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.
