Berlin Alexanderplatz (Fassbinder, 1980, WDR TV)

If you studied film in the early 1980's, you had to deal with the New German Cinema, an incredible upswelling of creativity in film generated by public funding for filmmakers who had a lot to say. Perhaps it was about time for a generation to express the... yup: angst, of growing up in post-Hitler Germany. The biggest of these film authors remain Werner Herzog, Wim Wenders, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, although many deserve notice: Hans Jurgen Seyberberg, Alexander Kluge, Volker Schlondorff, Margaretta vonTrotta, among others. Fassbinder was the most phenomenally productive, making about 40 films before burning out at age 37, his heart giving out from overwork, drugs and alcohol. The baroque sophistication of Fassbinder's later work is overwhelming, involving beautifully staged melodramas pulled from the lives of Fassbinder and his actors to some extent, often filmed by a moving camera through glass windows and doors. Berlin Alexanderplatz is a monumental piece of film work, 15+ hours made for German television, quite possibly the greatest film ever done for television. I remember it finally playing on public TV in Boston, what an event that was, and its first film screening at the Harvard Film Archive. I saw it again in a marathon screening at the PFA in Berkeley in about 1997, part of a Fassbinder retrospective. And I've been viewing it recently, dubbing low-fi VHS copies over to dvd. I remain impressed at the amazing accomplishment of this piece and know it has been an influence on my own attempts to make film, to try to conceive grandiose or epic projects and see if they take wing. Of course, making films is complicated, from writing to acting and set designing. Even for a super8 film there are many elements that can be controlled or left open to chance. Fassbinder's work allowed for little chance operations. I just wanted to register here the effect left in me from viewing this work. It's a kind of monument to aspire to.

As If It Were Your Own

Arriving in Northern California in early 1993, I wanted to make a first feature film on super8. Easier said than done. I had a series of vignettes that seemed related, aspects of my own story as a sound artist and radio programmer, and i began shooting film and collecting footage I'd previously shot along with some educational film footage. At first the material was called "The Plagiarist", after the radio show I'd hosted in Maine, but i gradually changed the name to "As If It Were Your Own", another Maine title I had used in a New Music America festival exhibit. I hired Alan Mukhamal to blow the super8 film up to 16mm and showed some of the rushes at Total Mobile Home, the basement cinema at friends David Sherman and Rebecca Barten's house. David, Rebecca and I coined the term "microcinema" together to describe their little theater. We did a lot of things together including a re-make of Guy Debord's anti-film "Hurlements in Favor of deSade". They have since moved to Bisbee, Arizona where they presented an underground film festival for a few years. They also helped make "As If", playing on-camera parts and advising me. Caspar Stracke, a young German super8 filmmaker I met through the Almanac, visited and helped build sets for "As If", acted as cameraman and acted on-camera, man. Mark Gergis, Oakland musician and s8 filmer, also appears in the footage. I acquired a Steenbeck 16mm editing flatbed from a convoy of Steenbecks imported from the BBC by some clever San Francisco filmmakers and sold into the community. Also acquired a Westrex 16mm fullcoat mag recorder (16mm audiotape) when Palmer Films, a revered SF film sound company went out of business. I edited and edited. Then Y2K arrived and I fled the Bay Area for Mendocino County. This film material got shelved. I am just beginning to apply the digital razor to old VHS copies of the material, to give some life to the lost project. I think the desire to work in long form may have been a huge stumbling block. The need to be grandiose, do something big. I could easily have broken the material down into a series of short films, which could be shown in any series of permutations, in fact I considered this but never switched over or finished any 1 short film. Clearly this material refused to be my own, but we'll see who has the last laugh. And don't bury the film with me.

They Have Poisoned The Drinking Water

In the last days of October, 1992, I went to Russia with my Russian friend Leo, a pianist I met living in Portland, Maine. I had long wanted to travel in Russia, pissed off at the political theater which determined that American and Russian citizens should fear and despise one another. Leo had visited several radio shows I hosted and we mixed his improvised piano playing with my tape loops and samples. He said we would do some concerts in Russia. I hoped to make some sort of film there, maybe collaborate with a Russian filmmaker. The first weeks there seemed like interminable partying; Leo was having a homecoming and "October Days" is a long series of celebrations of the 1917 Revolution. Leo's friend Radik, a filmmaker who did a marvelous adaptation of a story by Daniel Kharms (the great satirist), announced his wedding for New Year's Eve and I agreed then to stay for 2 months. Perhaps a mistake. I definitely poisoned myself with alcohol during that time, and food cleanliness was always questionable, although Russians do their best in periods of great limitation brought about by the unwieldy State Market distribution maze. But i did meet some wonderful people, traveled to the town of Saratov which had been off the map for "westerners" for years, we did several strange concerts, one of which was amazing, at an art opening in the Union Hall gallery in Moscow, a huge exhibit hall. I saw theater and a great concert by the group Vezhlivi Otkaz (Polite Refusal), who were like a Russian Pere Ubu, great musicians. All sorts of difficulties occurred on this trip and almost every day was dramatic. It was a series of headaches experienced inside the cave of Russian winter. It was lonely and painful. I began editing a video piece on a super-VHS system as soon as i returned to the US (and moved to Berkeley, California) from the super8 film and video shot in Russia. I semi-finished a 1-hour version of the piece, titled "They Have Poisoned The Drinking Water", but was never quite satisfied with it as complete. It has remained mostly shelved until now. I am just beginning an edit down of that piece into something more compact. Hopefully it will have something to say; we see too few images from the Russian world. Is it still sunk in the 19th century, as it was in 1992? I wonder.

The Flamethrowers (1989, super8, 9 min)

The Flamethrowers began in 1988 when I found a damaged print of Satyajit Ray's "Pather Panchali" in a Boston film collection. I'd actually seen the same damage done to a small segment of "The Seven Samurai" in a screening at Harvard's Film Archive and, after looking into the issue, was offered a loan of an almost entirely ruined reel of the Ray film to study. I refilmed sections of the damage onto super8 in close up. I had been reading Roberto Arlt's classic Argentinian novel "The Seven Madman" and its story of a secret plot to destroy society with poison gas mixed with what I was viewing in this film footage. The second volume of the novel is titled "The Flamethrowers", and I called this footage "The Flamethrowers" also, since the damage had come about by a projector throwing too much heat on the film, destroying it--or altering it radically--as it was being projected. I sent the 3 reels of b+w super8, along with 3 unexposed rolls, to Matthias Mueller of Alte Kinder, who I met at a Montreal Film Fest in early 1988, asking his group to make a second part to "The Flamethrowers", that this might become a serial film project. I arrived in Bielefeld for the Intercom Festival in late 1988 to find the Alte Kinders finishing the edit of their 3 reel segment. We screened the 6 roll piece at Intercom a few days later on 3 projectors, the old film triptych. Matthias and i agreed that the film was looking like an homage to another group of filmmakers, Schmelzdahin, the Bonn trio who mixed their own film chemistry and inspired a generation. We sent the film materials on to Schmelzdahin (Jurgen Reble, Jochen Lempert, and Jochen Mueller) who did contribute a third sequence to The Flamethrowers. The films came back to Matthias and he put together a single strip super8 version of all of the material, re-filming sections projected on 3 projectors and inter-cutting that with full-frame shots; he built a very beautiful version of the piece (I asked him to do this, wanting to see the same form he had developed in his film "Epilog" applied to this material). This "original" super8 version of The Flamethrowers also has wonderful audio that Matthias threw together on his Bauer sound-on-sound s8 projector, mixing tapes of sliding volcanic glass, Indian music, us running in the Bielefeld subway stations and water in his bathtub. Matthias is great with birdsounds, which appear throughout his films. Schmelzdahin took the materials again and tried to make a 35mm version of the project, but I never saw the results. Matthias later had a s8>16mm blow-up made and hired some soundtrack composers, but I think the audio on that version failed; that film copy toured in a Goethe Institute exhibition. I have just recently transfered a 16mm print to dv and begun restoring the original audio, which I have on an old videotape transfer of the original super8.

The Flamethrowers was essentially the crowning collaboration of the Film Almanac project and remains a significant collaboration of my life. I hope to return to this way of working. (Some additional words and film at www.filmersalmanac.net)

The Filmers Almanac (1988, super8, 7 hours of film)

After Frames for Frampton, I made a few other experimental diary films, including 2 called Ways To Midas, referring to my path home passing the Midas muffler sign and photography's "silver touch", and The Siberian Tigers, a fantasy baseball team and long sound piece of strange radio noise. The Siberian Tigers was awarded a fellowship from the Boston Film/Video Foundation and was presented there as a 2-monitor experimental video feature. My interest in Hollis Frampton's work made me decide to try to remake his grand work Magellan, consisting of a film for every day of the calendar year, by inviting super8 filmmakers the world over to shoot one day each for the project. Magellan inside out or not singularly concentric around one author-creator. This was a period in which mail artists were trading cassettes like mad, and great fun ideas with fluxus twists were being exchanged as "mail art". I was actively engaged and it was much more interesting than pursuing painting or other staid gallery arts. I traded freely with artists around the world. A crazy Canadian named David Zack started inviting people to share one name ("Monty Cantsin", or was it "Karen Elliot"? I think Karen Elliot was an alternate...) and show works as such collectively created. (I stupidly once sent him a letter my father had written to our family from his 1970's visit to Russia as a Washington Post reporter, describing seeing Lenin's waxy body in the mausoleum... Zack was in a Mexican prison at the time and died shortly after.) Anyhow, there were great collective projects going on perhaps as a response to the heightened pitch of reagan's Cold War posturing and world privatisation plans. There were Festivals of Plagiarism going on as art events internationally and even an Art Strike mobilized from within the mail artist community. It was heady fun.

The Filmers Almanac came out of that period, and from my interest in seeing super8 film become an exchange media akin to the audio cassette. If we did radio shows where we played cassettes from artists all over the world, couldn't we also present film shows of super8 rolls from afar as well? Starting in 1985 I sent out 3600 invitations to participate in the Almanac making, 100 each month for 3 years. (That was after Jeff Plansker helped me with the title over breakfast in Harvard Square, blurting out "Farmers Almanac" which became Filmers Almanac, and then tENTATIVELY a. cONVENIENCE chose the first day as I was mentioning the idea to him.) The target year 1988 came and 250 filmers had chosen film dates. I wound up receiving about 125 of those rolls, which was over 7 hours of film if projected traditionally. After some initial screenings, I turned to a 2-projector system, putting one on a lazy susan to allow for panning overlap. Matthias Mueller invited me to Germany and set up several screenings. He made an exquisite film for the Almanac which became the seed for his film The Memo Book. The production level on the films from Germany were amazingly high; there was an active sub-professional filmmaking scene there like no other. The Almanac showed in Helsinki, Detmold, Bielefeld, Hamburg, Osnabruck, Braunschweig, Bonn and Paris. At the Helsinki 8mm Festival at the start of the tour, filmmaker Vivienne Dick arrived from London and told us that the Berlin Wall had opened.

The other most memorable Filmers Almanac event was a screening in Toronto, under the umbrella of Pleasure Dome at the Purple Institution, a collective art loft. The screening there was so well received that people stayed on partying until almost dawn. A filmmaker raced home and got his 2-projector film to show at the end. A film crew caterer brought us all a late-night meal, and Atom Egoyan said hello, I think the Almanac giving some inspiration to his later "Calendar". I took a bus at dawn back to my hosts' apartment, a large box of films in one arm and super8 projector in the other.

see also: www.filmersalmanac.net/

Frames for Frampton (1985, 16mm, 7 min, color/sound)

By 1984, I had been studying experimental films for a year or 2, after first getting into filmmaking through an animation class with Flip Johnson at the Boston Museum School. I loved animation, but the classroom was a boys' club of exploding frogs, so it was out into the street with a super8 camera. I was also devouring anything I could read on the subject of experimental film, which sounded great in theory from the many books and scholarly articles on the heroic phase of New American Cinema (1950's through 70's). Unfortunately, by the early 80's screenings of these films were rare events and there was a seeming generation gap between the super-productive 70's and the bureaucratic reaganomic 80's. Video was replacing expensive film practice. Anyway, 2 filmmakers whose work I was drawn to from my readings were Stan Vanderbeek, who conceived of a Cinedome theater with internet-style exchange of motion pictures in multi-projection, and Hollis Frampton, who brought to film both a rigorous language-science and wordplay, humor. His film Zorn's Lemma is an incredible meditation on the matter of our alphabet (and can be viewed in funky internet-o-vision at: http://www.ubu.com/film/frampton.html). Both of these men died young of cancer, but they each brought to film an unusual understanding of its potential as a liberating device of communication, a language beyond language. Shortly after Frampton's death in 1984 I learned that the Albright-Knox Museum in Buffalo was mounting a show of his work, and I arranged to travel there to see the 3 hours of films called Hapax Legomena (a literary term meaning a word which appears only once on a written work). I shot one roll of Kodachrome super8 on the trip; a flight to Buffalo, the taxi to the museum, the grounds behind the museum, a run through the nearby cemetary and the bus back to Boston. This pilgrimage film was blown-up to 16mm on the Museum School's funky JK optical bench, a radio noise soundtrack was added, and it went out to some film festivals and collections in Japan and Germany. I met many filmmakers. This led to the larger film project dedicated also to Frampton: The Filmers Almanac. Frames for Frampton was in the Canyon Cinema catalog and collection for several years, but since the film did not rent they invited me to take it out of "circulation". It is now part of the Sonnet Lumiere film album.

Sonnet Lumiere

I took a semester of school in Barcelona in 1982. It was an opportunity I couldn't pass up, thanks to one professor who encouraged me, calling to remind me on the deadline day. I prepared for the trip by buying a used Beaulieu 4008zm super8 camera. My initial film ideas were architectural and 3 dimensional. I wanted to bring back 3-D images of the places I'd seen for friends who weren't able to take the trip. To film a 360 degree walk around a spot essentially captures the space in 3 dimensions. On return, I had the film transferred to video using state-of-the-art machines and began to put together an album of my first film pieces. There was a 360 degree view of the tower at Pisa and a film of me running through Harvard's football stadium. (That was another of my approaches: the running film.) I received a grant from the Somerville (Mass.) Arts Council to complete the video album. I called it Sonnet Lumiere, as in poem of light, and sound, a name I'd already given to an audio cassette album where some of the soundtracks came from. I began writing something about hybrid forms of film and video work which didn't amount to much. What I was doing, in retrospect, was trying to work with super8 film the way we worked with cassette audio, as a handheld personal recorder. Super8 is a cassette media, just snap the cartridge into the camera and shoot. The cameras come from the simplest point-and-shoot to very fancy ones, like the Beaulieu which has adjustable ASA. Although super8 projectors can be used to present beautiful film screenings, carefully shot and well-processed film should be copied to video before projection tears up the film emulsion. Super8 is an excellent alternative to video and should be considered an option for almost any moving picture production. I have to some extent dedicated my life to the medium of super8 filmmaking.

See lo-fi clips of the Sonnet Lumiere films and purchase a dvd copy here: http://filmersalmanac.net/spool.htm