DUMBO Arts Jalopy Hour Premiere

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

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

Here are Caspar's film notes for the event:

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

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

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

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

http://www.videodumbo.org

Madmen After 3

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

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

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

Gabor Body: Europe's Hollis Frampton

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Infinite Animation: Adam Beckett

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

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

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

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

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

The Making Of Jalopy Hour, part 1

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

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

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