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

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

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

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

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

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

Amazing Documentaries: The Take

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

Amazing Documentaries: Henri Langlois, Phantom of The Cinematheque

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

Amazing Documentaries: The Agronomist

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

Brand Upon The Brain!

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

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

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

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

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

The Lion Still Has Wings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wet Leaves: Wet Gate Plays Canada 2006

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wet Gate: 16mm Projector Band

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

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

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

Berlin Alexanderplatz (Fassbinder, 1980, WDR TV)

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

As If It Were Your Own

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

They Have Poisoned The Drinking Water

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

The Flamethrowers (1989, super8, 9 min)

The Flamethrowers began in 1988 when I found a damaged print of Satyajit Ray's "Pather Panchali" in a Boston film collection. I'd actually seen the same damage done to a small segment of "The Seven Samurai" in a screening at Harvard's Film Archive and, after looking into the issue, was offered a loan of an almost entirely ruined reel of the Ray film to study. I refilmed sections of the damage onto super8 in close up. I had been reading Roberto Arlt's classic Argentinian novel "The Seven Madman" and its story of a secret plot to destroy society with poison gas mixed with what I was viewing in this film footage. The second volume of the novel is titled "The Flamethrowers", and I called this footage "The Flamethrowers" also, since the damage had come about by a projector throwing too much heat on the film, destroying it--or altering it radically--as it was being projected. I sent the 3 reels of b+w super8, along with 3 unexposed rolls, to Matthias Mueller of Alte Kinder, who I met at a Montreal Film Fest in early 1988, asking his group to make a second part to "The Flamethrowers", that this might become a serial film project. I arrived in Bielefeld for the Intercom Festival in late 1988 to find the Alte Kinders finishing the edit of their 3 reel segment. We screened the 6 roll piece at Intercom a few days later on 3 projectors, the old film triptych. Matthias and i agreed that the film was looking like an homage to another group of filmmakers, Schmelzdahin, the Bonn trio who mixed their own film chemistry and inspired a generation. We sent the film materials on to Schmelzdahin (Jurgen Reble, Jochen Lempert, and Jochen Mueller) who did contribute a third sequence to The Flamethrowers. The films came back to Matthias and he put together a single strip super8 version of all of the material, re-filming sections projected on 3 projectors and inter-cutting that with full-frame shots; he built a very beautiful version of the piece (I asked him to do this, wanting to see the same form he had developed in his film "Epilog" applied to this material). This "original" super8 version of The Flamethrowers also has wonderful audio that Matthias threw together on his Bauer sound-on-sound s8 projector, mixing tapes of sliding volcanic glass, Indian music, us running in the Bielefeld subway stations and water in his bathtub. Matthias is great with birdsounds, which appear throughout his films. Schmelzdahin took the materials again and tried to make a 35mm version of the project, but I never saw the results. Matthias later had a s8>16mm blow-up made and hired some soundtrack composers, but I think the audio on that version failed; that film copy toured in a Goethe Institute exhibition. I have just recently transfered a 16mm print to dv and begun restoring the original audio, which I have on an old videotape transfer of the original super8.

The Flamethrowers was essentially the crowning collaboration of the Film Almanac project and remains a significant collaboration of my life. I hope to return to this way of working. (Some additional words and film at www.filmersalmanac.net)

The Filmers Almanac (1988, super8, 7 hours of film)

After Frames for Frampton, I made a few other experimental diary films, including 2 called Ways To Midas, referring to my path home passing the Midas muffler sign and photography's "silver touch", and The Siberian Tigers, a fantasy baseball team and long sound piece of strange radio noise. The Siberian Tigers was awarded a fellowship from the Boston Film/Video Foundation and was presented there as a 2-monitor experimental video feature. My interest in Hollis Frampton's work made me decide to try to remake his grand work Magellan, consisting of a film for every day of the calendar year, by inviting super8 filmmakers the world over to shoot one day each for the project. Magellan inside out or not singularly concentric around one author-creator. This was a period in which mail artists were trading cassettes like mad, and great fun ideas with fluxus twists were being exchanged as "mail art". I was actively engaged and it was much more interesting than pursuing painting or other staid gallery arts. I traded freely with artists around the world. A crazy Canadian named David Zack started inviting people to share one name ("Monty Cantsin", or was it "Karen Elliot"? I think Karen Elliot was an alternate...) and show works as such collectively created. (I stupidly once sent him a letter my father had written to our family from his 1970's visit to Russia as a Washington Post reporter, describing seeing Lenin's waxy body in the mausoleum... Zack was in a Mexican prison at the time and died shortly after.) Anyhow, there were great collective projects going on perhaps as a response to the heightened pitch of reagan's Cold War posturing and world privatisation plans. There were Festivals of Plagiarism going on as art events internationally and even an Art Strike mobilized from within the mail artist community. It was heady fun.

The Filmers Almanac came out of that period, and from my interest in seeing super8 film become an exchange media akin to the audio cassette. If we did radio shows where we played cassettes from artists all over the world, couldn't we also present film shows of super8 rolls from afar as well? Starting in 1985 I sent out 3600 invitations to participate in the Almanac making, 100 each month for 3 years. (That was after Jeff Plansker helped me with the title over breakfast in Harvard Square, blurting out "Farmers Almanac" which became Filmers Almanac, and then tENTATIVELY a. cONVENIENCE chose the first day as I was mentioning the idea to him.) The target year 1988 came and 250 filmers had chosen film dates. I wound up receiving about 125 of those rolls, which was over 7 hours of film if projected traditionally. After some initial screenings, I turned to a 2-projector system, putting one on a lazy susan to allow for panning overlap. Matthias Mueller invited me to Germany and set up several screenings. He made an exquisite film for the Almanac which became the seed for his film The Memo Book. The production level on the films from Germany were amazingly high; there was an active sub-professional filmmaking scene there like no other. The Almanac showed in Helsinki, Detmold, Bielefeld, Hamburg, Osnabruck, Braunschweig, Bonn and Paris. At the Helsinki 8mm Festival at the start of the tour, filmmaker Vivienne Dick arrived from London and told us that the Berlin Wall had opened.

The other most memorable Filmers Almanac event was a screening in Toronto, under the umbrella of Pleasure Dome at the Purple Institution, a collective art loft. The screening there was so well received that people stayed on partying until almost dawn. A filmmaker raced home and got his 2-projector film to show at the end. A film crew caterer brought us all a late-night meal, and Atom Egoyan said hello, I think the Almanac giving some inspiration to his later "Calendar". I took a bus at dawn back to my hosts' apartment, a large box of films in one arm and super8 projector in the other.

see also: www.filmersalmanac.net/

Frames for Frampton (1985, 16mm, 7 min, color/sound)

By 1984, I had been studying experimental films for a year or 2, after first getting into filmmaking through an animation class with Flip Johnson at the Boston Museum School. I loved animation, but the classroom was a boys' club of exploding frogs, so it was out into the street with a super8 camera. I was also devouring anything I could read on the subject of experimental film, which sounded great in theory from the many books and scholarly articles on the heroic phase of New American Cinema (1950's through 70's). Unfortunately, by the early 80's screenings of these films were rare events and there was a seeming generation gap between the super-productive 70's and the bureaucratic reaganomic 80's. Video was replacing expensive film practice. Anyway, 2 filmmakers whose work I was drawn to from my readings were Stan Vanderbeek, who conceived of a Cinedome theater with internet-style exchange of motion pictures in multi-projection, and Hollis Frampton, who brought to film both a rigorous language-science and wordplay, humor. His film Zorn's Lemma is an incredible meditation on the matter of our alphabet (and can be viewed in funky internet-o-vision at: http://www.ubu.com/film/frampton.html). Both of these men died young of cancer, but they each brought to film an unusual understanding of its potential as a liberating device of communication, a language beyond language. Shortly after Frampton's death in 1984 I learned that the Albright-Knox Museum in Buffalo was mounting a show of his work, and I arranged to travel there to see the 3 hours of films called Hapax Legomena (a literary term meaning a word which appears only once on a written work). I shot one roll of Kodachrome super8 on the trip; a flight to Buffalo, the taxi to the museum, the grounds behind the museum, a run through the nearby cemetary and the bus back to Boston. This pilgrimage film was blown-up to 16mm on the Museum School's funky JK optical bench, a radio noise soundtrack was added, and it went out to some film festivals and collections in Japan and Germany. I met many filmmakers. This led to the larger film project dedicated also to Frampton: The Filmers Almanac. Frames for Frampton was in the Canyon Cinema catalog and collection for several years, but since the film did not rent they invited me to take it out of "circulation". It is now part of the Sonnet Lumiere film album.

Sonnet Lumiere

I took a semester of school in Barcelona in 1982. It was an opportunity I couldn't pass up, thanks to one professor who encouraged me, calling to remind me on the deadline day. I prepared for the trip by buying a used Beaulieu 4008zm super8 camera. My initial film ideas were architectural and 3 dimensional. I wanted to bring back 3-D images of the places I'd seen for friends who weren't able to take the trip. To film a 360 degree walk around a spot essentially captures the space in 3 dimensions. On return, I had the film transferred to video using state-of-the-art machines and began to put together an album of my first film pieces. There was a 360 degree view of the tower at Pisa and a film of me running through Harvard's football stadium. (That was another of my approaches: the running film.) I received a grant from the Somerville (Mass.) Arts Council to complete the video album. I called it Sonnet Lumiere, as in poem of light, and sound, a name I'd already given to an audio cassette album where some of the soundtracks came from. I began writing something about hybrid forms of film and video work which didn't amount to much. What I was doing, in retrospect, was trying to work with super8 film the way we worked with cassette audio, as a handheld personal recorder. Super8 is a cassette media, just snap the cartridge into the camera and shoot. The cameras come from the simplest point-and-shoot to very fancy ones, like the Beaulieu which has adjustable ASA. Although super8 projectors can be used to present beautiful film screenings, carefully shot and well-processed film should be copied to video before projection tears up the film emulsion. Super8 is an excellent alternative to video and should be considered an option for almost any moving picture production. I have to some extent dedicated my life to the medium of super8 filmmaking.

See lo-fi clips of the Sonnet Lumiere films and purchase a dvd copy here: http://filmersalmanac.net/spool.htm

Some Books (and Records)

In 1985, friends of mine in Somerville, Mass. started renting a storefront on Highland Ave. just East of Davis Square and opened it as a used bookstore. This was before the T Red Line opened in Davis, and this spot was strategically located on the 96 bus line or the long loping walk from Medford to Harvard Square. A number of these new entrepreneurs were alumni of the Tufts radio station WMFO or had worked at the Somerville Theater. Lenny DiFranza, who had managed the theater and served as program director at WMFO, and Jeff Strauss, a film and literature student, were two of Some Books' initial signatories. They re-painted the sign out front to read REALITY CENTER, up from REALTY CENTER as it had once been occupied. Jake Dillon built bookshelves from discarded wood into every nook and cranny of the place. This funky little shop became a significant meeting place for many of us, and we took turns running the shop and organizing events there; usually 2 people would manage the place for 4-6 months, burn out and pass the candle. There was a late-night breakfast joint across the street that didn't open until 11PM. (Was it called Kay and Chips or Phyllis and Ted's? I think the former. Rodney Dangerfield was always singing "I don't get no respect" from their jukebox.)

I recall a number of marvelous micro-events taking place at SOME BOOKS. Tracy Chapman did some sets of her acoustic music before signing to a major label. Kip Chinian showed a brilliant series of large format (20x24") Polaroid photographs of himself in Viet Nam war make-up. And myself and Bill White organized monthly screenings of 8mm films, as we were both amateur filmmakers. Bill managed a number of movie theaters in Cambridge including the Orson Welles, and he was a serious movie buff who I believe writes reviews for a paper around Seattle, where he's from.

Bill and I called the film meetings Wide Open Cinema, a name I came up with for our film organisation or company. My theory was that film could be anything, or something different in the hands of whoever used it. There is also reference to opening the camera aperture to let more light in and take focus, and a minor reference to sport, of a player "being wide open" to make some sort of play. You get the picture.

Anyhow, we had several meeting of this film group. Bill showed his remake of Murnau's "Sunrise". I showed my growing body of super8 experiments. A guy named Todd Larsen showed his super8 narrative attempts. I rented some 16mm experimental films and showed them at the Somerville Theater and at Mass Art Film Society, Saul Levine's salon-like screening series intown. Jeff Plansker and I started showing our films side-by-side on 2 projectors as "Toronto/Spain". Harvard Epworth Church had a wonderful film series in those days and Ricky Leacock taught at MIT. Somerville had a developing cable access studio where I tried to create some programs, but found it a bit of a club. From there, I reached out to the larger World of filmmaking and got swallowed by it.

But that period at Some Books was significant to a number of people. I dedicate this blog to them and that time, the foundation for my love of cinema. Ah, Somerville.

The Triumph of VHS

January 17, 2007

Since moving to Los Angeles at the start of 2006, I've been advised by friends to make a short film for the youTube audience. While i haven't quite gotten myself to target creations so site specifically, I have had occasion to view video clips on youTube, usually following a link in an e-mail i receive. It is a great greeting card to send a friend a link to some shared musical or film clip stored on youTube/Google's mammoth hard drive. Recently, I received an e-mail linking me to youTube and some Hollis Frampton film clips someone had posted there. This was intriguing, since Frampton is a very obscure and usually film-pure film-maker, meaning I don't know of him approving of his films being transfered to videotape in his lifetime. Film is film and should be projected onto a movie screen by a movie projector at 24 frames per second (or 16 frames per second if made for "silent speed"). Although Frampton did anticipate and comment on film's eventual absorption into computer culture.

Frampton died of cancer in 1984. Hollis Frampton's films are distributed exclusively, I believe, by the NY Filmmakers Co-op, an organisation which stores, ships and receives its collection of aging 16mm film prints for public presentation. The MoMA may also have an attachment to Frampton's films, I believe they hold some restoration and negative rights as deeded by Frampton's heirs, his wife Marion Faller.

Anyway, the youTube search for "hollis frampton" returned a short stack of Frampton titles, which was a bit shocking, since it has always been so difficult to see these films; they are like small pieces of the Grail of filmmaking. Frampton's work is rarely screened, usually in blink-of-an-eye retrospectives at the Museum of the Moving Image or Anthology Film Archives. I didn't have time to click and view each of the excerpts that someone had uploaded to youTube from their PC, but i did take a look at 2 clips from "Magellan" (Drafts and Fragments), a section in which Frampton remade the history of cinema in the style of Lumiere, in 1-minute films capturing some essence of motion special to the film medium. Where the Lumieres filmed a train entering the station, Frampton filmed a barn silo open to the sky with starlings flying, his son pulling a fishhook from the mouth of a frog, the same silo being pulled down by a truck, a cat toying with a downed bird. These film-clips, converted somewhere along the way to video, were accompanied by a discussion on the soundtrack between HFrampton and another filmmaker Robert Gardner. I don't recall having heard Frampton's voice before and hearing him discuss his views and the purposes behind his filmmaking was a great glimpse behind the curtain. I assume this video was cablecast on a public access TV channel somewhere in New York State and some viewer recorded it or it snuck out of a university media lab.

Now, in the era of internet all-purveyance, such material becomes available on a grand scale, as the odd VHS recorder-collectors copy out their collections into the internet-ether. And the bizarre truth is that in this time of super low-res video viewing on the web, even the poorest translation of an old VHS tape looks acceptable. We are awed by the availability of so much material that the picture quality is overlooked, or seen through. With time, I'm sure the image quality of "films" on the www will improve; but for now we live with an internet of fast and dirty film fragments, approximations of their original forms. The frame rate is variable; we see a summing or skipping average of frames per second (4 or 5?) rather than anything close to cinema's standard 24fps. The moving picture equivalent to the audio mp3. Stamp collecting in lieu of a fine art collection.

2 days after that initial viewing I returned to the Hollis Frampton youTube link and these films had been knocked off. I assume someone had reported these clips as pirate material, not copyright free, and so they were removed. I don't openly condone the exchange of artists' materials without their consent, but I will say it felt like a crack in the Deathstar. Information wants to be free and films are made to be seen I think. Low-res bootleg video clips from Hollis Frampton films are not going to hurt the estate of Hollis Frampton. If anything, these small pieces of film history would lead new seekers to his work and to experimental film history in general.

Update: Since January, I found a viewable stream of Frampton's great "Zorn's Lemma" on UBUweb. And this week (early March) it appears that the Frampton clips are back on youTube. In late Spring 07 I found that the Frampton clips are all from "Screening Room", an officially released, yes cable or public TV document, an illustrated interview of Frampton available as a dvd from www.studio7arts.org

Another note: Steve Polta at the SF Cinemateq and I curated a show of Hollis Frampton films in the Summer of 2005, notes of which are viewable at http://filmersalmanac.net/frampton.htm