imagined a unique film to be projected for each day of the calendar year, effectively encircling the viewer in a humongous film loop and rendering a 3-dimensional clarity of vision. Frampton called it "circumambulating the hemispheres", and my own early film practice was largely inspired by the idea of capturing a place by walking a circle through it with the camera ON. While Frampton may not have described his work as seeking 3-dimensionality, I have been struck for the 28 years since his death at the proximity with which his ideas rub up against theories of poly-dimensionality. While the film image may not pop off the screen in a Frampton film, the thought-activity in response to his films must be considered something akin to mental holography. The work is just that active.

Frampton was a poet, linguist, photographer and dabbler in several arts--painting was what he seemed to admire most--and it was quite a natural move for him to abandon much of the rest once the film bug had bit him. We know that Frampton's earliest staging of Magellan was an art piece where he hung some pieces of plaster (?) in the studio and made a kind of walk-through sculpture. There are also the word-picture series he worked through in photographs and film: Ways to Purity, which collected odd signage fragments from lower Manhattan and, of course, Zorn's Lemma, the 1970 film which clearly established Frampton's genius. Not only does Zorn collect a movie version of the catalog of word signs seen in Purity, but his radical re-imagining of the alphabet begins with each letter hammered out of aluminum foil on a typewriter. The graphic impact of this alphabet, projected with a nice 250 watt bulb, cannot be overstated. The letters are downright cubic. I don't know if he was an admirer of Kubrick, but perhaps vice versa. The two filmmakers form a very small subset of intelligencia. The unrolling of Frampton's New Alphabet across the middle half of Zorn's Lemma is one of the great passages of film time. As each aluminum foil letter is replaced by a moving film image, the sensation becomes akin to the opening of windows. And it's not a house of windows, but the viewer's head and mind, the language centers, which are opening, and each letter becomes a flowing form much as ideas take form and move in the mind. If this isn't something close to holography then I'm hallucinating. It may be faux holography or something akin to anaglyphs, the red and green windows of early 3D movie glasses. Frampton turned to the motif of Red and Green himself; it is a major motif in Magellan.

Another early film worth mentioning here, which sometimes defies comment by its brilliance, is Palindrome, from 1969. The film presents a short strip of abstract shapes and forms repeated in a series of variations, positive, negative and other effects, regularly broken up by an equal length (24 frames?) of black or silence. (It is a "silent" film.) However, the great gift of palindrome is the music that this silent "image track" plays in your head. Frampton sets up a regular rhythm with the image turning on and off as it runs through, and then the subset of tinier variations happening within the image set plays another rhythmic dance which becomes music in the head. I would again argue in favor of considering this film an example of extramural holography. Frampton pushes the silent medium into the realm of sound as it is imagined in the mind by vision. The film explores a part of the brain that is usually dormant, a kind of inter-ear-eye canal.

And then there's Magellan. Frampton's final film project contains too many parts and pieces to fully evaluate here, but several of the films clearly suggest and create 3-dimensional states of mind, an effect Stan Brakhage might have called hypnagogic.

Mindfall is a film shot in Puerto Rico and contains beautiful and lush tropical footage, although Frampton subverts the elegance of his host island with disconcerting sound effects and he super-imposes two images throughout its entire half-hour length. Using A and B roll as a clever way to double-expose, Frampton provides the materials of stereo-vision without resorting to a 2-camera-2-projector system. He proposes that there is a cinema multi-tasking mind, which should be able to view and decipher more than one image stream at once. So, if two separate strands of thought or action coincide, maybe like a talented drummer playing one rhythm with his right hand and another with his left (and another with his feet!?), is that something one could tag as approaching holographic? (Stereo vision being a multi-task of parallel eyes.)

Winter Solstice is in some ways the crowning achievement of Frampton and Magellan. Shot in an iron foundry in Pittsburgh, the camera captures metals in various states of vulcanic transformation: liquid, solid, and most remarkably as flying patterns of showering sparks. This is magma. Usually a 30 minute experimental film on one subject is a tedious affair, but here is an example of time melting under the heat of such spectacular capture. Dali is jealous of this film. The cascades of burning ore fragments create patterns similar to some created by Bill Brand in the optical printer using rows of repeating and tumbling images. There is a constantly new feeling to the framed image. The camera shutter works in time with the shower of metal flowers to unbelievable effect. It seems re-animated. Vulcan lives. A Frankenstein effect of the material coming alive again under each projection. Again, an argument for holography.

Frampton pursued a goal of meta-film creation and, along the way, happened upon some radical techniques which elevated his bibliotic project to the level of euphoric discourse. He wanted to catalog a series of films, and shots within the films, that represented the entirety of human education and experience. Frampton and Magellan, by following the arc of the calendar, by walking a set path of stones through time, erected a World's Fair Globe to film consciousness, a bubble which collapses when it's not perceived through the right lenses. Circles of confusion abound.

Criterion published a dvd collection of Frampton films in 2012.

2012-08-01T23:10:00.001-07:00

In 1999 or so, editor Berin Golonu invited me to write an article for ART WEEK's issue on Surveillance. This was published in ART WEEK 31, No. 9, 2000.

THE ARTIST IS WATCHING BACK
    By Owen O'Toole
    Since Sony's introduction of the video Portapak in 1968, artists have been exploring ways in which video, so often aesthetically linked to the commercial complex of television production, can actually express the personal, the poetic, the sculptural and the political. Video is unique from film in its immediacy; the tape can be rewound and viewed instantly after recording, then recorded over again, unlike film which preserves a one-time record of events and must be chemically developed. Video recording is particularly well-suited to the long watch of documentary coverage, while film has been used more often to record and add cinematic flourish to premeditated drama or to rigorous plastic montage.
    A fascinating use of the video apparatus, something noted right off by artists and business interests, is what is called "closed-circuit television." The camera serves almost as an intercom, connected by wire to a distant television or monitor for viewing. No recording unit is necessary, just a camera and a monitor. This was seized by the business world as a marvelous security device and the era of surveillance video was born. Artists have used television's closed-circuit potential since that beginning. An amazing aspect of our market-culture is that these mass-produced tele-envisioning machines have gotten out into the hands of so many creative people. While the security-state minded world of business and finance viewed their surveillance apparatus as protection from external, or internal employee threats (and installed it everywhere), artists have elegantly used video's reflexive properties for self-portraiture; it has proven a medium with a capacity to be every bit as beautiful as painting (Mary Lucier, Bill Viola). The artist finds wonderful use for a machine which otherwise is used to blend, chop and grind.
    Ray Beldner, primarily a sculptor and installation artist, has done a number of works commenting on corporate uniformity. Surveillance appears as one aspect of the new urban landscape in which we have come to accept a man-made or mirror image of the world as the totality of our relations with nature. Beldner cleverly clusters channels of closed-circuit video beside monitors playing back prerecorded material to multiply and confuse the sense of live action. He also curated On The Money, a show in which artists altered legal tender, raising issues of "who is watching or reporting," since defacing money is illegal. Beldner's sewing of dollar bills into a sack to carry horse dung is a clear editorial statement, hopefully supported by the First Amendment. Other Beldner installations find racks of business suits standing for populations of office-commuting, white-collar workers. One popular piece, Converse/Confer/Conceit, has pigeon cages built above suit racks, allowing pigeon guano to paint the shoulders of the drab uniforms, revitalizing them. The effects of a society of surveillance are bound tightly to the technology.
    Of course, video cameras have become expert witnesses in cases against overly violent security forces (Rodney King). Even more so than film, the video camera gives anyone the power of being the "roving reporter," stirring up dirt or just being in the right place at the right time. Some strange contradictions are at hand, in which utopian possibilities of unfettered creativity and self-awareness meet seemingly opposed notions of "big brother watching," the dystopian present of a market-driven planet as viewed through TV-Darwinism, and the artist is watching back.
    Kim Trang's videotape Ocularis: Eye Surrogates serves as a miniature history of surveillance in a mere twenty-one minutes. Trang set up a 1-800 number and invited the public to call in episodes of surveillance from their lives, then wove those voices together with a variety of mundane video material, everyday camcorder shots slowed down or shot from above to simulate surveillance-mode, including footage of driving and waving at friends in another car (who also have a camcorder handy!). "Surveillance is kind of funny because it creates anxiety and boredom simultaneously. The searching gaze is anxious because surveillance is a form where one watches for something to go wrong. But it's also stultifying watching monotonous footage of real-time video," state the voice-overs. The tape is an argument for the basic joys of the video camera while also carrying several warnings on the box: Always have camcorder ready in case of imminent disaster!
    I think that a definition of art could be 'paying attention.'
    --John Cage
    Since 1984, Orwell's prophetic year, surveillance has increasingly been the subject-content of video artists' work. In 1987, Branda Miller and Deborah Irmas curated an extensive exhibit at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions titled SURVEILLANCE. The show was a major survey of such work and presented videotapes, photographs and installations. Miller expressed the purpose of the show as "stimulating the viewer to look beyond the fetishistic examination of the technology itself in favor of the multifaceted information gathering process' greater implications." The show was international in scope and featured many artists, including John Baldessari, Louis Hock, Martha Rosler and Michael Klier. The catalog even included a Freedom of Information Act kit, with a form and instructions on how to obtain FBI files.
    With the advent and growth of cable television, Americans--those who watch the tube--have been fed a diet of image-content which demands more and more of the same, feeding a voyeuristic syndrome which has peaked in the confrontation and exhibition of daytime talk shows like "Sally Jesse Raphael" and "Jerry Springer." MTV's "The Real World" plugged into the fever for so-called "reality TV" which now harvests cash crop with "Survivor" and "Big Brother" (though locking a group of strangers in a house, or island, and observing them like rats, or watching them eating rats seems a rather forced hand of reality). The blossoming Internet has also absorbed its weight of this surveillance-exhibition culture drift. Eyeball cameras and CU-See-Me software have turned college kids in dorm rooms into cyberspace celebrities available for viewing 24-hours-a-day. Charge it to your VISA and help pay my college tuition. Thank you!
    Video art has finally been entering the museum canon with big shows such as Seeing Time (selections from the Kramlich collection) at SFMOMA, and of course, Nam June Paik's Guggenheim show in New York, which may have been the art event of the year. In 1999, the M. H. de Young Museum invited curator Glen Helfand and artists to examine the museum from the inside out in an exhibition titled Museum Pieces. "The artists and I were, outside of practical restrictions, given an impressive amount of free reign. We scrambled through the attic, poked into files, gained access to security cameras, and navigated the internal bureaucracies," states Helfand in his voice-over narrative for the Museum Pieces video produced by artists Sergio De La Torre and Julio Morales. An installation by De La Torre and Morales that was included in the exhibition, mixed active surveillance video on an elegant rear-screen sculpture, making fun of the surveillance pre-occupation of institutions while offering up its aestheticised future.
    San Francisco and its southern Silicon Valley are at ground zero for the testing and questioning of this new media. Micro-technology develops and is used to support moving-image art in museums and galleries at just the time when we begin to move away from image in general. Steve Seid, curator of video at UC Berkeley's Pacific Film Archive, spoke of "a surveillance that doesn't necessarily involve moving images." For instance, Seid talked about a recent computer surveillance program called Spector: "Spector is more along the lines of where things are going. A lot of surveillance is displaced out of the image-world that we tend to think of. It's going towards the informational rather than the image, collating more and more data about everyone. It's more about consumption than policing." We've become trained through media saturation to police ourselves. "The kind of thing Safeway does when you belong to their club. They not only know what you buy, but when you do. Analysis gets into finer and finer detail, data becomes a (virtual) image of you. They no longer need an image or picture."
    The Bureau of Inverse Technology is a collective of artists working in close critique with science and technology. The videotape bitPlane is a remarkable work, an austere piece of surveillance video which manages to nose-in on the current state of technology from a new angle. Using a remote-controlled model plane equipped with a low-res video cam and transmitter, the Bureau invaded industrial airspace over the hi-tech campuses of Silicon Valley's major corporations, giving us a chaotic aerial mapping of the source-landscape of so much of our current technical necessities; a beautiful piece of pirate-radio surveillance. In her discussion of the Bureau's projects, theorist Natalie Jeremienko asks, "What is the political fabric of the information age? And what interventions can be made in a place where economics gets equated with politics, where diversity is rendered in homogeneous database fields, and where consumption forms identity?"
    Seid counters with a sobering glimpse into the future of consumer profiling: "You can go to a boutique on the Web, punch in your dimensions here, and they customize a mannequin with your dimensions. They put the blouse on you!"
    Owen O'Toole is a filmmaker and sound artist living in Northern California.

SEEKING A FRIEND

2012-07-04T00:34:00.001-07:00

The apocalypse film genre is one that draws me like a moth to the flame, so I took a rare film pass to see SEEKING A FRIEND FOR THE END OF THE WORLD, not because I'm a fan of Steve Carell or Kira Knightley. They both did a fine job in the film, but this movie is in some ways akin to a Bresson film, wherein the actors are there more as models to deliver their lines and let the ideas, the atmosphere, do the talking. There are a lot of good actors in SEEKING A FRIEND, but the film is made with such a casual demeanor that everyone gets to downplay their usual serious parts, even though the subject here is pretty serious: an Earth apocalypse by giant meteor. It's enlightening to watch people have to decide what's truly important in their lives and throw everything else away. With 3 weeks to live people turn to doing what is really important to them. I have watched some of Laura Linney's TV show THE BIG C recently and, diagnosed with advanced cancer, she goes about life in an entirely new way, no longer putting up with the bullshit that we often settle for in our assumedly livelong days. Linney's character waits several weeks to tell her family she has cancer, not wanting to fall too quickly into the trap of their sympathy and condolence. Carell and Knightley are drawn together in their final 3 weeks on Earth by a similar mutual detachment that allows them to make the most of the wretched situation and approach death somewhat at peace. While some people fall into the pit of their own worst qualities, these blessed souls find their higher selves at the final hour. It's an encouraging prospect: that apocalypse could be an opportunity for redemption on Earth and entirely unrelated to Christian legends of rapture and ascension. Goodness is its own reward. There is a funny scene at a TGIF-style restaurant named somewhat akin to a Hitchcock film, where the waiters seem to be all on ecstacy and the meal devolves into an orgy that must be escaped. Breaking into old friends' abandoned mansions and feasting from the restaurant grade freezer never tasted so good. There are also faint whiffs of THE OMEGA MAN in depictions of streets wandered by lost souls awaiting the end. The music theme, the High Fidelity-ish love for vinyl-- Kira walks through half of the film holding a short stack of LP favorites-- is amusing in a Music For A Desert Island way, but the retro-romantic Bacharach section was a bit indulgent to me. The sweetness of Things That Will Be Lost if we lose this world is definitely worth stating again and again and is a great function for film: to remind mankind not to crap his own nest, but Bacharach pushes the kitsch button in this instance. Otherwise I do laud writer-director Lorene Scafaria for her accomplishment; it's well written and shot, and I'll seek out her NICK AND NORA'S INFINITE PLAYLIST (writer) to see what else she's made of.

A HOLLIS FRAMPTON ODYSSEY

2012-05-18T14:32:00.000-07:00

Last week, my friend Jeff Plansker forwarded me a NYTimes article about Hollis Frampton's 1968 film SURFACE TENSION, which contains a race-walk through New York from the Brooklyn Bridge to Central Park using single-frame "timelapse". Writers Andy Newman and Michael Kolomatsky, as lovers of the New York they report on, have held the clip up for examination on the Times' website, including the repeated appearances by Frampton's then-girlfriend, and they also created a side-by-side comparison of the walking tour from Frampton's film and from their own cellphone.

http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/tag/surface-tension/

The interest and excitement, it turns out, comes from the fact that Criterion has just published a 2dvd set titled A HOLLIS FRAMPTON ODYSSEY, which contains 24 films by HF made between 1966 and 1979. SURFACE TENSION is one of the 24 films. Each of the films in the set merits the kind of re-examination that SURFACE TENSION has gotten on the NYTimes website. Last night, Jeff and I made our monthly pilgrimage to Amoeba Records in Hollywood, where I hoped to pick up the new Frampton set. What a long time coming... to be able to walk into a record store and buy the new Hollis Frampton record (Do You Feel Like We Do jokes aside) is very much a Holy Grail achieved. Similar to the recent find of film of the Rams vs. Giants Yankee Stadium game I attended with my father in 1970. In 1985 I made a short film titled FRAMES FOR FRAMPTON, an optical printer expansion of 1 roll of super8 film into 7 minutes of 16mm film. The super8 was shot in October of 1984 en route to Buffalo from Boston and back, to see a show of Frampton's work at the Albright-Knox Gallery. Frampton had died just earlier that year. The MIT Press publication RECOLLECTIONS AND RECREATIONS may have been the catalogue raisonne for that Frampton exhibit, which included many photographs, xerography, even books with bullet holes in them ("The Tortures of The Text"). The evening of my overnight visit, the entire HAPAX LEGOMENA series of films was screened, almost 3 hours of film. I shot my roll of super 8 around the Albright-Knox and ran into the nearby Forest Lawn Cemetary with the Beaulieu 4008ZM running around 8fps.

After finishing FRAMES FOR FRAMPTON, I arranged a screening of the film at a gallery in Boston as part of David Kleiler's Rear Window series. I rented Frampton's SURFACE TENSION to accompany FRAMES FOR FRAMPTON and to see the film myself, since no one else was showing his work. Fortunately, P. Adams Sitney and others had written gushing descriptions of Frampton's film triumphs. One of the great properties of Frampton's work is its conceptual nature: even a verbal description could create a strong filmlike image in your head. I devoted the next 5 or 6 years of my life to studying and promoting Frampton's work. I rented ZORN'S LEMMA and projected it one Saturday in the Somerville Theater on a Kodak Pageant arc projector the theater owned, part of a series of "Extended Theater" shows my friend Lenny DiFranza organized. I became somewhat obsessed with Frampton's MAGELLAN project, his metafilm history involving the creation of a film (or more) for every day of the year. I rented WINTER SOLSTICE and projected it on Dec 21 several years in various locations. WINTER SOLSTICE is the film that I most love Hollis Frampton for, and its inclusion in this Criterion set must be heralded as a landmark in experimental film publishing. I don't know of any film which has so completely taken me into a space of ecstatic film rapture. Focusing on the intense activity within a steelworks, we are treated to long passages of cascading showers of sparking steel fragments against an austere black background. The camera shutter creates motion effects akin to abstract animation, as flurries of yellow sparks fly in all directions. By his definitive capture of this light show, moreso than Dziga Vertov in Enthusiasm, Frampton has defined what an industrial art can be: a machine which reveals. He is a little bit Vulcan, a god of metals, through this film. I have't yet watched the dvd transfer. Frampton made films that made the day you saw them important. With Magellan, he also said that each day is invaluable, could be a day of Great Inspiration for the creative mind. I never met him but learned so much from him. He is sorely missed but finally celebrated publicly with this Criterion release.

Todd Edwards' LET'S BE FRANK at The Improv Lab

2012-04-11T21:55:00.005-07:00

Todd Edwards is a filmmaker and comedy writer I met through our sons being at the same pre-school. He's from the midwest, where he made an indy film called Chillicothe, which went to Sundance and got a lot of attention. Todd and brother Cory then made Hoodwinked (2005), a feature length animated film which gained distribution with the Weinsteins and did big box office. Todd has since made another indy feature called Jeffy Was Here, a music video for the Hansens, he writes constantly and has several projects in the pipeline. In his spare time, or to create an outlet for his ideas outside the sometimes slow process of studio greenlighting, Todd decided to present a night of his monologues, which took place on Monday, April 9th at the Improv Lab on Melrose in Los Angeles. The event was a benefit for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society of Los Angeles. I thought we might see Todd do several long pieces ala Spalding Gray, but instead he curated a set of pieces by eleven talented performers, largely of his own writing. It was a variety show, almost like a radio show, revolving around the core of Todd's formidable talent.

LET'S BE FRANK opened with a musical introduction by Frank Simes, the only true Frank on the bill. Frank played amplified acoustic guitar and sang two songs, I IMAGINED YOU and TOUCH ME NOW, both examples of his power pop talent earned from 30 years in the Los Angeles music scene. It would make a nice opening to any Hollywood evening, Frank's music being so well rooted in the clubs and stages of this town, besides being freshly returned from a tour of Italy with Roger Daltrey's band. The chorus of I IMAGINED YOU has been running through my head ever since.

Next, Todd hit the stage, dressed in the 80's finery of a leather jacket with sleeves pushed up and a kamikaze headband, to tell us the story RECORDS, about a sad sack who lost his record collection to an ex-girlfriend. Deciding to re-take his collection, he stands outside her apartment with field glasses and explains the convoluted reasoning behind his predicament. The absurd honesty of the character's self-absorption is familiar to any of us who live in our heads and depend on others being "less smart" than ourselves. Stalking appeared as a theme across the evening, in the over-the-top physical comedy of Vanessa Ragland, whose FRANKIE loudly pantomimed a hussy's unelegant attempts to mate at a dance bar, and with Katie Hooten she drawled the hip-hoppish girl duo music video HEY BOY, warning a one-time lover of how she would return to fuck up his world. FRANKIE and HEY BOY, written by Ragland and Hooten, who just happens to be Todd's sister, are both Fatal Attraction nightmares. The night could have been dubbed STALKERS, a night of monologues.

Cooper Thornton did a great Marine commander in MOON ATTACK, the pep talk given to a squad of soldiers preparing to offload on the moon and fight a group of threatening aliens. Again, Edwards' non-stop twisted reasoning corners the listener at the corner of fucked-up and funny. The story is a twist to the homophobic and plays well in our era of Santorum. A simple bleak drone in the background created an appropriate doomsday vibe.

Phil Lamarr performed POET, a spoof of radical chic poetry crossed with a pop culture crash on Billy Joel's ass. His delivery was a Howl and hootin was had later on. Jeff Grace did Todd's ORIENTATION, advising the audience as a group of maternity ward babies on the dos and don'ts of joining the general population. Samm Levine and Vanessa Ragland (again!) did a spoof of the I Can't Believe It's Not Butter commercial, each trying to overreach the other on how buttery or not the darn stuff might be.

There was not an INTERMISSION. But then Todd was back in a gentile wig and light blue windbreaker for SMUT CUTTERS, his portrayal of a religious video editor on the phone assuring a client he could and would rake any improper languange, violence, nudity or sexual situations from their movies, although he might also masterbate. Tim Hooten, the evening's MC and host/representative for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, blasted us with a parody of his own doctor's visit, when he was informed of his own leukemia. Fortunately, I have drunk beers with this man and know when he's being funny. In much of the evening's work there was a thin line between humor and frightening, and thus: LET'S BE FRANK. Todd and Tim and Vanessa and Katie are Seriously Funny, to quote the title of a book on the great American comics of the 50's and 60's (George Carlin, Woody Allen, Syd Ceasar, Lennie Bruce, among others). Finally, Cristine Rose turned the night upside down with GRAND OPENING, the hilarious telephonic brainstorm of a businesswoman trying to create an unforgettable store opening and throwing the kitchen sink at the problem.

Much of Todd Edwards' work depends on his deep resources for conjuring laundry lists of absurd ideas and situations, akin perhaps to another FRANK: the great radio theaterist Joe Frank, heard for many years on Pacifica Radio. Todd put together a night of entertainment that flowed like a radio show. There were many clever musical cues. He made it look easy to put on this kind of show and I could imagine him doing it again and again. A curator of smiles to beat the shit out of cancer.

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.