Alex MacKenzie travels with two Kodak Pageant analyst projectors. On airplanes, one is a carry-on, while the other is fitted into a checked suitcase. He sets up the projectors behind the audience within the cinema, tonight on a table mounted stably atop four chairs. His soundtrack is on a portable digital recorder which he times to the chapters of the presentation. The film itself is two 400 foot reels of 16mm, fitted inside one small 35mm reel can. It is a perfectly economical system, organized for travel.
Alex spends his summer in the British Columbian Gulf Islands, where he is building a cob house in the woods. He has shot a bunch of film in the coastal zone there, the intertidal area between high and low tides. Intertidal runs about an hour on the two analyst projectors, which function as something between film projectors and slide projectors. Alex has made a handful of projector performance films for this system and I'd say he pretty well has it down. Beginning with two projection frames side by side, he slides one projector to overlap the other. He uses gels and lenses to bend or expand a projector beam, executing the changes with clear intention. Although each performance is unique and unrepeatable--the beauty of film performance being that for each show the projected piece comes out differently--there was a clear map or score to the piece.
Found footage of the moon opens, from an early film. Then riding the ferry out to the islands. Austere wooden bridge structures lean into the frame, suggesting the borders between man's kingdom and that of wild ocean. There are always two frames. Life is not a single strand of thought pictures. There is always overlap or relationship, between what we see and what we remember, or the two images of a (faux-)stereo pair. Intertidal was not shot as a stereo film, but suggests that by virtue of its presentation. There are panorama shots, oddly unmatched wide-frame images of waterfront areas and hills. Maybe the twin projections represent man on the one eye and the ocean through the other. They take turns. We are introduced to a tidal area and the lifeforms hidden within. Crabs, sea stars and jellyfish have swim-in roles. Kelp was given its own chapter. The chapter divisions give sensible pacing to a varied catalog of ocean and coastal images, as well as a series of Rayograms produced by laying materials on film. The greatest drama comes with the crabs, both hermit and the normal shelled variety. Two hermit crabs fight, with one big boy appearing to dominate thoroughly. Is this mating behavior? Another sequence shows crabs on the back of a jellyfish, seeming to ride it like a bus or a surfboard, though Alex said the jellyfish would likely be their food.
Intertidal is partly an homage to naturists Ed Ricketts and Jean Painleve. Ricketts was a friend of Steinbeck and John Cage, a bohemian in the Kerouac tradition who traveled the west coast and studied marine biology, but he was cut down early in a car accident. Painleve is known for his underwater films today. He may have started as an assistant to Bunuel and Dali on Un Chien Andalou; Alex says he wrangled ants for the shoot.
The Intertidal soundtrack was made by Scott Morgan, aka loscil, whose ambient synthesizer pieces clearly demark the chapters of the film and offer a kind of sonic focus to our sea-gazing. Like the footage, the music drifts in and out of phase in arrhythmic loops, requesting a hypnotic willingness from the viewer.
The footage is run through the projectors at varying speeds, sometimes atuned to the musical flow and sometimes not. MacKenzie slowed and sped his machines and the filmed waveforms responded, surf rushing towards shore and then freezing or slowing to a crawl up on land. The ocean world pounds stone into sand. Intertidal has both primitive and progressive qualities. Primitive because the hand-processed 16mm black-and-white film throws us back to the 1940s and 50s, the era MacKenzie refers to in the work. Progressive because it is clearly a bitter-sweet celebration of the beauty and power of a natural world which we are so quickly using up. The power of Intertidal is its forthright reflection of the natural world. In an era where so much media threatens to control, pacify or overwhelm its viewer, Mackenzie understands that less is more.
The entire film is hand-processed, giving it a seen-through-seaweed quality. While much of the world turns to HD video for immaculately rendered tourist postcards, MacKenzie is laying rock salt on film and exposing it to the elements. His two projector system is a time machine back away from the HD video surround dateline, to when 16mm cameras were first being picked up and turned towards little personal moments.
The LA Film Forum held this screening on December 5, 2013 at the Velaslavasay Panorama, an old theater near USC which is dedicated largely to pre-cinema entertainment. Upstairs, there is a wrap-around panorama of Antartica or the Arctic. Truly unique, like a slice of New Orleans in Los Angeles. (I still haven't been to the Museum of Jurassic Technology, which Alex has visited and he says is a wonderful theater of allusions.)
It was great to see the crabs. The next day, my child Evan asked to see The Three Stooges on youTube and we found one called A Pain in the Pullman, where the Stooges get hired as entertainers on a train. They bust into a bigger star's cabin and find a crab dinner and champagne. The 3 rubes can't decide if the crab is a spider or a turtle! And they set themselves to eating the crab shell, tossing away the meat inside. Parallel crabs.
Friday, December 20, 2013
Friday, November 1, 2013
In Space No One Can Hear Your Soundtrack
My first view of Gravity was the terrifying trailer that showed the space accident that forms the centerpiece of the movie's action. I wrote to friends that I didn't think I wanted to experience that kind of space terror, akin to my boycott of The Blair Witch Project because I didn't want to be frightened from going out into nature alone. But as the Gravity movie approached, I became excited about its release, clearly a great special effects job of creating a simulation of spacewalking. Anything that touches on the personal and the grandiose in space is up my alley, so I became determined to see this movie, although I get out to movie theaters about 10 times a year lately. I glutted on film when I was younger, so it all evens out I guess.
I discussed scheduling a film screening with a few friends. Should we see it at (former Grauman's) Chinese Theater, recently retrofitted to IMAX? Should we avoid the 3D effect and view it as a 2D movie valued for its content, photography and montage?
(Ira Flato is talking to astronaut Chris Hadfield right now about the movie on the radio in my kitchen...)
It took 2 weeks for me to find a time I could peel away and see Gravity. Jeff Plansker and I went to the Santa Anita mall in Arcadia for a 1:25PM screening of the 2D version. I would have been OK with seeing it in 3D or IMAX but Jeff preferred the 2D version greatly.
There were a million previews, including Ben Stiller's new Walter Mitty movie, which actually looks kind of nice, for Ben Stiller.
Gravity begins with a few statements about space: that there's no sound, for instance. However the soundtrack does a Hitchcock scare-you build into the title graphic and then suddenly goes silent, I think a minor abuse of the sound band and a hint at what was to come. Don't get me wrong, there was some brilliant sound design in Gravity, and it should have been left that way. Adding a musical score, with symphonic elements and over-arching drama and tell-me-when-to-sneeze cues, was a big mistake on this movie. You've got to wonder who signed off (the director) on the soundtrack. It comes very close to ruining a beautiful picture.
The visual effects and scene-making are astounding. The sense of being space-suited and out-of-doors from your spacecraft in the vacuum of space, is fleshed out incredibly well. This is what computers can do now, create a verisimilitude of image down to such small details, that you are fooled into being there. The shots of whirling, wrecked space stations are just unbelievable.
The shots of Sandra Bullock crying are tearfully well-done. I thought of video artist Bill Viola, who spent 10 years filming images through the distorting lens of a drop of water, and Gravity cops his lick and goes another step in one swift minute of film. I also flashed to Man Ray's famous photo (of Lee Miller) with glass beads in her eyelashes. It was loaded film, so to speak.
There's a lot to like about this film. It is so visually realistic. The earth-orbiting footage must be straight NASA video from the space station, paid for by American citizens. Maybe the film ticket should be discounted. Maybe all space movies should be discounted. We live to see this stuff and think big about the universe we live in.
I had another thought while watching the ending shots of space debris raining down into the atmosphere. Gravity is an appropriate homage to the astronauts of space shuttle Columbia, who died coming back into the atmosphere when one or more of their heat shield tiles failed to protect the cabin from the extreme heats of re-entry. The film could be called The Girl Who Fell To Earth. The whole film follows Bullock as she dives from one jetty in space to another, making her way down the ladder from orbit to entry to landfall. It is a timely plea to clean up our earth's clouds of orbiting space junk. Bullock's use of the fire extinguisher is inspired. She does some gorgeous floating in men's underwear.
There is limited dialog in the film, a nice break from the ever-talking movies. Bullock does over-narrate a few scenes, but this could be forgiven as the kind of crazy you might go as you freeze to death in space. And then the soundtrack kicks in, the most grievous error being the Avatar-ish tribal anthem at the end, and we're pushing the same old buttons again. Response 5. Response 7. Rip away the soundtrack and release the film again with just a subtle sound design version. We all deserve that kind of expansive view of space rather than one limited by a series of lazy music choices.
Monday, October 28, 2013
The Century of an Eyesplice
On February 22 of 2000, Luis Bunuel's 100th birthday, we presented "The Century of an Eyesplice" at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley, under the curatorial guidance of Kathy Geritz. A newly restored print of Un Chien Andalou by the Eastman House was screened, along with Simon of the Desert, Viridiana, and a tattered print of Chien Andalou with a soundtrack I created for the occasion. We had a cake made to look like the "diagonal box" and Eric Gergis played the accordeon. David Larcher was in town and we had martinis afterwards at a bar across the street.
The soundtrack was composed from various sources, many olde records, in recognition of LB's original soundtrack using 78rpm records of Wagner and tangos. I hired Gibbs Chapman to help me cut the audio; he taught me to use ProTools. The basic soundtrack was transferred to 16mm magnetic stock and played on an interlock projector at each of three major presentations of the piece. I acquired the interlock machine and a Westrex mag recorder at Palmer Films liquidation sale just months before. I also acquired a print of Chien Andalou from a liquidation sale at distributor Budget Films. Film was liquidating.
The first screening of the new soundtrack was in Berkeley on Bunuel's birthday. I used a contact microphone to amplify tabletop objects as another layer of sound on top of the basic "bed" tracks. The film seemed to me to be about the terror of household objects. The razor is the first "wild object" of the film. Sound effects of cutlery were slowed down to sound like swordblades as Luis sharpens his razor. Or perhaps it was a recording of fencing. The slice or eye-splice is a burst of piercing controlled feedback.
The man rides a bike, his goofy musical theme sampled from a music box toy (It's a Small World After All). The man is a wind up toy himself, and the same winding key might open the absurd box he wears around his neck. The bicycle is also imitated by rolling a squeaky wheel on the contact board, a piece of wood with piezo disc contact microphone attached. Staples in the wood are plucked to approximate ant-legs, running in and out of a hole in the man's hand. This image, from Dali's dreams, is so contemporary; I think of it often as I watch young people stare into their palms, consumed by smartphones. A nylon wire (fishing line? kite string? raquet string?) was stretched when the woman grabs a tennis racket to fight the man off. An antique vocal madrigal is played to accompany the dragging of the donkey-skinned pianos, a religious procession. Hundreds of vinyl pops were digitally erased from that recording.
The second screening was a week later at The Blinding Light in Vancouver. Alex MacKenzie built an entire Surreal City series around the event. And the third screening was at ATA in San Francisco, where I used firecrackers during the gunfire scene; they were exploded in a box at the top of the stairs and their realism surprised even me.
The man falls into his field, onto the back of a statuesque female nude which disappears and he is carried off by some passers by--the don of this parkland and his garden workers. A beautiful propellar plane engine sound accompanies the fade to black. A door opens and the woman enters to stare down the death-head moth on the wall. I found an exquisite, sparse loop sample from an old record which fits the black and white film emulsion here like a glove. And then a chopstick was vibrated along the edge of the soundboard; it flutters like large insect wings. I sometimes sampled that and slowed it down to great effect.
There is a scene in which the second man (the Challenger?) comes to the house, rings the doorbell (actual martini shaker with ice recorded and mixed with bells), he is let in and when he enters the room I used live radio to accompany his actions. At the Berkeley screening the radio insert found a BBC news voice saying: "Mad cow disease", which was in the news at the time.
I continued to work on the soundtrack and sent a few copies out on VHS. I tried to create an alternate version of the film but got bogged down. Only recently have I gotten around to remixing the piece for web presentation. Please view it here.
Wednesday, October 23, 2013
Un Perro Andaluz, 80 Anos Despues
Maybe a year ago, I stumbled across a BFI blog where film enthusiasts and archivists were discussing recent dvd and blu-ray releases. The BFI had produced a dvd of L'Age d'Or which included Un Chien Andalou in the set, and somebody offered the information about the Spanish restoration project. I have been looking to import this book+dvd for at least the past 9 months. The set is a catalog for the exhibit which opened in San Sebastian and visited a few other Spanish cities. The restored film is online and looks gorgeous in the small frame. I had a new Holy Grail: finding a hard copy of this restored film. I looked online at bookstores in Spain and Spanish amazon, the European amazons and asked European friends. It is still difficult to import a rare book, even with the internet. The cost, 30 or $40 on the street in Spain, would probably approach $100 from a large bookstore, with shipping and import fees. I decided to wait and see if it would turn up via some American distributor or museum store. Every few months I remembered to look into it. This summer (2013), I called Schoenhof's in Cambridge, probably the biggest importer of foreign books in the US, where I had bought many Spanish books during my years in Boston, and asked them about ordering it; still around $100. Then I checked ABEbooks, the consortium of independent booksellers online, and someone in the US appeared to have a copy of the set: the 2 book volumes, 46-page Basque summary and the dvd of the restored film--the complete edition, at $65 + $10 shipping. On further inquiry, shipping would be an additional $8.70, bringing the total to $83.70. Still not cheap, this seemed a fair price for something I had been searching for so long. It arrived only a few days later. It is another classic piece for a Bunuel collector, a hardboard case holding 2 books and the film. I have an entire large bag filled with books on and by Bunuel. I have a multi-region dvd player. The last incredible film find was when I discovered that Hollis Frampton's films were out on a Criterion dvd. It was an incredible year for film. Don't ask me to borrow either of those dvds.
Thursday, April 11, 2013
Film Department Letter
I wrote this letter of introduction when applying for an art school film job a few years back.
Thank you for looking at my materials as I offer myself for consideration to teach film (there).
What do I think I could bring to your film department?
I have a great love of film and an even greater interest and concern for the lives of people looking for ways to express themselves with film. Of course we are at a time when film as THE MEDIUM is rapidly being displaced by digital means; knowing computers is more important every day. A professor of film at an arts college must know how computers can be used to solve problems and expedite production of ideas into moving pictures.
I have feet in both realms: the digital and its parent analog.
I have collected films and film machines for 25 years and have learned something from each of the formats. I studied animation with Flip Johnson using Bolex cameras, pegboards and lights. Richard Lerman taught filmmaking and sound and became a friend. I taught myself to use the JK optical printer. Soon after, I switched to super-8 filmmaking, which is largely a do-it-yourself media, although some "teachers" included the young German filmmakers, my peers: Matthias Mueller, Jurgen Reble, Caspar Stracke, and all the European, Canadian and American artists I spent time with (Yann Beauvais, Cecile Fontaine, Mike Hoolboom, Alex MacKenzie, Bradley Eros, Jeanne Liotta). I lived super8 film for several years, traveled to numerous festivals. I experimented with many telecine routes, from "Do-It-Myself" to Bob Brodsky's service. I have owned many super8 cameras and projectors and used most existing filmstocks. I bought ORWO super8 cartridges in East Berlin.
Unfortunately, I don't recommend super8 as heartily as I once did, largely because the number of reliable or repairable cameras and projectors has declined. With a good camera, super8 remains a tremendous image making medium, but please have it rendered to digital video ASAP. Super8 projectors are largely unreliable at present.
I've always believed in COLLABORATION as an important avenue of creativity and I've sought out other artists with whom to work.
Parallel to filmmaking, I have studied and practiced RADIO as an art form. I decided somewhere early on that a radio transmitter is a PROJECTOR for sound, and I've always found radio to have great commonalities with film as an expressive tool. My soundtrack work grew out of radio shows I did at the same time as making films; the concurrent practices feed off of one another.
Using film as a PERFORMANCE medium is another area where I've had a lot of experience, beginning with the ALMANAC project, where I used 2 projectors to present the work. I have soaked myself in Gene Youngblood's Expanded Cinema tome and am a great proponent of breaking the single-channel stream of film presentatrion. Working with Wet Gate, where we developed the use of the 16mm projector as a performance instrument in concert, has been a great outlet for my need for a true film practice. (Wet Gate will perform at the Berkeley Art Museum as part of their Friday Night series on January 29th, 2010.)
I do, however, appreciate and champion well made single-channel films. I am not quite the dilettante I was even 10 years ago.
The past 10 years I have tried to function in the wild world of community and commerce, first working in Public Radio and then creating soundtracks for film and television, often for commercials. Again, with a foot in 2 different worlds, I have stayed in touch with the experimental art world while trying to bring my skills into the larger film industry. Perhaps like Paul Sharits and others who wanted to see if they could apply experimental principles to more commercial (or accessible or just distributed) work, I moved to LA 4 years ago. My most recent new project involves writing the script for a teleplay or original series, based on my father's life. I have ongoing relationships and projects with creative people which I am nurturing.
I have always seen film as a great communicating force and have wanted to inject myself into that, into the great machinery of projectors and television screens that can reach people all across the world. Here in Los Angeles that means beginning with a script, so that is an important starting place. I don't mean to say that film cannot contain or even be based upon improvisational elements. When I was younger. film was much more of a diaristic medium for me, whereas now I want to consider carefully each time I engage the film apparatus. It's too expensive a medium at this point.
Thank you for looking at my materials as I offer myself for consideration to teach film (there).
What do I think I could bring to your film department?
I have a great love of film and an even greater interest and concern for the lives of people looking for ways to express themselves with film. Of course we are at a time when film as THE MEDIUM is rapidly being displaced by digital means; knowing computers is more important every day. A professor of film at an arts college must know how computers can be used to solve problems and expedite production of ideas into moving pictures.
I have feet in both realms: the digital and its parent analog.
I have collected films and film machines for 25 years and have learned something from each of the formats. I studied animation with Flip Johnson using Bolex cameras, pegboards and lights. Richard Lerman taught filmmaking and sound and became a friend. I taught myself to use the JK optical printer. Soon after, I switched to super-8 filmmaking, which is largely a do-it-yourself media, although some "teachers" included the young German filmmakers, my peers: Matthias Mueller, Jurgen Reble, Caspar Stracke, and all the European, Canadian and American artists I spent time with (Yann Beauvais, Cecile Fontaine, Mike Hoolboom, Alex MacKenzie, Bradley Eros, Jeanne Liotta). I lived super8 film for several years, traveled to numerous festivals. I experimented with many telecine routes, from "Do-It-Myself" to Bob Brodsky's service. I have owned many super8 cameras and projectors and used most existing filmstocks. I bought ORWO super8 cartridges in East Berlin.
Unfortunately, I don't recommend super8 as heartily as I once did, largely because the number of reliable or repairable cameras and projectors has declined. With a good camera, super8 remains a tremendous image making medium, but please have it rendered to digital video ASAP. Super8 projectors are largely unreliable at present.
I've always believed in COLLABORATION as an important avenue of creativity and I've sought out other artists with whom to work.
Parallel to filmmaking, I have studied and practiced RADIO as an art form. I decided somewhere early on that a radio transmitter is a PROJECTOR for sound, and I've always found radio to have great commonalities with film as an expressive tool. My soundtrack work grew out of radio shows I did at the same time as making films; the concurrent practices feed off of one another.
Using film as a PERFORMANCE medium is another area where I've had a lot of experience, beginning with the ALMANAC project, where I used 2 projectors to present the work. I have soaked myself in Gene Youngblood's Expanded Cinema tome and am a great proponent of breaking the single-channel stream of film presentatrion. Working with Wet Gate, where we developed the use of the 16mm projector as a performance instrument in concert, has been a great outlet for my need for a true film practice. (Wet Gate will perform at the Berkeley Art Museum as part of their Friday Night series on January 29th, 2010.)
I do, however, appreciate and champion well made single-channel films. I am not quite the dilettante I was even 10 years ago.
The past 10 years I have tried to function in the wild world of community and commerce, first working in Public Radio and then creating soundtracks for film and television, often for commercials. Again, with a foot in 2 different worlds, I have stayed in touch with the experimental art world while trying to bring my skills into the larger film industry. Perhaps like Paul Sharits and others who wanted to see if they could apply experimental principles to more commercial (or accessible or just distributed) work, I moved to LA 4 years ago. My most recent new project involves writing the script for a teleplay or original series, based on my father's life. I have ongoing relationships and projects with creative people which I am nurturing.
I have always seen film as a great communicating force and have wanted to inject myself into that, into the great machinery of projectors and television screens that can reach people all across the world. Here in Los Angeles that means beginning with a script, so that is an important starting place. I don't mean to say that film cannot contain or even be based upon improvisational elements. When I was younger. film was much more of a diaristic medium for me, whereas now I want to consider carefully each time I engage the film apparatus. It's too expensive a medium at this point.
Saturday, January 5, 2013
Hollis Frampton: Incidental Holographer
Although I never met Hollis Frampton, the American film maverick who died of cancer at the age of 48 but left a legacy most 100-year-olds would be proud of, I studied at his feet. And later at his footage. But at the start it was mostly footnotes. While the early-1980's did provide some wonderful growth in the arts: artists' book publishing, performance spaces opening, multi-media forms emerging, the art of film was showing its first stages of decline, largely due to increasing costs, but also with the new interest in portable video, among other causes. So a lot of the great experimental film of earlier decades was not being actively screened. I'm talking Boston. There was Saul Levine at Mass Art showing his personal favorites. There was New York, where almost anything could be seen in the course of a year, but I couldn't live in New York, my birth city. The only way I found to internalize the great works of avant-garde cinema was reading about the films in books by P. Adams Sitney (Film Culture Reader) and Amos Vogel (Film as a Subversive Art), among others.
The two filmmakers whose ideas jumped off the pages of those books and bit me the most were Stan Vanderbeek and Hollis Frampton, both visionaries and meta-film activists. Vanderbeek, after a period of playful animation and collage films, turned to ideas for presentation including his Cinedome, which envisioned a geodesic sphere intended for projections; the interior was an ocular theater. Vanderbeek went so far as to imagine the cyber-future where films could be beamed in from elsewhere on the globe, collaged or mixed with any manner of other projected film on the spot. It was a beautiful vision, one which inspired a number of my own attempts at multi-projector harmony.
Frampton was a more traditional maker, cutting his films to A and B roll perfection and trying to wrestle every bit of mind muscle he could from one standard 16mm projector, just as he had gathered the images while gripping the camera. Singlehandedly. Frampton's major opus, Magellan, has every bit the same spherical intelligence as Vanderbeek's Cinedome. Magellan imagined a unique film to be projected for each day of the calendar year, effectively encircling the viewer in a humongous film loop and rendering a 3-dimensional clarity of vision. Frampton called it "circumambulating the hemispheres", and my own early film practice was largely inspired by the idea of capturing a place by walking a circle through it with the camera ON. While Frampton may not have described his work as seeking 3-dimensionality, I have been struck for the 28 years since his death at the proximity with which his ideas rub up against theories of poly-dimensionality. While the film image may not pop off the screen in a Frampton film, the thought-activity in response to his films must be considered something akin to mental holography. The work is just that active.
Frampton was a poet, linguist, photographer and dabbler in several arts--painting was what he seemed to admire most--and it was quite a natural move for him to abandon much of the rest once the film bug had bit him. We know that Frampton's earliest staging of Magellan was an art piece where he hung some pieces of plaster (?) in the studio and made a kind of walk-through sculpture. There are also the word-picture series he worked through in photographs and film: Ways to Purity, which collected odd signage fragments from lower Manhattan and, of course, Zorn's Lemma, the 1970 film which clearly established Frampton's genius. Not only does Zorn collect a movie version of the catalog of word signs seen in Purity, but his radical re-imagining of the alphabet begins with each letter hammered out of aluminum foil on a typewriter. The graphic impact of this alphabet, projected with a nice 250 watt bulb, cannot be overstated. The letters are downright cubic. I don't know if he was an admirer of Kubrick, but perhaps vice versa. The two filmmakers form a very small subset of intelligencia. The unrolling of Frampton's New Alphabet across the middle half of Zorn's Lemma is one of the great passages of film time. As each aluminum foil letter is replaced by a moving film image, the sensation becomes akin to the opening of windows. And it's not a house of windows, but the viewer's head and mind, the language centers, which are opening, and each letter becomes a flowing form much as ideas take form and move in the mind. If this isn't something close to holography then I'm hallucinating. It may be faux holography or something akin to anaglyphs, the red and green windows of early 3D movie glasses. Frampton turned to the motif of Red and Green himself; it is a major motif in Magellan.
Another early film worth mentioning here, which sometimes defies comment by its brilliance, is Palindrome, from 1969. The film presents a short strip of abstract shapes and forms repeated in a series of variations, positive, negative and other effects, regularly broken up by an equal length (24 frames?) of black or silence. (It is a "silent" film.) However, the great gift of palindrome is the music that this silent "image track" plays in your head. Frampton sets up a regular rhythm with the image turning on and off as it runs through, and then the subset of tinier variations happening within the image set plays another rhythmic dance which becomes music in the head. I would again argue in favor of considering this film an example of extramural holography. Frampton pushes the silent medium into the realm of sound as it is imagined in the mind by vision. The film explores a part of the brain that is usually dormant, a kind of inter-ear-eye canal.
And then there's Magellan. Frampton's final film project contains too many parts and pieces to fully evaluate here, but several of the films clearly suggest and create 3-dimensional states of mind, an effect Stan Brakhage might have called hypnagogic.
Mindfall is a film shot in Puerto Rico and contains beautiful and lush tropical footage, although Frampton subverts the elegance of his host island with disconcerting sound effects and he super-imposes two images throughout its entire half-hour length. Using A and B roll as a clever way to double-expose, Frampton provides the materials of stereo-vision without resorting to a 2-camera-2-projector system. He proposes that there is a cinema multi-tasking mind, which should be able to view and decipher more than one image stream at once. So, if two separate strands of thought or action coincide, maybe like a talented drummer playing one rhythm with his right hand and another with his left (and another with his feet!?), is that something one could tag as approaching holographic? (Stereo vision being a multi-task of parallel eyes.)
Winter Solstice is in some ways the crowning achievement of Frampton and Magellan. Shot in an iron foundry in Pittsburgh, the camera captures metals in various states of vulcanic transformation: liquid, solid, and most remarkably as flying patterns of showering sparks. This is magma. Usually a 30 minute experimental film on one subject is a tedious affair, but here is an example of time melting under the heat of such spectacular capture. Dali is jealous of this film. The cascades of burning ore fragments create patterns similar to some created by Bill Brand in the optical printer using rows of repeating and tumbling images. There is a constantly new feeling to the framed image. The camera shutter works in time with the shower of metal flowers to unbelievable effect. It seems re-animated. Vulcan lives. A Frankenstein effect of the material coming alive again under each projection. Again, an argument for holography.
Frampton pursued a goal of meta-film creation and, along the way, happened upon some radical techniques which elevated his bibliotic project to the level of euphoric discourse. He wanted to catalog a series of films, and shots within the films, that represented the entirety of human education and experience. Frampton and Magellan, by following the arc of the calendar, by walking a set path of stones through time, erected a World's Fair Globe to film consciousness, a bubble which collapses when it's not perceived through the right lenses. Circles of confusion abound.
Criterion published a dvd collection of Frampton films in 2012.
The two filmmakers whose ideas jumped off the pages of those books and bit me the most were Stan Vanderbeek and Hollis Frampton, both visionaries and meta-film activists. Vanderbeek, after a period of playful animation and collage films, turned to ideas for presentation including his Cinedome, which envisioned a geodesic sphere intended for projections; the interior was an ocular theater. Vanderbeek went so far as to imagine the cyber-future where films could be beamed in from elsewhere on the globe, collaged or mixed with any manner of other projected film on the spot. It was a beautiful vision, one which inspired a number of my own attempts at multi-projector harmony.
Frampton was a more traditional maker, cutting his films to A and B roll perfection and trying to wrestle every bit of mind muscle he could from one standard 16mm projector, just as he had gathered the images while gripping the camera. Singlehandedly. Frampton's major opus, Magellan, has every bit the same spherical intelligence as Vanderbeek's Cinedome. Magellan imagined a unique film to be projected for each day of the calendar year, effectively encircling the viewer in a humongous film loop and rendering a 3-dimensional clarity of vision. Frampton called it "circumambulating the hemispheres", and my own early film practice was largely inspired by the idea of capturing a place by walking a circle through it with the camera ON. While Frampton may not have described his work as seeking 3-dimensionality, I have been struck for the 28 years since his death at the proximity with which his ideas rub up against theories of poly-dimensionality. While the film image may not pop off the screen in a Frampton film, the thought-activity in response to his films must be considered something akin to mental holography. The work is just that active.
Frampton was a poet, linguist, photographer and dabbler in several arts--painting was what he seemed to admire most--and it was quite a natural move for him to abandon much of the rest once the film bug had bit him. We know that Frampton's earliest staging of Magellan was an art piece where he hung some pieces of plaster (?) in the studio and made a kind of walk-through sculpture. There are also the word-picture series he worked through in photographs and film: Ways to Purity, which collected odd signage fragments from lower Manhattan and, of course, Zorn's Lemma, the 1970 film which clearly established Frampton's genius. Not only does Zorn collect a movie version of the catalog of word signs seen in Purity, but his radical re-imagining of the alphabet begins with each letter hammered out of aluminum foil on a typewriter. The graphic impact of this alphabet, projected with a nice 250 watt bulb, cannot be overstated. The letters are downright cubic. I don't know if he was an admirer of Kubrick, but perhaps vice versa. The two filmmakers form a very small subset of intelligencia. The unrolling of Frampton's New Alphabet across the middle half of Zorn's Lemma is one of the great passages of film time. As each aluminum foil letter is replaced by a moving film image, the sensation becomes akin to the opening of windows. And it's not a house of windows, but the viewer's head and mind, the language centers, which are opening, and each letter becomes a flowing form much as ideas take form and move in the mind. If this isn't something close to holography then I'm hallucinating. It may be faux holography or something akin to anaglyphs, the red and green windows of early 3D movie glasses. Frampton turned to the motif of Red and Green himself; it is a major motif in Magellan.
Another early film worth mentioning here, which sometimes defies comment by its brilliance, is Palindrome, from 1969. The film presents a short strip of abstract shapes and forms repeated in a series of variations, positive, negative and other effects, regularly broken up by an equal length (24 frames?) of black or silence. (It is a "silent" film.) However, the great gift of palindrome is the music that this silent "image track" plays in your head. Frampton sets up a regular rhythm with the image turning on and off as it runs through, and then the subset of tinier variations happening within the image set plays another rhythmic dance which becomes music in the head. I would again argue in favor of considering this film an example of extramural holography. Frampton pushes the silent medium into the realm of sound as it is imagined in the mind by vision. The film explores a part of the brain that is usually dormant, a kind of inter-ear-eye canal.
And then there's Magellan. Frampton's final film project contains too many parts and pieces to fully evaluate here, but several of the films clearly suggest and create 3-dimensional states of mind, an effect Stan Brakhage might have called hypnagogic.
Mindfall is a film shot in Puerto Rico and contains beautiful and lush tropical footage, although Frampton subverts the elegance of his host island with disconcerting sound effects and he super-imposes two images throughout its entire half-hour length. Using A and B roll as a clever way to double-expose, Frampton provides the materials of stereo-vision without resorting to a 2-camera-2-projector system. He proposes that there is a cinema multi-tasking mind, which should be able to view and decipher more than one image stream at once. So, if two separate strands of thought or action coincide, maybe like a talented drummer playing one rhythm with his right hand and another with his left (and another with his feet!?), is that something one could tag as approaching holographic? (Stereo vision being a multi-task of parallel eyes.)
Winter Solstice is in some ways the crowning achievement of Frampton and Magellan. Shot in an iron foundry in Pittsburgh, the camera captures metals in various states of vulcanic transformation: liquid, solid, and most remarkably as flying patterns of showering sparks. This is magma. Usually a 30 minute experimental film on one subject is a tedious affair, but here is an example of time melting under the heat of such spectacular capture. Dali is jealous of this film. The cascades of burning ore fragments create patterns similar to some created by Bill Brand in the optical printer using rows of repeating and tumbling images. There is a constantly new feeling to the framed image. The camera shutter works in time with the shower of metal flowers to unbelievable effect. It seems re-animated. Vulcan lives. A Frankenstein effect of the material coming alive again under each projection. Again, an argument for holography.
Frampton pursued a goal of meta-film creation and, along the way, happened upon some radical techniques which elevated his bibliotic project to the level of euphoric discourse. He wanted to catalog a series of films, and shots within the films, that represented the entirety of human education and experience. Frampton and Magellan, by following the arc of the calendar, by walking a set path of stones through time, erected a World's Fair Globe to film consciousness, a bubble which collapses when it's not perceived through the right lenses. Circles of confusion abound.
Criterion published a dvd collection of Frampton films in 2012.
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