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.

DUMBO Arts Jalopy Hour Premiere

On Saturday, September 26th, 2009, Jalopy Hour was premiered in a Brooklyn bookstore exhibition space (Powerhouse Arena). It was a beautiful weekend in New York, with entirely mixed weather. I measured 3 celebrity sightings in my crossings of Manhattan: Willem Defoe, who I often see around Houston Street, the Clintons at a restaurant north of Greenwich Village, and Elisabeth Moss of Madmen on the Upper West Side. Jalopy Hour was shown thanks to the kindness of Caspar Stracke, of Brooklyn or Berlin or Mexico City, who has curated VideoDumbo the last several years. It is a video festival that keeps expanding in scope and Caspar, with wife Gabriela Monroy together a VJ duo called Mostra, almost single-handedly mounts a festival which would take 10 people to produce anywhere else. Caspar can be seen carrying the video projector from one venue to another just in time for the next scheduled screening, an absolutely personal approach to festival coordination.

Anyhow. The screening went well, in spite some classic snafus. The dvds which were to be ready and for sale were not, due to unforeseen difficulties arisen with the printer-manufacturer. (We have since pulled the job and moved it to another company, a process currently underway...) We had also hoped to screen a blu-ray master of the film, which we had with us, and I picked up a blu-ray player in Manhattan especially for the screening, but for some gosh darn reason, the player would not recognize the disc. So we played an SD disc from Caspar's laptop which sufficed in the heat of the moment. The small audience of about 50 really played a big part in the film's playing, they seemed to truly understand the film, laughing at every appropriate moment. It was very encouraging that a film so delayed in its public life could have such a warm first reception.

Here are Caspar's film notes for the event:

Jalopy Hour is the result of a decade-long collaboration between commercial director/filmmaker Jeff Plansker and the experimental filmmaker/sound artist Owen O'Toole. It was originally conceived as an imaginary TV series shot in different American cities, exploring their respective cultural histories by the use of an absurdist lexicon borrowed from Ernie Kovacs, Lord Buckley, and Buster Keaton.

The project soon grew into some sort of Rousselian monster, a grotesquerie whose governing logic was perversely withheld from the viewer. British and French elements are carefully blended with absinthe and decadence, transporting us back through the early 19th century, as America's identity crisis was played out under the shadow of Old Europe.

Plansker and O'Toole eventually locked their project onto the one city whose vibrant historical nexus reflected the exuberance of a transplanted European colonial culture mutating into something altogether new: they describe New Orleans as "the only city where Jalopy Hour could be filmed, being the only American locale possessing the sense of stepping into another time, of preserved antiquity and colonial decay, of conflict resolution reached through the mouth of a bottle."

Jalopy Hour was filmed over 12 sweltering days in June, 1998; initially intended as a half-hour "pilot" program, it now lives as a short film. After several years on hold, Plansker and O'Toole eventually continued their collaboration and edited several versions from the raw material; the result was a long-form edit and a series of short vignettes. Both edits of Jalopy Hour are included on the DVD, along with several scenes that didn't make the final cut. This collection of puzzle pieces itself encourages the viewer to assemble them into a personal composition; only with a careful reading between the electronic scan lines can the complexity of this collaborative tour-de-force be fully revealed.

http://www.videodumbo.org

Madmen After 3

We have been active fans of television program MADMEN, created by Matt Weiner, for the past 8 or 10 months, seeing the first 2 seasons as dvd video from our Public Library and Netflix. It has been sooo nice to see television that is worth watching. (I will have to comment elsewhere on Ken Burns' new National Parks epic, also fabulous.) I don't have much of a stomach for cop shows or CSI-style guns and hospitals interactions, and I don't go for Soprano mafia dramas, even though it is an appropriate metaphor for modern life, plus I realize Madmen's Weiner came from the Sopranos writing stable.

Although Madmen has been up and down, leaving you wondering what happened to half of the characters introduced in previous episodes, the general truth to period (the early 1960's) and quality of acting and story has remained at a very high level, and finally sets the bar for television back up where it should have been. I realize we are perhaps in another golden period of television, partly brought on by an economy that demands budget entertainment. If the human race is condemned to a future of television, as the Intel Corporation said in September: The Future is TV Shaped, then let it continue in this vein of quality. I remain amazed at how many people I meet have shows they watch, calling them their own, how important TV remains to people. Television as a medium remains hugely successful and I think challenges the personal computer for distinction as the end all of our technological path. Even now as I type on this laptop I wonder: Is this a personal computer or really just another mode of conveyance for television content? A youTube window opens up to answer me...

Anyway. Madmen is the best television I've seen since Twin Peaks. And like Twin Peaks it has had its ups and downs: the silly lawn tractor over the foot episode for instance, as Twin Peaks had some very silly motorcycle romance themes. But when Madmen is good, and it has tended to be about 70% of the time, it's very good. reminds me of the cinema of Douglas Sirk, high melodrama wrapped in well researched historical baggage. The first season followed current events of the period really well, with a particularly good playing of the Cuban Missile Crisis. This recent season, which I have not seen all episodes of, also had an adept handling of the Kennedy assasination, which was a date I felt they were avoiding or forestalling for months. The show slagged a bit as the writing team figured out how to move through 1963 towards that gruesome day, which many of us consider The End of Democracy Day, and now it's all mafia movies coming from the GOP. The political references speak to the "reality" presented on this show, a real window on that important era. Makes so-called "reality TV" look like a true joke.

Gabor Body: Europe's Hollis Frampton

I know it's a bit facile to equate 2 important artists like this, so forget the title. Made you look. Frampton and Body did both leave this earth too early, Frampton at 48 and Body at a shockingly young 39.

Body's influence was huge in Europe during the 80's and he produced a huge BODY OF WORK (a better title) that demands revisit and evaluation. I think of American Postcard, the great feature film he made about the US Civil War era, which toured the States in a program called The Other Side: European Avant Garde Cinema, and which I had the good fortune to see (at the Boston MFA, around 1984). A great film, part Muybridge and part LeGrice, a film containing faded passages lost in effects of early photography and cinema. There I go again, referring to other artists. But the echoes of other great work is so strong in the BODY of work. Great BODYs attract.

Gabor Body produced a large number of films which always seemed ahead of the curve in both subject matter and technique. He initiated the hugely influential video magazine INFERMENTAL. He made early computer graphic films. I'm sure he is revered in Budapest, but that is a very wide hemisphere from here. There is very little material on Gabor Body here in The Web, especially considering his futuristic work and thinking. I have unboxed the wonderful compendium book that Vera Body gave me after I hunted her down in Cologne, and I promise to write more about the book in a future piece here.

This appears to be the official website:
http://www.bodygabor.hu/bg_rol/?id=114

It appears that the Berlin Film Festival will include his last film in a series about Pre-Fall-Of-The-Wall Films this season:
http://altfg.com/blog/film-festivals/berlinale-2009-after-winter-comes-spring/

And I also found this material on his life, with a few minor video klips:
http://www.newmedia-art.org/cgi-bin/show-art.asp?LG=GBR&DOC=IDEN&ID=A000000257

May the world blossom with new openness to the work of the great overlooked filmmakers. More walls to be demolished.

Infinite Animation: Adam Beckett

Just in from the screening of films by Adam Beckett at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. I was a little late, getting caught in Depeche Mode Hollywood Bowl traffic and then left my lights on when parking and had to call AAA for a jump start. Had a Winchell's donut while waiting since I was parked directly in front, across the street from the Academy on Vine Street.

Adam Beckett was an animation genius who went from Antioch College to Cal Arts to the Star Wars crew. He died unexpectedly in a fire at the age of 29 and one can onlky imagine what he would have done had he lived longer. He had already become a master at the optical printer and Oxberry stand. His films use all of the great deep potentials of those machines, from matte effects to incredibly complex overlays. He did things that looked like video art feedback with film.

The screening presented new prints provided through the restoration work of Mark Toscano at the Academy and funding from the iotaCenter. I missed the 3 loop projection provided for audience entrance. The prints looked very good and have aged well, remaining full of life and a deep understanding of sequence in time, of process and pattern. There was some minor softness at some points to the focus and color chroma which may have been part of Beckett's art, involving long non-stop overnight stints at the animation stand, drawing as he ran the pages through the camera stand. Projection of this work could be challenging, as Beckett has forms morphing from edge to edge of the frame, so most projectors would have a hard time keeping the entire frame in focus.

Adam Beckett's work is what animation is all about, I mean: it is essential work. Large format drawings which begin with seemingly simple loops patterns of morphing shapes and/or words and letters and then grow into much larger and deeper pattern pieces, the artist drawing more design between what he started with, then deepening it again by creating matte and color filter effects with multiple passes through the printer. "From the kernel to the cosmic", someone quoted him saying. All of the pieces describe processes of evolution and cyclical return and work at theme and variations taken from small-ish tidal pools of graphic material. Beckett could take a small group of drawings into the animation chamber and come out with cans full of new motifs and orchestrated chaos on film. It was a pleasure to see this presentation, with Beckett's mother in the audience and many alumni from the Star Wars technical crew together to talk olde times.

Reminded me of studying animation with Flip Johnson at the Boston Museum School beginning in 1981. I was getting into pattern drawing for animation and may have headed down a similar path, although I don't have a head for numbers the way Beckett evidently did. Unfortunately the animation department at the Museum School was more geared towards exploding frogs so I moved on to running through stadiums with super8 cameras.