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

Wednesday, October 13, 2010

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

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

Jalopy Hour West Coast Premiere and DVD Release

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

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

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

East/West: Stereo Views

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

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

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

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