World Citizen Alex MacKenzie's Intertidal

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.