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Shades of Light

2011-09-26T22:29:00Z

An appropriately mysterious picture of Jordan Belson, from FC No. 48-49...

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Video Interview with Nathaniel Dorsky, A Coruna, Spain, June 2011

2011-10-05T09:05:00Z

This two hour and ten minute discussion is presented in three sections by Lumiere Magazine

While touring with my films in Spain this past spring, I had the pleasure to be honored with the attention of three young men who offered me the opportunity to participate in the following interview. I was touched by their earnestness, but also by sensing something out of the ordinary in their project. They seemed not of the common thread and their knowledge and respect for the subject matter was surprising and inspiring. How could they know so much about the American avant garde. We made a date to meet in my hotel lobby on Saturday a little after breakfast.

That morning, I awoke not too well and realized that soon a three hour video interview was expected. I did my best to muster up my energy and after a few cups of coffee and something to eat, we were all sitting around and preparing to begin. Right from the beginning our conversation drifted toward the subject of film language and what I found inspiring within the American avant garde and in films in general. This train of thought developed in many directions. I am happy that through the lucky coincidence of all present, something that began as an interview, quickly turned into a thing more marvelous, a genuine exploration.

After doing some editing in Spain, they presented me with the most wondrous of surprises: an interview, illustrated with film clips, a little like a dream. That this all came about spontaneously and in such an ordinary and friendly way is a great joy for me. I am extremely grateful. I only ask your indulgence for my exhaustion which results in many errors of speech. I find it interesting that my hands have come to the rescue and are vital players in the communication.
Nathaniel Dorsky

By Francisco Algarín Navarro and Félix García de Villegas, with the collaboration of Miguel Blanco Hortas and Marcos Ortega; translated by Miguel García, Miguel Armas, Miguel Blanco and Andrea Queralt; Video by Félix García de Villegas; Montage and subtitles by Francisco Algarín Navarro.

FIRST SECTION, ENTREVISTA CON NATHANIEL DORSKY (I), 55:07 min, from Revista Lumière on Vimeo.

SECOND SECTION, ENTREVISTA CON NATHANIEL DORSKY (II), 47:56 min from Revista Lumière on Vimeo.

THIRD SECTION, ENTREVISTA CON NATHANIEL DORSKY (III), 27:07 min from Revista Lumière on Vimeo.

Lumière Magazine www.elumiere.net

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Basso Profondo: Nathaniel Dorsky’s "The Return"

2011-09-25T17:56:00Z

Written by Michael Sicinski for Notebook MUBI and published on September 23

At the Q&A following the presentation of his latest film The Return, which had its world premiere at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival’s Wavelengths program, Nathaniel Dorsky was asked, “Could you please say a little bit about your editing style?” Without missing a beat, Dorsky replied, “How little?” It’s a great laugh-line (and like all of Dorsky’s Q&A humor, good natured and never at the questioner’s expense), but it also speaks to an irony about the reception of Dorsky’s cinema over the years, something to which I myself have hardly been immune. Since the late 1990s, when Dorsky emerged with what has become identified as his present, ongoing (not to say “mature”) style of filmmaking, inaugurated with Triste (1996) and Variations (1998), a great deal of attention has been paid to the highly unique editing patterns in these films, as well as their penetrating beauty.

The latter has proven an elusive topic for writers (myself included, though I’ve tried), since Dorsky’s images frequently appear to summon the sublime from the mundane and quotidian, not through arduous extraction but by an apparent glance or flick of the wrist, and even as I type these words I recognize that the alchemy they imply disguises the material labor that Dorsky clearly and lovingly pours into his films, the consummate craftsmanship at the sites of both shooting and assemblage, that produces this deceptive air of effortlessness. Still, it is Dorsky’s ability to notice and register the precise moment of (for example) multiple directions of motion—a horizontal bus passage and a diner patron standing up from a table—both reflected in the double reflection of facing plate glass windows, as the sun, glinting off a moving car, shifts the visual terms of the planes’ engagement, as well as their color values, a moment, that is, that exists in the human sensorium as peripheral excitation at best, that makes the individual shots of his films both unforgettable and hard to hold onto.

Since it is typically these singular moments that jump out and grab hold of a spectator during Dorsky’s films, at least upon initial viewing, critical discourse has largely focused on the editing patterns. This is not, I should add, because they are any easier to understand or describe. It can simply be a bit easier, initially, to get a grip on what these challenging films are not—edited to the measure of language—than on what they are—fully-formed, self-sufficient film images subject to macro-organization that, while in the midst of that flow of moments, can feel rather cloudlike. That’s because Dorsky’s films radically refute both the standard montage rhetoric of narrative cinema (weak articulation, predominant sameness, minor change within a basic framework of spatial and temporal continuity) and most avant-garde films (pattern repetition, clear delineation of a visual theme, or the minimization of editing in favor of long takes). Dorsky’s films, from shot to shot, emphasize a gentle dissimilarity (not “collision montage”), so as to generate for each shot a kind of full temporal presence, a hovering “now” that does not co-dependently cling for its meaning to the previous or the next shot.

This is not to say that there are not patterns or relationships; there are, and they become evident the longer you watch and the more times you view the films. But if the total picture is harder to conjure in your memory than it is for other films and filmmakers, it has to do with the replacement of the above mentioned aides memoire with full pictorial independence in the moment, summoned into existence as a single film (and not ever just a random assortment of single shots) by longer term rhymes, variations, and structures of intensity. Although Dorsky has cited Bresson and Ozu as forebears to this way of thinking about cinematic construction, it strikes me that the great Armenian independent Artavazd Peleshian and his theory of “distance montage” are just as apposite. Every shot retains its identity, while still gaining a new meaning through its association. (Not to put too fine a point on it, but this basic definition seems like a starting point not only for radical cinema, but radical democracy as well.)

Nevertheless, Dorsky’s latest film The Return is not only another perfect example of this method; it’s also one of the filmmaker’s finest works to date. Since the discontinuation of Kodachrome, Dorsky’s film of choice, he has had to turn to Fuji color film, essentially a new medium whose parameters he continues to explore. Let’s take a moment to consider this. Many film artists, both commercial and avant-garde, have stepped from celluloid to digital and merrily continued their practice as though nothing has changed. Dorsky’s work, just as much as any so-called structuralist, is so medium-specific that a switch from one kind of film to another, with its distinctive capacities and color temperatures, necessitates a new way of working, as well as set of works devoted to exploring (among other things) the material parameters of the new film. What The Return does on this score, first and foremost, is locate the bass register. This is a film that pushes the bottom, exploring the darkest reaches of the spectrum, the filmic black that is, in many ways, cinema’s last stand against digital encroachment. Although reading too much into a Dorsky title is usually a mistake, we might think of this is a “return” of the deep soul of film. In an interview with Filmmaker Magazine, Dorsky expressed his frustration with the Eastman color negative film used for his two previous films, Aubade and Pastourelle (both 2010) and his hopes for Fuji negative. It paid off.

But apart from the general depth of tone, The Return finds Dorsky exploring specific relationships of light and darkness within the frame, as well as multiple planes of focus and layers of ambiguity. The opening two shots are characterized by extreme darkness, pierced and anchored by a bright light on the left side of the frame. (The second time it grows larger and more colorful.) This maneuver recurs a few more times in the film. Dorsky, then, introduces the aesthetic “problem” of celluloid blackness not only through internal contrast, but also by easing us “into” the film frame from the side (not unlike Straub / Huillet’s real world-film world edge play). The “lighter side” is the boundary of our world, and we are gradually nudged into The Return’s dark spaces.

This is not, however, to say that The Return is a comprehensively black-filled film. Dorsky continually introduces contrasts, both within and across shots. Inside individual shots, the play of light and dark tends to be exaggerated through a masterful manipulation of flatness and depth. Sometimes, as with the street scene window reflections, this movement is rather obvious, engaging our eye almost immediately. But at other times Dorsky’s subtlety practically combines the painterly push/pull of Cézanne with the time-based misdirection of Tati. In several shots Dorsky fills the screen with an all-over pattern of gray puddle or pond water with light and movement, including reflected treetops. Then the “painterly” field will separate and divide, showing us that somehow we are viewing a double reflection of the water, or an upward reflection of an optical “event” on the ground, resulting in a tripled or even quadrupled plane of activity. Recall that even with the attenuated sunlight (triangulated from god-knows-where), this is a dark gray field, and so Dorsky’s image is registering micro-shifts between gradations of medium gray, again exploring the new film’s potentials for differentiation between darks.

But then there are similar shots of all-over light and dark interplay that amplify the use of the higher end of the temperature range, the deep darks operating more as crevices and inlets. This is especially the case in Dorsky’s close-up shots of flowers and tree branches, in which the negative space “holds” the Fuji blacks like a thick weave, sometimes resulting in undulating plays within, or along, an essentially flat surface, not unlike certain canvases by Pollock or de Kooning. Nevertheless, what at first appears basically two-dimensional is usually not; a slight shift in movement, the touch of the breeze, will activate the composition, so we see that there is a larger cluster of flowers in the foreground, or a crisscross of branches where we had originally seen only one solid object. This shift, of course, does many things within the frame, all at once, within a relatively brief span of time. It extends the “present tense” of the individual shot, instigating internal relationships that render any shot-to-shot semiotics wholly secondary. It activates the picture plane, alternating flatness and depth, in a manner related to but certainly different from that encountered in a modernist painting. It insists (if it has not already happened earlier in the shot) that the eye move through the picture plane, marking difference(s) within it, rather than try to absorb it as a whole meaning-sign (as in Eisenstein). And it alters the shot’s ratio of light and shadow, which is particularly significant in a work dedicated, in part, to exploring the potential depths of the exposed film image.

But then, as I mentioned above, Dorsky’s films always assemble their singular film images into macro-structures or assemblages. One of the reasons people like the questioner from the audience, or writers about Dorsky, tend to be interested in his editing patterns is precisely because these patterns are clearly perceptible but often difficult to parse, at least on initial viewing, because they do so eschew the syntactical shorthand that governs most films. Some of the recent films, such as Winter (2007) and Sarabande (2008), exhibited visual motifs based on recursive shapes. Winter features many variations on the diagonal, while Sarabande contained numerous spinning forms and helixes.

The Return, by contrast, does not have any single dominant form, but certain forms and patterns can be traced throughout it. For example, one shot of long, thin fronds waving in the foreground, moving in and out of the sun, serves to divide the screen into a light zigzag pattern: /\/\/\/\. Several shots later, we see this form repeated in a variety of subtle ways—jutting branches, the close-up tines of a fork on a lunch plate, fingers on gesticulating hands, etc. None of these images is a repetition of the original. Rather, they provide echoes across the time of the film—to paraphrase Jimi Hendrix, “slight returns.”

And if there is one dominant motif in Dorsky’s newest film, it is the idea that time, if we allow ourselves and the world enough of it, will instigate these slight returns and small disclosures. The movement of one plane behind another is a perceptual disruption, but only a temporary one. The planes shift, and those things that have left our field of vision almost always come back, albeit with a difference. From one set of shots to the next, The Return offers the purest of perceptual life—light, reflections, distortions, pure color—as well as natural forms, human beings, cats and dogs. However you, the viewer, define cinematic “life,” wait for a bit and it will “return.” Even one of Dorsky's classic motivic structures, the multi-shot sequence of beaded rain on glass, colored light popping through in drizzled intervals, “returns,” from earlier films, in all its cyclical autumnal grace. Likewise, Dorsky’s final shot, like so much else in The Return, harks back to many other elements in the film (the layered water, the play of deep gray, the raindrops) while retaining its strength as a self-sufficient image. It is a single gray cloud with a glowing penumbra. Over the length of the shot, the cloud (held steady in Dorsky’s camera) reveals the tiny edge of the sun peering out from its lower right hand corner. The film brings us gently out into the brightness again. Fiat lux. ■

article: MUBI Notebook

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Cinema Scope Online, Toronto International Film Festival 2011

2011-09-13T18:14:00Z

Review by Bart Testa of the Wavelengths program including the world premiere of The Return by Nathaniel Dorsky:

Cinema-Scope TIFF Day 5 Wavelengths

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Guillaume’s Conclusion

2011-08-28T21:53:44Z

I had always been convinced that in my small essays, the untold part was more meaningful…”
Chris Marker, Passengers

IMAGINE. Chris Marker’s enigmatic video of August 24, 2011, the day of Steve Jobs’ resignation, sent to some friends and associates without comment, in an email entitled “Guillaume’s Conclusion.”

Saying Goodbye

2011-09-09T23:56:00Z

It's been a rough year for the avant-garde community, with Tuesday's passing of George Kuchar and Jordan Belson adding to a list of recently deceased names whose contributions to said community were, and yet remain, invaluable. Kuchar and Belson were at opposite ends of the spectrum, both in terms of the work they produced and seemingly in their respective personalities, but both were essential all the same. Thankfully for us their work will continue to live on, containing innumerable wonders yet to be discovered...

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This first piece is an early 1967 interview conducted with the Kuchar brothers by Sheldon Renan which appeared in the no. 45 issue of Film Culture...

(Naked and the Nude by George & Mike Kuchar; via Anthology Archives)

(Lust for Ecstasy by George & Mike Kuchar)

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This second piece is an excerpt from Gene Youngblood's seminal Expanded Cinema, which was included in the no. 48-49 (1970) issue of Film Culture (apologies for the blurring, but I thought it was still readable and hopefully will serve as an encouragement to seek out Youngblood's Expanded Cinema, no doubt a must-read...

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Views from the Avant-Garde 2011

2011-08-27T23:18:00Z

The cinematic wonderland that is Views From the Avant-Garde is back in it's 15th edition this year, shaped as always by the sensitive and discerning hands of Mark McElhatten and Gavin Smith. The eye-popping schedule is as follows..

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VIEWS 2011 15TH EDITION

Curated by Mark McElhatten and Gavin Smith

Friday October 7

(The Return by Nathaniel Dorsky)

FRANCESCA BEALE THEATER

12:30pm

1. The Soul and the Stem

Señora con Flores / Woman with Flowers

Chick Strand, U.S./Mexico 1995/2011, 15m (preservation print from the Academy Film Archives)

Jan Villa

Natasha Mendonca, India/U.S., 2010, 20m

The Sole of the Foot

Robert Fenz, U.S/Germany 2011, 34m

Correspondence

Robert Fenz, U.S./Germany 2011, 30m

Total running time: 99m

3:15pm

2. Ben Rivers

Sack Barrow

U.K., 2011, 21m

Slow Action

U.K., 2010, 45m

Total running time: 66m

5:45pm

3. Bitches Brew

Posthaste Perennial Pattern

Jodie Mack, U.S., 2010, 3m 38s

Babobilicons

Daina Krumins, U.S., 1982, 16m (new 35mm preservation by the Academy Film Archive)

You Are Now Running On Reserve Battery Power

Jessie Stead, U.S., 2011, 11m

Hull

Tara Merenda Nelson, U.S., 2011, 7m 32s

from Jhana and the Rats of James Olds:

Telephone Call

Stephanie Barber, U.S., 2011, 1m

Billy and the Magician

Stephanie Barber, U.S., 2011, 3m 18s

Little Kitten

Stephanie Barber, U.S., 2011, 42s

Zero Buoyancy

Stephanie Barber, U.S., 2011, 4m 53s

Romance Novels

Stephanie Barber, U.S., 2011, 1m 4s

A Party Record Packed with Sex and Sadness

Bobby Abate, U.S., 2011, 10m 11s

Praxis 8 – 12 Scenes

Dietmar Brehm, Austria, 2010, 25m

Taste Test

Andrew Lampert, U.S., 2011, 2m 30s

Bitch-Beauty

MM Serra, U.S., 2011, 7m

Total running time: 107m

8:45pm

4. Ladders and Tracks

Berlin Tracks 18h00-20h00

Shiloh Cinquemani, U.S./Germany, 2011, 2m 7s

(k)now (t)here

Hey–Yeun Jang, U.S., 2011, 8m 50s

Subway

Angela Ferraiolo, U.S., 2011, 7m 40s

Village, silenced

Deborah Stratman, U.S., 2011, 4m 56s

Snakes and Ladders

Katherin McInnis, U.S., 2011, 3m

Longhorn Tremolo

Scott Stark, U.S., 2010, 16m

Land Fill

Jennifer Reeves, U.S., 2011, 8m 52s

Barren

Katherin McInnis, U.S., 2010, 2m

Back View

Vincent Grenier, U.S., 2011, 17m

The Toy Sun

Ken Kobland, U.S., 2011, 33m

Total running time: 104m

WALTER READE THEATER

1:00pm

5. OpenEndedGroup

Upending

U.S., 2011, 65m (digital 3-D)

3:30pm

6. Ken Jacobs:

SEEKING THE MONKEY KING

U.S., 2011, 40m

5:30pm

7. Ernie Gehr

Crystal Palace

U.S., 2002-11, 28m

Thank You For Visiting

U.S., 2010, 12m

Mist

U.S., 2010, 9m

ABRACADABRA

U.S., 2009, 39m

Total running time: 88m

8:30pm

8. George Kuchar

Lingo of the Lost

U.S., 2010, 37m 45s

Empire of Evil

U.S., 2011, 50m

Total running time: 87m

Saturday October 8

FRANCESCA BEALE THEATER

11:15am

9. Cabinet of Curiosities

Between Gold

Jonathan Schwartz, U.S., 2011, 10m 42s

Tin Pressed

Dani Leventhal, U.S., 2011, 6m 23s

Fifteen an Hour

Kevin Jerome Everson, U.S., 2011, 6m

Tableaux Vivants

Vincent Grenier, U.S., 2011, 10m 20s

Curious Light

Charlotte Pryce, U.S., 2011, 4m 12s

Forms Are Not Self-Subsistent Substances

Samantha Rebello, U.K., 2010, 22m

The Matter Propounded, of its Possibility or Impossibility, treated in four Parts

David Gatten, U.S., 2011, 13m

from Jhana and the Rats of James Olds

Miniatures

Stephanie Barber, U.S., 2011, 2m

Degas

Stephanie Barber, U.S., 2011, 58s

The Eclipse

Stephanie Barber, U.S., 2011, 33s

ransom notes

Kelly Egan, Canada, 2011, 4m

Conjuror’s Box

Kerry Laitala, U.S., 2011, 4m

Total running time: 82m

1:45pm

10. Looking Through a Glass Onion

Passage Upon the Plume

Fern Silva, U.S., 2011, 6m 46s

Shayne’s Rectangle

Dani Leventhal, U.S., 2011, 5m 4s

Line Describing Your Mom

Michael Robinson, U.S., 2011, 5m 50s

Gossip

Bobby Abate, U.S., 2011, 8m 19s

from Jhana and the Rats of James Olds

Tatum’s Ghost

Stephanie Barber, U.S., 2011, 3m 45s

The Death of the Gorilla

Peter Mays, U.S., 1966, 16m (new restoration by the Academy Film Archive)

By foot-candle light

Mary Helena Clark, U.S., 2011, 9m

A LAX RIDDLE UNIT

Laida Lertxundi, Spain, 2011, 9m

Sounding Glass

Sylvia Schedelbauer, Germany, 2011, 7m

The Evil Eyes

Bobby Abate, U.S., 2010, 18m

Total running time: 89m

4:15pm

11. Betzy Bromberg

Voluptuous Sleep

U.S., 2011, 95m

7:15pm

12. Jerome Hiler & Nathaniel Dorsky

Words of Mercury

Jerome Hiler, U.S., 2011, 25m

The Return

Nathaniel Dorsky, U.S., 2011, 27m

Total running time: 54m

9:30pm

13. John Zorn: A Film in 15 Scenes

15 scenes: 254 shots

Gobolux, U.S., 2011, 15m

Well Then There Now

Lewis Klahr, U.S., 2011, 19m 30s

Bare Room

Joey Izzo, U.S., 2011, 31m 33s

arcana

Henry Hills, U.S./Austria, 2011, 33m

Total Running Time: 97m

WALTER READE THEATER

11:00am

14. Jean-Marie Straub

Lothringen!

co-directed with Danièle Huillet

France, 1994, 20m

Un héritier

France/South Korea, 2011, 20m

L’Inconsolable

France, 2011, 15m

Schakale und Araber

Switzerland, 2011, 11m

Total running time: 66m

1:15pm

15. Klaus Wyborny

Studies for the Decay of the West

Germany, 2010, 80m

4:00pm

16. Daniel Eisenberg: The Unstable Object

Less and Less / Toujours moins

Luc Moullet, France, 2010, 14m

The Unstable Object

U.S./Germany/Turkey, 2011, 69m

With

Total running time: 83m

6:45pm

17. Kevin Jerome Everson

Quality Control

U.S., 2011, 70m 42s

The Prichard

U.S., 2011, 11m 18s

Total running time: 82m

9:45pm

8. George Kuchar

see Friday October 7, 8:30pm, Walter Reade

Sunday October 9

FRANCESCA BEALE THEATER

12 noon

1. The Soul and the Stem

see Friday October 7, 12:30pm, Francesca Beale Theater

2:45pm

12. Jerome Hiler & Nathaniel Dorsky

see Saturday October 8, 7:15pm, Francesca Beale Theater

5:30pm

13. Ladders and Tracks

see Friday October 7, 8:45pm, Francesca Beale Theater

8:15pm

18. The Red and The Black

River Rites

Ben Russell, U.S./Suriname, 2011, 11m 30s

Shadow, Seed, Spagyric

David Baker, U.S., 2011, 5m 12s

Peril of the Antilles

Fern Silva, U.S., 2011, 5.51m

A Preface to Red

Jonathan Schwartz, U.S./Turkey, 2010, 6m

Protocol

Lina Rodriguez, Canada/Colombia

2011, 1m 15s

Imperceptihole

Lori Felker & Robert Todd, U.S., 2011, 14m 37s

Light Licks: By the Waters of Babylon: I WANT TO PAINT IT BLACK

Saul Levine, U.S., 2011, 12m

Third Law: N Kedzie Blvd.

Mike Gibisser, U.S., 2011, 7m 10s

Slow Burn

Jesse Cain, U.S., 2011, 19m 46s

Total running time: 86m

WALTER READE THEATER

1:00pm

19. Virgin Springs

Baptismal Sticks and Stones

April Simmons, U.S., 2011, 6m 50s

Devils Gate

Laura Kraning, U.S., 2011, 20m

Twice Removed

Leslie Thornton, U.S., 2011, 11m

Ricky

Janie Geiser, U.S., 2011, 11m

Silent Springs

Erin Espelie, U.S., 2011, 12m 57s

Gazette

Eliénore de Montesquiou, Russia/Estonia, 2009, 4m 12s

Kudzu Vine

Josh Gibson, U.S., 2011, 19.52m

Total running time: 86m

3:30pm

20. Lewis Klahr

The Pettifogger

U.S., 2011, 65m

6:00pm

4. John Zorn: A Film in 15 Scenes

see Saturday October 8, 9:30pm, Francesca Beale Theater

9:00pm

21. James Benning

Twenty Cigarettes

U.S., 2011, 99m

Monday October 10

FRANCESCA BEALE THEATER

11:00am

9. Cabinet of Curiosities

see Saturday October 8, 11.15am, Francesca Beale Theater

1:30pm

22. Aurand/Muñoz/Sami

Villatalla

Jeannette Muñoz, Switzerland/Chile/Italy, 2011, 21m 59s

A Year / Ein Jahr

Renate Sami, Germany, 2011, 12m

Young Pines / Junge Tiefern

Ute Aurand, Germany/Japan, 2011, 43m

Total running time: 76m

3:45pm

10. Looking Through a Glass Onion

see Saturday October 8, 1.45pm, Francesca Beale Theater

6:30pm

23. Paul Clipson Super 8 performance

Chorus

U.S., 2009/2011, 8 min

Compound Eyes No. 1-5

U.S., 2011, 27min

Light from the Mesa

U.S., 2010, 7m

Chorus

U.S., 2009/2011, 8m (16mm version)

Morphologies

U.S., 2011, 20m

Total running time: 70m

8:45pm

3. Bitches Brew

see Friday October 7, 5:45pm, Francesca Beale Theater

WALTER READE THEATER

11:30pm

14. Jean-Marie Straub

see Saturday October 8, 11:00pm, Walter Reade Theater

1:45pm

6. Ken Jacobs

see Friday October 7, 3:30pm, Walter Reade Theater

3:00pm

20. Lewis Klahr

see Sunday October 9, 2:30pm, Walter Reade Theater

5:00pm

19. Virgin Springs

see Sunday October 9, 1:00pm, Walter Reade Theater

7:30pm

24. Ben Rivers: Two Days At Sea

U.K., 2011, 86m

Elinor Bunin Munroe amphitheatre

Premieres presented on the Film Center’s Panasonic 152-inch 4K plasma screen

Daily Friday October 7-10

Open to the general public, with no admission charge

All the work will be repeated across the four days in groupings and individual rotations several times a day.

Confirmed:

John Krieg Exiting the Falk Corporation in 1971

James Benning, U.S, 2011, 71m

Soft Palate

Martin Arnold, Austria, 2010, 3m 10s

Self Control

Martin Arnold, Austria, 2011, 1m 56s,

Picture Taking

Ernie Gehr, U.S., 2011, 9m 30s

Armoire (Four Parts)

Vincent Grenier, U.S., 2007-2011, 9m 5s

TBD

Dani Leventhal

Traders Leaving the Exchange, A Guard and the Street

Les Leveque, U.S., 2011, 15m

from The Binocular Series

Leslie Thornton, U.S., 2011

(The Toy Sun by Ken Kobland)

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Personal photos: mid 1960's, New York City

2011-08-17T18:00:00Z

Six photos: two from 1965, two from 1967, two from 1970

Nathaniel Dorsky 1965

The first photo was taken in the Winter of 1965 on East 21st Street by my room mate Tony Baczewski. I was very proud of my extra heavy coat that I had bought at the Hudson Army Navy Store at a time when that type of store was a real rarity. I had been working for two years as a projectionist at the New School for a film class taught be a truly wonderful man named Joseph Goldberg. The class was a survey of world cinema and I learned a tremendous amount about light and compassion. I had a revelation one evening upon seeing Carl Dreyer's "Passion of Joan" concerning the nature of film as light unfolding in time. It was an extraordinarily strong experience. From that moment on I never "read" a film again, I directly saw them. It was a real turning point for me. Suddenly, one knew everything about cinema! Till this day I can easily tell when hearing someone speak of film whether they have had this epiphany. It means everything to me.

I had just finished making "A Fall Trip Home" which I completed in the late autumn having finished "Ingreen" a few months earlier. There was a very well-to-do woman in the New School class named Gay Matthaei who wanted to make a film along with her twin sister, Jewel, about painters for children. Gay later became well known for having commissioned Diane Arbus to photograph her daughter's birthday party. She asked Goldberg for a recommendation for a film maker and he recommended me. I was shocked and felt way over my head, but I rose to the occasion and designed, photographed and edited a film for them called "Where Time is a River". We shot only the actual paintings (Rousseau, Gauguin, Chagall and Leger) and it was quite dreamy to have access to museums after hours and enter the homes of some of the grandest families in Manhattan. It was my first real film making job and it turned out very well. During this period Stan Brakhage visited New York to show films and I invited him to my East 21st Street apartment to see "Ingreen". He came over with Naiomi Levine and we looked at her film, "Yes" and then "Ingreen". Stan liked it very much but objected to my use of sound for dramatic impact. That spring I began shooting the third film in my hometown trilogy, "Summerwind". It was a difficult struggle, as I was trying to break away from the superimposition style of the two earlier films. Willard Van Dyke of MoMA chose it for a museum sponsored tour of Japan, and it was also selected for Gian Carlo Menotti's Festival of Two Worlds in Spoleto, Italy. I was honored and could hardly believe it.

Slavko Vorkopich and Nathaniel Dorsky, Winter, 1965, after a lecture at MoMA

The second photo was taken by Jerome Hiler who was covering the very influential Slavko Vorkopich lectures at the Museum of Modern Art for Film Culture. After the lectures a group of us would join Vorkopich at the 6th Avenue Delicatessen for further discussions. This photo was taken there. These lectures were a defining moment for my generation. They were a thorough exposition of how film works visually, with a very generous supply of projected examples. I remember being so proud that he included excerpts from the work of the American avant-garde, as at that time these works were not recognized in the more official circles. I was recently reminiscing with George Kuchar about those lectures and he told me how much they had affected his film making.

Jerome Hiler, 1967, New York City

Nathaniel Dorsky, 1967, New York City

The third and fourth photos were taken in December at a wedding party for a friend, Paul Glickler and his wife, Cabell Smith. I had met Paul on a film project that involved my shooting paintings by Paul Gauguin for a television documentary for CBS News called "Gauguin in Tahiti: Search for Paradise". It was an extremely fortunate job, as I was soon to win an Emmy Award for that work and get a kiss from Imogene Coca live on national television.

That autumn, Jerome and I had moved to the rural north-west corner of New Jersey about two hours from Manhattan. We had come upon a house to rent on a lake with two fireplaces for eighty-five dollars a month. We would live there for three years, making many trips into the city. This is the period of time I shot most of my footage for "Hours for Jerome". Although we lived simply, we always were in need of work. Once, the mythic film maker, Ralph Steiner, came up to our house with Mrs. Willard Van Dyke, also of MoMA. I had gotten a commission to edit three of his later films. He offered me the use of the 35mm camera he had shot "The City" with, but I was too overwhelmed to take up his offer. One other commission is worth mentioning from those years in the country. I was the volunteer projectionist at our rural county library and programmed a show once a month from the rotating collection of 16mm films. The library acquired a grant to make a film about itself and Jerome and I were hired. We loved making this film together and created an extremely rich montage with a wide variety of local citizens using the various services. We were very friendly with the musician and film maker Tony Konrad at that time and we hired him to do the music. His wife, Beverly Grant, who was in Jack Smith's "Flaming Creatures" read the voice-over.

We were obligated to call it "Library", but our real wishes were "Books for All", a slogan on the side of their bookmobile.

In New York, Jerome had worked as the assistant to a society and fashion photographer, Fred Eberstadt, from the first day I met him. Fred and his wife, Isabel, were very well-to-do and very much in the social spotlight. Jerome was commissioned to make a film about Fred's mother's garden and estate, Target Rock, on Long Island. It was a personal gift for members of Fred's family, but later Jerome had the opportunity to show it publicly at Lincoln Center. Isabel was a friend of the film maker, Jack Smith, and Andy Warhol during those wild and heady days of the mid Sixties. She once came home with an "Andy Marilyn" and Fred was furious that she had spent 1,200 dollars for such a painting.

Jerome was also working at that time as the projectionist for the avant-garde showcase at the 41st Street Theater. He has more than enough hilarious stories to fill a short book. Tales of his fist fight in the projection booth with an audience member who stormed the booth to try to stop the film, "Academy Leader" by Bruce Conner, many things like that. Jerome was the first projectionist for Warhol's "Chelsea Girls", which was shown on two projectors simultaneously. Andy worked with Jerry and gave him the freedom to choose which of the two screens he would source the sound from and to which reels he would add various colored gels in front of the projector lens. Occasionally we would drive in from the country if the theater needed something special from the projectionist. One such evening Jerome projected a twenty-four hour film called "Four Star" by Warhol. The film cans were piled everywhere in the booth to shoulder height with crazed superstars forcing their way into the booth, pressuring Andy to play their reel at a respectable hour. All this maniacal energy backed up with speed and black leather.

Jerome and I always enjoyed our trips home after such events. Arriving late at night and getting out of the car under a canopy of stars, smelling the cool forest and hearing the silence. I want to include two more photos at this point even though they are from l970, the last year we would share that wonderful country house on Lake Owassa. They were taken by Fred Eberstadt in his studio on one of our city visits a year before we decided to move to San Francisco.

Nathaniel Dorsky

Jerome Hiler, 1970, New York City

Nathaniel Dorsky, 1970, New York City

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Video of the day. Raya Martin's "Ars colonia" (2011)

2011-07-19T13:50:03Z

Directed by Raya Martin. Commissioned to play before films at the International Film Festival Rotterdam 2011 made with contributions from the Hubert Bals Fund.

Movie Poster of the Week: The Posters of the Stenberg Brothers

2011-07-23T13:11:11Z

There is a terrific exhibition of Soviet Revolutionary Movie Posters currently running, through next Friday, at the Tony Shafrazi Gallery in New York. Of the 95 posters on display (many of which are the sole surviving examples and have never been publicly exhibited before) almost half are by Vladimir and Georgii Stenberg, my choices for the two greatest movie poster designers of all time.

Back in 1997, MoMA mounted a retrospective of the Stenberg Brothers’ work which is what turned me on to them. The catalogue, a must-have for anyone interested in movie posters and graphic design, is out of print but used copies can still be found.

Born in 1899 and 1900 to a Swedish father and a Russian mother, the brothers initially studied engineering and fine arts. Pioneers of Constructivism, they worked as sculptors, architects and designers of everything from railway carriages to theater sets to women’s shoes, always working in collaboration with each other. But it was as movie poster designers, in the glorious spring of Soviet Cinema, that they excelled. From their first poster for The Eyes of Love in 1923 until Georgii’s untimely death ten years later in a motorcycle accident, they designed more than 300 posters. (Vladimir continued to design film posters, though with less distinction, and was appointed Chief Designer for Moscow’s Red Square. He died in 1982.)

What is extraordinary about the Stenbergs' posters, beyond their amazingly expressive and dynamic use of color, composition and typography, which has rarely been equalled, is that, though they look like photomontage they are actually almost entirely illustration. The ever-inventive Stenbergs had constructed a prototype overhead-projector which would allow them to project filmstrips onto their posters and to copy and embellish faces and bodies (as well as to distort them if necessary), hence their photorealist look. This gave their posters a consistency and quality that would have not been possible to achieve, due to the limitations of the printing processes available at the time, by cutting and pasting photographs onto paper.

There are way too many great Stenberg posters to do justice to them in one post, so for now I thought I’d show ten of my all-time favorites. I didn’t repeat the two that I placed at the top of my recent Dziga-Vertov post, even though they are certainly two of my favorites.

The poster above is for the German film Six Girls Seeking Shelter (Hans Behrendt, 1927). I love its combination of realism (two women’s faces and legs which are repeated three times) and abstraction (the grid of yellow, black and grey for their dresses) and the way the woman's arms spill into that grid.

This enormous poster (104" x 80", the size of 8 one-sheets) for the international export of Eisenstein's October (1927) was created in collaboration with Yakov Ruklevsky who is occasionally credited with the brothers. All of the Stenbergs’ posters are dynamic, but there is something especially thrilling and three dimensional about that blue gun-wielding sailor looming out of the top diagonal of the poster and the red revolutionaries pulling the cannon, straining towards the edges of the frame.

This playful and energetic poster is for The Last Flight (Ivan Pravov, 1929), a film about a circus troupe marooned in southern Russia during the 1917 revolution. The Stenbergs' use of concentric circles is one of my favorite elements in their work. I’m also especially drawn to their deep black backgrounds.

Another German film, Which of the Two or Manhunt (Nunzio Malasomma, 1926). With its concentric circles and dual figures, it nicely echoes the poster above, though to very different effect. Brilliant use of perspective and depth. Note the Stenbergs' signature bottom right, which reads 2 Stenberg 2.

A 1927 poster for the German film High Society Wager or The Weather Station (Carl Froelich, 1923) about a social climbing couple who fall victim to gambling, beautifully symbolized by the staircase they are ascending and their emerging nemesis below. The spiral staircase is reminiscent of the Stenbergs' own Constructivist sculptures, and also Vladimir Tatlin’s Monument for the Third International which is also on display at Shafrazi.

Though this looks as if it might be a poster for a noirish thriller about a man on the run, Cement (Vladimir B. Vilner, 1928) is actually a film about the lives of workers in a cement factory. The man’s head and hand are the only obviously realistic elements in what otherwise could be a Malevich geometric abstraction. The representation of refracted light (which I assume is sunlight streaming into the dark bowels of the factory) and the reflection of light from window panes is exquisite.

Though it looks like a science-fiction film with aliens invading on surfboards and some outlandish air-sea contraption, SEP (1929) was actually a training film for army personnel, one of two equally bizarre posters the Stenbergs produced for it. Though the Stenbergs apparently never saw a skyscraper, they frequently appear in their posters which are almost exclusively urban in their settings.

The Man from the Forest (Georgi Stabovi, 1928). Apparently little is known about this Ukrainian film but the poster is one of the best examples of the Stenbergs’ use of extreme close-ups (attuned as they always were to the grammar of cinema) most of which are of women's faces, as also seen below.

A 1927 poster for Chaplin’s A Woman of Paris (1923) also done in collaboration with Ruklevsky (see their combined signatures). An exquisite and unusual composition, one of many bissected Stenberg designs, but especially interesting in the way the two images merge in those angled bars at the bottom right and the way the credits perfectly marry the curve of the woman’s face.

And finally, one of two posters that the Stenbergs made in 1929 for Buster Keaton’s The General (1927) (the other one is amazing too). Both of them are quite different in color and composition from most of the brothers’ work. The use of non-Cyrillic typography (though the N is rendered as an H) to create Buster's suit is just one of many examples of the Stenbergs' inventive use of type.

If you’re in New York and can brave the heat, go see the the Shafrazi show before it ends on Friday (note that the gallery is closed Sunday and Monday). If you can’t, there are some great photos of the show here and you can scroll through all the posters on the Shafrazi website. It's a treat to see the originals, because the colors on a lot of these posters are often reproduced inconsistently in print. Also, you can really study the Stenbergs' illustration technique up close. But on the website you have the advantage of the posters being labelled, which they are rather frustratingly not in the gallery.

I am indebted for many of the scans to New Zealander Giovanni Tiso, who in 2010 was posting a "Daily Stenberg" on his blog. I was sorry he stopped at #48.

Since these ten are just the tip of the iceberg of the 300 posters the Stenbergs produced, of which at least 100 are extant, expect more Stenberg posts in the near future.

Collaborators, War Stories and Roads Not Taken: An Interview with Monte Hellman

2011-07-02T21:20:19Z

For a self-described "reactionary" filmmaker, Monte Hellman is remarkably forward-thinking. Road to Nowhere (reviewed here), his first feature since 1989, is a film shot digitally that's partly about cinema in the digital age; from its very first shot—where a character pops a DVD-R with the film's title on it into a laptop—on, Road to Nowhere is a film about the slipperiness of digitally created, manipulated and viewed images. Written by longtime Hellman collaborator Steve Gaydos, it stars Shannyn Sossammon as Laurel, an inexperienced actress who is cast in a true crime drama also called Road to Nowhere (directed by one “Mitchell Haven” and written by one “Stephen Gates”); in this film-within-a-film, Laurel plays femme-fatale-ish Velma Duran, though the whole thing is ambiguous enough (in terms of structure, characterization, aesthetics, etc.) that at least one character begins to suspect that Laurel and Duran are in fact the same person.

Hellman is erudite and easygoing. We spoke by phone earlier this month, right before he was due to present Road to Nowhere at Karlovy Vary. I wanted to focus the conversation on his newest film and the last two films he made before taking a two decade leave of absence from directing: Iguana (1988) and the direct-to-video horror film Silent Night, Deadly Night III: Better Watch Out (1989). I began by asking him how Road to Nowhere had come together.

***

MONTE HELLMAN: Steve Gaydos had the idea and he presented it to me. He claims that I haven’t liked any of his ideas in the last forty years; somehow this one attracted me. He wrote the first draft of the script. Then we sat around the kitchen table with a couple of our friends and tossed ideas around, then he went back another draft and then we started shooting. It changed quite a bit during the shooting, because the actors, after a few takes, would start to improvise a little bit. Sometimes, it was just a matter of restructuring it, putting scenes in different places.

IGNATIY VISHNEVETSKY: Did you work with Gaydos on the set, or, once the movie started shooting, was the restructuring all up to you?

HELLMAN: It just happened. We didn’t think we were restructuring. Steve was on location, but he didn’t come on the set very much and he didn’t travel around the rest of the world with us. A lot of scenes that were re-written were rewritten because we couldn’t afford a location. We were gonna shoot Florida as Cuba and it turned out to be too expensive a location for us, so, fortunately, we didn’t shoot the backstory with “the real Velma Duran.” I was intending to shoot that with Shannyn as well, but that would have been really confusing.

VISHNEVETSKY: There was originally a full backstory and an explanation of what’s going on?

HELLMAN: We hear it in the dialogue: “The real Velma Duran died fighting oppression in Cuba.” We were gonna show her being captured by the secret police in Cuba and being killed. It would have made the picture unweidly in terms of length and it would have made it more confusing that it already is.

VISHNEVETSKY: The end credits of the film say that it’s based on a true story.

HELLMAN: [laughing] Not that part. There is a part that we realized after the fact… Well, I think all fiction comes out of your life experiences. We found out that the basic situation of someone getting drunk and accidentally killing somebody had happened to a close friend of ours. And—partially intentionally—the character of Laurel was somewhat based on Laurie Bird. A lot of her dialogue was lifted from things Laurie had said in life.

VISHNEVETSKY: You and Steve Gaydos have worked together for a long time. He wrote Iguana…

HELLMAN: Yes, he worked on Iguana and he worked on a number of scripts that did not get made. We’ve been very close friends and collaborators for almost forty years.

VISHNEVETSKY: Didn’t he work on Silent Night, Deadly Night III: Better Watch Out, too? I heard he re-wrote it.

HELLMAN: I was taking a page out of Howard Hawks’ diary. Hawks frequently had several writers working on a film, and he had one writer who just wrote the gags. Steve wrote the gags on Silent Night, Deadly Night III.

VISHNEVETSKY: After Silent Night, Deadly Night III, you didn’t make a feature for a little over 20 years. Did you and Steve Gaydos work on any projects in the interim?

HELLMAN: There were a number of projects I was trying to get on, and, indeed, we’re still trying to get them made. The one I hope to do next is one I’ve been working on for at least that long. It’s harder to describe than Road to Nowhere. It’s a supernatural, ticking-clock timebomb romantic thriller. It’s about these two people. One is a CIA assassin, the other is the wife of a diplomat, and both are murdered in the first ten minutes of the movie. They meet after death, fall in love and find out that if you meet somebody after death that you were destined to be with, then—through some error of the establishment up above or wherever they are—you can go back to the moment of your death and live 24 hours. And if you’re still physically together and still in love at the end of 24 hours, you can live out your life.

VISHNEVETSKY: That sounds like a pretty complicated production…

HELLMAN: [laughing] It’s not too bad, really. There aren’t too many characters, except for all of the ghosts wandering around in the background.

VISHNEVETSKY: You shot Road to Nowhere on a Canon 5D. It’s referenced in the dialogue—there’s a moment where the Mitchell Haven character, who I guess is analogous to you, touts the cost. Having taken a 20 year break from directing features, what’s it like to come back at a time when you can shoot a feature on what’s essentially a consumer still camera?.

HELLMAN: The character is not based on me, but the work he’s doing and the way the movie is shot is definitely linked to my experiences. I’m a reactionary filmmaker, but I’m an early adopter in terms of technology. I’ve been into digital still photography for a long time. I’ve had a number of shows with digital prints, so it was a natural progression. I think digital photography is so much better. You have more precise control over dodging, color, everything in digital still photography. The same is true in motion picture digital photography. It’s so much better than sitting with a timer and having a lab act on your suggestions and waiting for what happens with a bunch of chemicals. Here you can instantly see the result and it’s locked there. And, that particular camera—[Haven] compares it to the Thomson Viper, which is a half-million dollar camera. God knows what it costs to rent. And the 5D is $3,000, and in most ways it’s better.

VISHNEVETSKY: Why call yourself a reactionary filmmaker?

HELLMAN: Well, my style of directing hearkens back to Hawks and Hitchcock and Huston and George Stevens.

VISHNEVETSKY: But the film to me feels very modern. Maybe it’s the use of technology, and the way technology is involved in the plot. Do you think of yourself as a person who is trying to use modern technology to explore what you believe are classical ideas?

HELLMAN: [laughing] I’ll accept that.

VISHNEVETSKY: I’ll take that as a “yes”… Besides Steve Gaydos, you’re worked before with this film’s cinematographer, Josep M. Civit, who also worked on Iguana…

HELLMAN: That’s right. That was our first picture together. You find somebody that does it the way you like, it’s natural that you keep wanting to work together. The process of finding Josep was extremely difficult. I had gone to Spain looking for the man who shot The Spirit of the Beehive, Luis Cuadrado. He had been suggested to me by Néstor Almendros. I got to Spain and discovered that, not only had he died, but that he been 95% blind when he photographed Spirit of the Beehive. He would have his assistant describe the sets to him and would then tell the assistant where to put each light in the room and how much intensity and so forth. So then I tried to get his assistant. He signed on, but then we were delayed and he committed to another picture. So I spent days at the cinematheque in Madrid looking at one reel each of about 25 movies before I found Josep. And once you find an actor or any other collaborator that you like working with, you don’t wanna go through the process of searching all over again.

VISHNEVETSKY: How did Iguana come together?

HELLMAN: Ate de Jong had been asked to direct it and he was not interested in the project, so he suggested me. The producer had a number of other names he was looking at, but he called me first because he believed in numerology and—as you now know—my phone number has two 3s in it. He called me and I went to meet with him in New York. He had a screenplay, which was just the worst you could imagine. My first reaction was just to turn it down. We had another meeting in Los Angeles and a friend of mine who speaks Italian was there as a translator and when I would say "Well, I don't think I could really do this," he would translate it as "I can do this as long as I can make some changes to the screenplay." So, inadvertently I wound up getting involved in it and we did indeed write a whole new screenplay.

VISHNEVETSKY: As unusual as Iguana is, Silent Night, Deadly Night III is usually pointed out as the oddest work in your filmography.

HELLMAN: Well, I had the flu and my good friend Arthur Gorson asked me to direct it; it was his first picture as a producer. Again I turned it down—I didn't need a translator this time—but he kept asking me. I guess in a weak moment I said the same thing that my friend had mistranslated before: "Well, if I can throw the script away and start all over again..." And he said fine. We literally wrote a new script in a week. Steve came on board and my daughter came on board and they kind of polished the original script and we were off. We were literally still writing the script when I, in my weakened condition, was going off and scouting locations. Three weeks later we started shooting.

VISHNEVETSKY: A lot of people assume making the movie was a negative experience for you, since you didn't make a feature for two decades afterwards.

HELLMAN: It was not a negative experience. I had a great time working on it! But it did in effect kind of stunt my career. Just because of the genre, everyone assumed that it was gonna be horrible and they still call it the "blot" on my career. Whatever the movie was, I thought my work in it was my best to date, though naturally I think Road to Nowhere surpasses that by a lot. I don't think that Iguana is necessarily my best work because I was hampered by really bad production. We literally had nothing that we needed. I feel like it's my equivalent of directing Our Town on a bare stage with two ladders. We had no lights for three weeks. We were waiting for them to arrive by a slow boat by way of China or something. Josep did admirably; I think one of the most beautiful scenes in the movie was in the church where the priest is lecturing—and that was all natural light. We were shooting interior and a few exteriors all with only the aid of reflectors. I think we had no lights until our last week of shooting in the Canary Islands.

VISHNEVETSKY: Before embarking on shooting a film digitally, did you look at any recent films that had been shot digitally for inspiration?

HELLMAN: Well, it was really a brand new camera. We ran it through every possible test, so that we knew what its limitations were and what its advantage were. It was a very conscious choice to choose the [5D] over the Red. There's such a myth about the Red; I think the 5D goes way beyond it. The color looks so much like original IB Technicolor, it's incredible.

VISHNEVETSKY: You said earlier there were some scenes you didn't end up shooting...

HELLMAN: I think the only part we didn't shoot was the backstory with the real Velma Duran, but we did shoot pretty much everything else, though the scenes wound up in different places in the movie. Just as an example: the script opens up with the scene of Velma in her room and then cuts to Fabio Testi and Cliff De Young. There were so many different things going on very quickly and I decided in the editing process—and maybe I knew it when shooting, or else I wouldn't have spent so much time on the hair dryer scene—that I wanted to open with the simpler backstory of the plot where she pretends to commit suicide.

VISHNEVETSKY: Partly because there's a film-within-a-film in this movie, the identities of the characters often shift around. Is that something that was intended from the beginning?

HELLMAN: No, the only thing we wanted to do was to get into some of the stuff that Alain Resnais had done. It seems like [Road to Nowhere] is influenced by Last Year at Marienbad, but really the movie that influenced us the most was Stavisky...—it's one of my favorite movies. I was involved with a Robbe-Grillet project, though: an adaptation of La maison de rendez-vous. We prepped that movie, but the producer pulled the plug before we had a chance to make it. That was in about 1973.

VISHNEVETSKY: I'm intrigued by all of these unrealized projects, especially since you mentioned that you were trying to get movies made between 1989 and 2010. How many were there?

HELLMAN: There were at least half a dozen. And before 1989, many more. The ratio of movies I've worked on to the movies I've made is probably five-to-one.

VISHNEVETSKY: Is there one that "got away?" One you really wish you could have made?

HELLMAN: Well, I still intend to make it. The most personal project for me was one that I was hired by Paramount to develop. Originally there was a Mark Peploe screenplay, then a Charles Eastman screenplay and then I kind of stole from each of them to create a combination screenplay. That's one I've been trying to make since the early '80s.

VISHNEVETSKY: What's it about?

HELLMAN: It's a film noir. It's Lionel White's Obsession. Lionel White worked with Kubrick on The Killing. I guess when Kubrick was about to make Lolita, Lionel wanted to do the screenplay. Kubrick had other ideas, so Lionel wrote this novel, Obsession, which is his noir version of the Lolita story.

VISHNEVETSKY: A lot of films about about filmmaking tend to be nostalgic for an earlier time, but Road to Nowhere is a movie that's very enamored with the way movies are made today: digital cinematography, the video village...

HELLMAN: I hope to make more movies soon. I'll make them as fast as I can find money. But I really feel that the way they're shooting the movie in Road to Nowhere is not that all that different from the way it was before. The crew isn't all that different from what we had on Two Lane Blacktop. It's pretty much the same kind of equipment—we just needed bigger trucks then. You need just as many lights to shoot digitally, but you don't need the same intensity. Other than that, it's pretty much the same as I've been making movies all along. Well, except for the really low-budget ones, like The Shooting and Ride in the Whirlwind, where we had a crew of ten people.

Locarno 2011. Old and New Straub

2011-08-08T02:34:13Z

Above: Un héritier (2011).

According to my best available sources, the first Jean-Marie Straub/Danièle Huillet film to appear at the Locarno film festival was their 1994 short, Lothringen! (All corrections and updates to this are welcome.) This turns out to be perfectly appropriate for the appearance of Straub in Locarno circa 2011, in which new and old work appears in three separate programs, including a revival screening of Lothringen! (sometimes known as Lorraine!) as part of a Straub shorts program. That program also includes one of Straub's newest films, Un héritier, which was commissioned by the Jeonju film festival for its annual Jeonju Digital Project and, in what's now a tradition, is here in Locarno. This edition of the project is about as strong as any recent one, with the Straub and a small masterpiece by José Luis Guerín, Memories of a Morning, which sees him in the sublime mode of En construcción, both set in distinctly different Barcelona neighborhoods; Claire Denis' inconsequential diary short, Aller au diable, rounds out the trio. The beauty of this selection is that Un héritier is shown for the first time since Jeonju (where I saw the entire Digital Project) both within its original commissioned context and apart from it, in a different and perhaps more useful and meaningful context—as part of Straub's ongoing fascination with the history of his hometown of Metz, and the surrounding Alsace-Lorraine region. Seen paired inside the four-film program with Lothringen!, Un héritier takes on an even angrier tone than when I first saw it. Both pieces are based on different literary texts by the Lorraine regional author, Maurice Barres: Un héritier stems from Au service d'Allemagne, which describes the bitterly resented subjugation of the native French population by the dominant German occupiers; Lothringen! is derived loosely and in fragments from Barres' 1909 novel, Colette Baudoche, about a young Alsatian girl in Metz in 1870 falling in love with a German university professor.

Above: Lothringen! (1994).

The two films mark poles in a notable shift in Straub's cinema over the past two decades. Lothringen!, as my critic colleague Francisco Ferreira marveled to me after yesterday's screening, is some kind of high water mark for Straub-Huillet's use of the pan shot to convey historical meaning by means of a photographic capture of geography and architecture. In shot after shot, the 35mm camera pans left to right or right to left, often in 180 degree arcs, and occasionally in high-angle dipping arcs or low-angle rising arcs, to observe Metz and its environs in the mid-1990s, a little more than 120 years after the novel's events as well as the European wars which saw many Metz males lose their lives—captured in two shots of war monuments, the sort that tourists typically will gaze at without comprehension. This pan shot grammar has been gradually integrated with more fixed shots observing actors reciting selected texts, such as the recent series of short films based on Cesare Pavese's Dialogues with Leuco—Quei loro incontri, Artemis' Knee, Le streghe, femmes entre elles (represented in Locarno by a separate program devoted to a single non-fiction 2010 feature by Romano Guelfi about the making of Le streghe titled Dell'avventura 2/1, marking the first of a series of docs Guelfi is making about Straub's filmmaking practice) and, now, L'inconsolable, in which Orpheus laments his journey to Hades to rescue Eurydice. The pan does recently pop up as a visual element in the 2010 short, O somma luce, but one is struck by how different the overall cinematic construction of Lothringen! is from the recent work, and not just because the former is in 35mm while all of the recent work is in digital video. The spoken text, presumably taken from Barres, is purely in voiceover in Lothringen!, while the dialogues in both L'inconsolable and the other world premiere in the program, Schakale und Araber, are delivered in partial direct address.

Above: L'inconsolable (2011).

For all of the formal differences between Un héritier and Lothringen!, the concerns remain the same. Some viewers may be just a tad bothered by Straub's selection of material by a frankly ultra-nationalist writer like Barres, whose hatred of the Germans knows no bounds, and who is even described on occasion as a French "blood-and-soil" patriot. Straub, too, doesn't much like Germans, and it seems that with Un héritier, he returns to Lothringen! and its ringing call against German psychic and cultural occupation. To underline the point, Straub appears in Un héritier in a speaking role for the first time in any of his own films since the 1973 short, Introduction Arnold Schoenberg's Accompaniment to a Cinematic Scene, playing opposite Joseph Rottner as a French Alsatian doctor. Straub physically inserts himself into the action on screen—and there is action, with Straub and Rottner having a casual conversation while walking down a forest path, followed by a moving camera, a rarity in Straubian cinema. More striking still is the sight of Straub on screen taking on the role of listener, attending to Rottner's doctor describing his attempts to treat a woman (Barbara Ulrich, who appears in three of the Locarno shorts) while contending with her violent husband. These images remind that Straub, as a filmmaker, is always standing or sitting next to his camera, and listening to his actors. Now, in Un héritier, he permits himself to be seen in his normal position as listener.

Above: Schakale und Araber (2011).

If there's no doubt where Straub stands in the struggle between the French and Germans in his native region, the struggle between two groups in Schakale und Araber is more mysterious and open to interpretations. The original text is a Kafka story, about what happens when a European trekking through Arab lands is confronted by jackals, which can speak his language. The jackals tell the visitor how much they despise Arabs, and appeal to the European to help kill them. As allegory, the story has been read any number of ways—as a tale of Zionist vs. Orthodox Jews, as a fable about Jews vs. Arabs—and Straub's handling maintains the openness. Paradoxically, while some of Straub's filmed texts aren't necessarily set outdoors, including the beautifully performed Pavese dialogue of L'inconsolable (set, like so many of the recent "performance" films, in lovely natural locations that always remind me, as a Southern Californian, of the wooded glens in the Santa Monica and San Gabriel mountains), the Schakale und Araber story is set in the Arabian desert, yet Straub films actors Ulrich, Giorgio Passerone and Jubarite Semaran in an old drawing room cast in daylight through French windows. Since physical space plays such a crucial role in all of the films, this choice for the Kafka is especially mysterious and ripe for puzzling over. It's as if, by placing it in a hyper-European interior, Straub is bringing the original Arabic place setting back to the source of the problems, in Europe itself.

It seemed to me that the Locarno screenings were also distinctly Swiss, or at least exactly mirrored what an outsider experiences in Switzerland, which is a quadri-lingual world which skips between Italian, French, German and English, the country's four languages. While L'inconsolable is in Italian with French subtitles, and Schakale und Araber is in German with French subtitles, Un héritier is in French with English subtitles, and Lothringen! is in French with no subtitles. Maybe only in Locarno, certainly only in Switzerland.

Harry Smith Portrait (milk & honey) by Allen Ginsberg

2011-08-09T18:01:02Z

Harry Smith, in an audio interview, once claimed that he ate a steady diet of only butter and sugar for weeks. I believe it.

Here is a nice photograph of Harry Smith, snapped by Allen Ginsberg.

Bees make honey.

Got milk?

Harry Smith’s Birthday Party by Allen Ginsberg

2011-08-10T05:03:42Z

“Harry Smith's Birthday Party” by Allen Ginsberg, 1998, estate stamped 32 1/4" x 24 1/2"

A helpful commenter (thanks!) lead me to “Harry Smith’s Birthday Party,” a two color lithograph and screenprint by Allen Ginsberg.

Edition of 39, available through Gemini GEL.

(Sidenote: DINCA welcomes all comments. Comments are fun and helpful, especially when contributing additional informational. To obviate spam comments, we close dincomments after 60 days. Aight, rip it up.)

an ASCII Eulogy for Robert Breer (R.I.P 1926–2011)

2011-08-14T03:03:18Z

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Watch 70 by Robert Breer.

More details over at bad lit.com

Video: A Studio Visit With Lewis Klahr

2011-07-15T20:44:24Z

Dear periodical collectors: Keep your stash away from filmmaker Lewis Klahr, who mines old magazines and comic books to re-purpose for his art. The Wexner Center for the Arts produced the above, embedded video visit to Klahr’s home studio where he discusses and shows off his methods of producing his acclaimed short films. However, part of that method includes digging through piles of reference material and cutting out the retro images to collage in his animation. The video also includes lengthy excerpts from films such as Pony Glass (starring Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen), Altair and more.

Personally, I’m always fascinated by collage filmmakers like Klahr and Craig Baldwin because it’s tough to wrap one’s head around the process of finding what material belongs in which film. Klahr gives us a brief glimpse of this, showing off several cut-outs that may or may not end up in whatever film he’s working on in the video.

It’s also very interesting to see Klahr working in this tiny cramped space that’s filled with reference sources, particularly old Popular Science and Popular Mechanics magazines inherited from his late grandparents.

Klahr also appropriates lots of comic book imagery, which somewhat puts him in the same arena as ’60s pop artists like Andy Warhol and, especially, Roy Lichtenstein. The Jimmy Olsen drawings in Pony Glass are unmistakeable, and I believe the Garden of Eden images used in False Aging are from the ’70s tabloid-sized DC comic Stories From the Bible, illustrated by Joe Kubert and Nestor Redondo. I don’t know what the little female heads on Klahr’s work table are from, but they look like they’re from classic Golden Age comics.

The last thing I really enjoy about this filmmaker profile is hearing Klahr discuss the narrative flow of his short films, which isn’t always apparent in watching the actual films. In that regard, I believe Klahr can fit into the “collage narrativist” category of filmmaker, which was coined by Craig Baldwin.

While the audio of this profile leaves something to be desired, this is a very nice piece done by the Wexner Center to commemorate an artist residency they awarded Klahr. Unfortunately, so far it’s the only one they’ve produced. They should think about doing more.

If you’re interested in viewing more of Lewis Klahr’s work, Other Cinema did release a DVD compilation of his films called Anxious Animation. You can buy it on Amazon or rent a DVD from Netflix.

Robert Breer, R.I.P.

2011-08-13T19:51:02Z

It has been announced via the Frameworks listserv that pioneering experimental animator Robert Breer passed away on Aug. 11. The news came with no information regarding the circumstances of his death. Bad Lit: The Journal of Underground Film believes Breer was born in 1926, so although we don’t know the specific date of his birth, he was either 84 or 85 years old.

(Bad Lit is also not a member of Frameworks, but had this information forwarded to us.)

According to Sheldon Renan’s An Introduction of the American Underground Film, Breer began his artistic career originally as a painter, graduating from Stanford in 1949 with a degree in that field. Upon graduation, he moved to Paris where he first began making animated collage films such as Form Phases I (1953).

Then, he moved into line animation films, including one of his most famous short works, A Man and His Dog Out for Air (1957), which is primarily an abstract films that periodically form recognizable shapes, such as the two figures mentioned in the title.

In 1959, he moved back to the U.S. in Palisades, N.Y. and made animated films that focused on or combined all of his different techniques, such as Blazes (1961) and even a “whacky live-action pop art venture called” Pat’s Birthday (1962) with Claes Oldenburg’s company of Happening performers, according to Renan.

Renan also states of Breer’s early work:

The underground is greatly involved with the act of seeing. Starting in the fifties with Robert Breer’s work and that of Brakhage, there has been a fascination with the question of how one sees, of what sight is. The concern is with both the physiological and philosophical aspects of seeing.

Breer made films his entire life and even sculptures. Some of his films include Rubber Cement (1976), Swiss Army Knife With Rats and Pigeons (1980), Time Flies (1997) and Atoz (2000).

Other accomplishments include:

Teaching animation at NYC’s Cooper Union for many years.

Thirteen of his earliest films, including Form Phases I and Blazes, were included in the Anthology Archives Essential Cinema Repertory Collection in the mid-’70s.

In 1987, the American Film Institute awarded him their Maya Deren Award, which was a lifetime achievement honorary award for underground and independent filmmakers.

In 2009, his film Eyewash (1959) was included on the Treasures IV: American Avant-Garde Film, 1947 — 1986 DVD collection.

Many of his films can be found bootlegged on the Internet. But to honor his memory, we are embedded a Q&A session conducted with Breer at a L.A. Filmforum retrospective held in 2008:

Underground Film Links: August 14, 2011

2011-08-14T12:00:37Z

This week’s Must Read: Photographic portraits of the filmmaker as a young man: The early creative life of Nathaniel Dorsky. Pictures, yes, plus lots of great autobio info.
Underground film distributor Canyon Cinema is moving this weekend and Maia Cybelle has some Flickr photos of the move. A brief post-move mention on the Canyon blog says they have moved to Yosemite Place in San Francisco, CA.
The Melbourne Underground Film Festival, which begins this week, has an official blog written by JJ DeCeglie. Although the fest is yet to start, DeCeglie is already busy interviewing founder Richard Wolstencroft and Jury Head Jimmy Jack; and has written other articles.
Cinemad has a new podcast up, this time with comedian, actor and filmmaker Bobcat Goldthwait.
Rick Trembles sends Final Destination 5 to Motion Picture Purgatory.
The Arizona Underground Film Festival has a snazzy, newly redesigned website you need to check out. The fest will run next month.
The Reel Bits previews the Sydney Underground Film Festival, which starts early next month.
Remember the ’80s bike movie BMX by Hal Needham? Probably not, but the film is 25 years old this year and it’s being celebrated very much in Calgary where it was partially filmed. A special anniversary event for BMX is being co-organized by Brenda Lieberman of the Calgary Underground Film Festival.
The KDK Horror Network has jumped on the Waylon Bacon Help Wanted bandwagon.
This director pre-test screening anxiety confession by Robert G. Putka is very personal and interesting.
Sad to learn indie film distributors were being heavily affected by the recent London riots. Electric Sheep has some info.
The Phantom of Pulp can cry after all. Then, he goes all ape.
Chopping Mall flashes back to Oasis of Fear, which sounds like goofy fun.
Bob Moricz contemplates the unfair judgements made against female artists.
Roger Ebert reflects on smelly cinema.
The Pictures underground film zine has a new free download issue out with articles on Angelique Bosio, Bruce LaBruce, David Wojnaricz and others.
Cineflyer presents the battle of the century: Winnipeg vs. Berlin.

Personal Photos: 16mm beginnings

2011-08-10T11:00:00Z

Three photos from 1961, 1962, and 1964

1961, Antioch College

The first photo was taken at Antioch College in Ohio when I was 18 years old. I had just begun to use the cinema club's 16mm Cine Kodak camera and was shooting black and white film from a company called Astra that repackaged World War II gunnery raw stock. It was extremely inexpensive and came with processing for which one had to wait three weeks. I made about five films during this period. One was a Russian style work montage of a student project to build a swimming pool and another was a send up of the Alain Resnais film which I called "Next Year at Marienbad". The poet, Michael Brownstein, wrote and recorded the voice over and Alan Lloyd, who would go on to compose music for Robert Wilson, did the art design. We played the sound on a reel to reel quarter inch tape recorder along with the projection. The chain around my neck was my first light meter.

1962, New Jersey

The second photo was taken in July at a camera store on my 19th birthday by my childhood friend, Andrew Makowsky. He would later appear in "Ingreen". I was in the middle of making my first educational film, my first commission, really, which went on to win an honorable mention in the Kodak Teenage Movie Contest. It was called "Catch A Tiger" and showed pre-school children improvising music and assembling found-object art works from a wide variety of materials at a day care center run by my mother, Blanche Dorsky. At that time the avant garde film scene was blossoming in New York and soon I left Antioch and returned to the city. After spending an adventurous year of film making and discovery I entered NYU film school in September for two semesters. Marty Scorsese was a classmate. That next summer I made "Ingreen", my first film to be shown at an avant garde venue.

1964, Ingreen

In the third photo, also taken by Andrew Makowsky, I am photographing my cousin, Andy Grunther for my film "Ingreen". I was twenty year old and had spent the last two years enthusiastically attending the avant garde showcases in New York City. Jonas Mekas was generous enough to come over to an apartment where I was living with a group of young film makers, including Michael Mideke, who was a great influence on me. I showed Jonas "Ingreen" and he invited me to show it that week at the Washington Square Gallery on West Broadway. This was the venue for avant garde film that summer. My, to be, life long friend, Jerome Hiler, attended along with his companions, film maker, Gregory Markopoulos and avant garde film critic, Ken Kelman. I had been very affected by Gregory's "Twice a Man", especially in its early silent screenings and was extremely honored. And then Jonas wrote about "Ingreen" in his Village Voice column. I was off to a grand start.

Nathaniel Dorsky

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Intuiciones a 18 fotogramas por segundo

2011-08-09T13:28:00Z

Interview with Nathaniel Dorsky translated by Elena Duque into Spanish for Cahiers du Cinéma, España #46, June 2011 on the occasion of his eight shows in Madrid and A Coruna, Spain.

48-49.indd.pdf Download this file

Link CAHIERS DU CINÉMA ESPAÑA

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Yoel's shared items in Google Reader

Shades of Light

Video Interview with Nathaniel Dorsky, A Coruna, Spain, June 2011

Basso Profondo: Nathaniel Dorsky’s "The Return"

Cinema Scope Online, Toronto International Film Festival 2011

Guillaume’s Conclusion

Saying Goodbye

Views from the Avant-Garde 2011

Personal photos: mid 1960's, New York City

Video of the day. Raya Martin's "Ars colonia" (2011)

Movie Poster of the Week: The Posters of the Stenberg Brothers

Collaborators, War Stories and Roads Not Taken: An Interview with Monte Hellman

Locarno 2011. Old and New Straub

Harry Smith Portrait (milk & honey) by Allen Ginsberg

Harry Smith’s Birthday Party by Allen Ginsberg

an ASCII Eulogy for Robert Breer (R.I.P 1926–2011)

Video: A Studio Visit With Lewis Klahr

Read More:

Robert Breer, R.I.P.

Read More:

Underground Film Links: August 14, 2011

Read More:

Personal Photos: 16mm beginnings

Intuiciones a 18 fotogramas por segundo