The Lion Still Has Wings

In 2004, my friend and film collaborator Jeff Plansker was invited to make a short film using Sony's new HD Cine Alta video camera, in recognition of his work as a director of commercials. A strange honor, in that Sony provides the camera and a technician, but the director/production co. must pay for the production; a clever way to promote the use of HD video with users and I guess a good opportunity to work on an open project for the director. For several years, Sony organized a series of short films made this way as their "Dreams" project, screening the results in LA, NY and Cannes. I believe 2005 was the last year of Dreams.

Jeff told me in the fall of 04 that he was trying to work with a writer-collaborator on a short story for the project, and perhaps I would be called on to make music for it, but come 2005 they hadn't come up with a clear story, and the project was due by the end of February. I was called in as clean-up crew, invited by Jeff to develop the alternate project idea. We consumed a few bottles of RGW (really good wine) and put some ideas on paper. We wrote the piece in 2 days, pre-produced for 2 days, shot for 2 days, and edited the film in 2 days. It was instant filmmaking, a pretty exciting way to work.

The theme of that year's Dreams project was "Flight". And we retained one idea from the initial story Jeff had been working on: that of filming in a actual airplane interior, which exists as a set in West Hollywood i think. We removed all language from our film vocabulary and decided to make a music piece. Of course we started kicking around ideas inspired by Fluxus events but then wound up narrowing in towards something closer to Stockhausen. Jeff had heard of a choir that was willing to work on film projects and I came up with an editing scheme that could collage the actual singing of the chorus into an experimental audio piece.

The Truncated Turbo-Pascal Editing System is a new method for randomizing the edit process. About 10 years ago I had some ideas about creating random templates for video-film editing after being first introduced to the Avid system. I believed that company might have been interested in developing a series of plots or patterns that could be applied to any digitized film footage to come up with interesting sequences which human intervention would pass by or just miss in the almost infinite combinations of possible edits. I met with an editor in LA (Bobby Briggs, if i remember correctly) who heard about my idea and was interested, but nothing ever came back to me about my proposal (to create templates for a digital editing system). I may have written once to Avid also, with no response. Anyway, this new project allowed me to make a breakthrough with the same idea. I quickly developed a new way to apply random numbers to a film bin with the help of editor Noah Herzog, whose nimble mind quickly understood what I was trying to do and we applied the System to this project.

So, the shoot days went well; it was a nice, relaxed project. Unfortunately, the one area I didn't think through or get enough info in advance on was the fact that this fancy HD camera has 8 or 9 tracks of audio built into the tape. So, we had stupidly hired the usual DAT recorder boom and tape op guys ("sound speed"), who did get us a decent stereo recording of everything we shot, however: 2 stereo mics could have tapped directly into the video recorder and made the audio compositing (finishing, putting together) so much easier. We also could have used a multi-mic surround recording approach but didn't think of it. really, Sony dropped the balls by not educating us about the sound properties of their system; and we were making a SOUND piece! I think the mic built into the camera captured a mono audio track.

The film we made: THE LION STILL HAS WINGS, consists of 3 sections, each of which directly derives from the experience of airplane flight. In the edit room, we applied the TTPES (Truncated Turbo-Pascal editing System) to the main segment, the 2nd section, of the film, in which the choir sings inside an airplane. I brought Jeff's brother's old casio into the plane set and played the octave of notes beginning with a low e-flat and going up from there. With each note, the choir would collectively repeat the note after hearing it until we had recorded 2 octaves I believe. Some variations and chords were built with the help of the choir director. The Turbo-Pascal system neatly divided the choir shoot into 91 shots. We used a random number generator to determine the sequence in which these shots were placed and their length in frames (up to 91 frames). The result had some tremendous collisions and, with some massaging of the material by Mr. Herzog, became a beautiful audio piece. Matt Dunlop did an amazing job of converting the stereo tracks from DAT to the camera-mic edit version we first created. A lot of very good people helped make this film, which I consider an instant film. It wasn't free, in fact it was quite costly to produce. But I think it's a nice indicator of what is possible.

Nods to Carl Swanberg for the gorgeous reel-to-reel machines.

Please view THE LION STILL HAS WINGS at www.lionstillhaswings.com

Wet Leaves: Wet Gate Plays Canada 2006

Peter's Negativland contacts in Toronto, Darren and Nadene of Deep Wireless, invited Wet Gate to perform at their SOUNDplay Festival this October. The trip was made possible largely by adding stops in Montreal and Kingston, where 2 other festivals were able to book us and defray costs. Shipping 3 guys and their projectors and sampling equipment can get expensive. Steve sourced out a big, cheap suitcase at Ross to house the Eiki slotload, a choice I joined him on. Peter opted for a hard plastic toolbox, which seemed to work out, but I found its plastic handle too brittle and breakable. Anyway, we made ourselves portable; projectors on the fly.

We Know Each Other So Well
2 weeks before, I travelled up to SF from LA to rehearse. We spent 2 nights working on new material and conceiving an outline for a Canada show. We watched the documents of our Rotterdam and Exploratorium shows and pulled basic ideas from those. This is basic Wet Gate process, feeding on recent past. I like the fact that tins of film loops from the last show(s) contain much of what will be used on the next one; anyway, the most interesting and current material rises to the surface. I had found a number of films on themes of ice and fire and brought some loops to our meeting. Steve deftly cut some additional loops from these films and Peter pulled a few nuggets from his archive.

24-hour Bagel Town
Customs is a drawn-out affair entering Canada, with a gymnasium sized atrium roped off into about 30 rows of zagging line which took 45 minutes before reaching the Customs desk. Steve and Peter had arrived about an hour before me, and found the bar. Tired Montreal Pop volunteers took us into town and our host accommodations. I lucked out and was housed with Dave Douglas, a genius professor of film at Concordia University, who spent a lot of time showing us around as well as educating us on Canadian film history. One of Douglas's focuses is Cuban film and he visits the Cuban Film Festival when he can, sometimes bringing Canadian films with him. Douglas got some grant money to publish on dvd a series of early Canadian independent films, most notably works by Larry Kent who might be seen as Canada's Cassavettes. He lives close to the 24-hour bagel epicenter of Montreal, and so several times we grabbed late bagels and watched Larry Kent films.

Our show was part of the Film Pop Festival, an offshoot of the Pop Montreal music festival showcasing upcoming bands as well as presenting older artists like Roky Erickson, Gary Lucas and Ramblin' Jack Eliot. We played on Sunday, October 8 at the Portuguese Association, along with a series of short music-films made in association with the National Film Board of Canada. Canadian cities are fortresses of internationalism, with cultural centers for many immigrant communities dotting their maps. These centers are available for rental by groups to put up music shows and festivals, which gives the events an interesting hybrid homegrown feel. Although some of the NFB audience left before we played, we had a good show which was well-received even though it seemed many didn't understand that our sound comes entirely from the filmsound until someone asked a question (we had a lengthy Q+A) afterwards. We were referred to as the Wet Gate Collective in Montreal for some reason; I think they like collectives, Montreal being a rebellious town.
[See an article -"Looper Troopers"- in the Montreal Mirror which interviewed Peter and Steve at http://www.montrealmirror.com/2006/100506/film1.html]

Lakeside Park
A day off in beautiful autumn weather allowed me to walk up Mont Royal to the lake park there, a bit like nirvana. Bought a Sun Ra + Walt Dickerson LP. While Peter and Steve tended towards poutine stations, restaurants serving french fries covered in gravy and lard or cheese, we all concluded that Montreal beer was tremendous.
Friends of Steve's, Matt and Sonia, invited us to their home for Thanksgiving dinner, Sonia offering us a fantastic vegetarian lasagna and more incredible hospitality.
[A brief history of Canadian thanksgiving: "The history of Thanksgiving in Canada goes back to an English explorer, Martin Frobisher, who had been trying to find a northern passage to the Orient. He did not succeed but he did establish a settlement in Northern America. In the year 1578, he held a formal ceremony, in what is now called Newfoundland, to give thanks for surviving the long journey. This is considered the first Canadian Thanksgiving. Other settlers arrived and continued these ceremonies. He was later knighted and had an inlet of the Atlantic Ocean in northern Canada named after him - Frobisher Bay. At the same time, French settlers, having crossed the ocean and arrived in Canada with explorer Samuel de Champlain, also held huge feasts of thanks. They even formed 'The Order of Good Cheer' and gladly shared their food with their Indian neighbours. After the Seven Year's War ended in 1763, the citizens of Halifax held a special day of Thanksgiving. During the American Revolution, Americans who remained loyal to England moved to Canada where they brought the customs and practices of the American Thanksgiving to Canada. There are many similarities between the two Thanksgivings such as the cornucopia and the pumpkin pie. Eventually in 1879, Parliament declared November 6th a day of Thanksgiving and a national holiday. Over the years many dates were used for Thanksgiving, the most popular was the 3rd Monday in October. After World War I, both Armistice Day and Thanksgiving were celebrated on the Monday of the week in which November 11th occurred. Ten years later, in 1931, the two days became separate holidays and Armistice Day was renamed Remembrance Day. Finally, on January 31st, 1957, Parliament proclaimed... "A Day of General Thanksgiving to Almighty God for the bountiful harvest with which Canada has been blessed  ... to be observed on the 2nd Monday in October." from twilightbridge.com] We enjoyed a game of film trivia I concocted using David Thomson's Dictionary of Film, reading excerpts from the entries and guessing who was being described. Kept us busy for an hour! Matt's dog also afforded us the opportunity to later discuss the subject of pitbulls as pets, with Peter and Steve I think somewhat cavalierly defending ownership of these dogs while I argued that there should be some rules about owning dogs which have been bred and trained to fight in close city quarters.

Tuesday, we took an evening train to Toronto, which was a bit confusing because they try to limit baggage to 2 pieces on this train and we each carried 4; but it worked out fine, after a telephone rep for the train told Peter, "go for it, live boldly", and we found an escalator to the train platform and I pretty much demanded access to that. The train attendants were generally quite kind. The ride was long and dull; I amused myself by drawing cartoon coinface images of Peter and Steve. The weather turned as we left Montreal, bringing an early winter to the Great Lakes region and 2 feet of snow to Buffalo, NY.

Projector Museum
I remember that Montrealers told us that bike safety was better in Toronto than Montreal, though in Toronto people told us stories of cyclists being dragged under the back wheels of turning buses. Avid bicyclist Jim (Bailey I believe, member of URG, the Urban Refuse Group) met us at the train station and guided us to Nadene's minivan and we were off to the Grange Hotel, a funky 6-floor brick dormitory between Queen and Dundas, a good central location. We found the Java House restaurant and installed ourselves there, for constant breakfast and other meals during out stay. Wednesday, we did a morning radio show on CKLN with Ron Gaskin, who as "Rough Idea" hosts concerts around town. Peter and Steve toyed with a projector and sampler, mixed by Ron into a living interview with us, classic freeform radio. After breakfast, we visited Art Metropole, a media center/bookstore opened by notorious art group General Idea back in the 80's (they fetishized poodles and published a magazine called FILE that was fairly big in the art world back then). Then went to the CBC Center in the business district and ogled their collection of old film and radio machines, the displays on kids TV shows and the sound effects world, a wonderful little museum that i hope is never hidden away. Steve spent 25$ to go up in the CN Tower and we later met up at the Goethe Institute to see Michael Snow (CAT synth) play with Alan Licht (guitar) and Aki Onda (cassettes and samplers), a Rough Idea event. While it was not an ingenius setting of noise improvisation, there were moments towards the end where soft tones from Licht's guitar played mutually with Snow and Onda's somewhat lighter approach. The arced array of amps behind the musicians didn't help sound dispersal in the room, a small round cinema auditorium. Thursday we loaded our equipment into the Latvian House on College St., where the SOUNDplay festival would host 3 concerts using Darren Copeland's multi-speaker diffusion array. Later that night I took off and visited the Orbit Room (Alex Lifeson's bar on College) for an hour or so, catching a set by Chris Caddell's Hendrix-style trio.

Friday the 13th
Friday was concert day. We had a good sound check and a bit of bickering over how our projections would fit on the screen. The days of travelling together were adding up. I tried to leave it to Steve and Peter to discuss everything ad nauseum; there wasn't room or time for all 3 of us to talk. David Ogborn presented some beautiful music to the prelude segment of Fritz Lang's Metropolis, using computer music and 3 soloists on voice, violin and trombone. Wonderful use of the surround system and chorused samplings from the live instruments, particularly voice. Our show was a bit of a calamity; very quickly our sound began over-modulating and breaking up and it was not clear where it was coming from. Evidently, our lines on the system mixer had not been adjusted for proper levels, even as I had tried to get a good headroom for peaks at sound check. But none of us thought to trim the gains back to line level, and so when we pushed our levels in performance the sound broke apart. This wasn't the only sound problem of the festival; Saturday night was plagued by similar over-modulation noise and surround sound related computer glitches and crashes. After Peter wrongly deduced that the sound problem was in my line (understandable because I was the last one he heard breaking up), I ripped apart my sound gear to remove a previously faulty effects unit, thinking it might be acting up again. I was hobbled for the remainder of the show, but I guess we did OK. There was great informal discussion afterwards, and I met with Jonathan Pollard, who had invited me in 1990 to show the Filmers Almanac in Pleasure Dome's first season (Pleasure Dome IS a collective which has been showing experimental film across Toronto for over 15 years), and John Porter, Canada's greatest super8 filmmaker, said HI and gave me a copy of his Visiting Filmmaker Map of Toronto (see super8porter.com).

Saturday was night 2 of SOUNDplay, beginning with Michael Snow's trio, with his son Aleck and John Kamevaar. (I'm assuming anyone reading this would be a little familiar with Snow's work, he is the most well-known living Canadian artist, painter and musician, and filmmaker known for classic avant-garde films Wavelength, Back and Forth, La Region Centrale etc.) Snow's remarks for this performance: "We are going to sound flicker". (Sunday's soundPLAY would be a screening of "flicker" films and a panel discussion.) While the trios music was interesting at times, splayed out on the surround speakers, it was largely a wall of noise-chatter and was interrupted by computer crash-like glitches. Aleck Snow snuck in drum machine samples. Michael's CAT synth issued staccato sine wave pulses and we don't know what John Kamevaar did while sitting at his laptop.

Perhaps the most interesting person at SOUNDplay was Louis Dufort, a Montreal electro-acoustic composer who tries his hand at all sorts of giant projects, including operas and harbour symphonies (a form popularized by Newfoundland's biennial Sound Symposium and visionary Canadian composer R. Murray Schaefer, author of "Tuning The World"). Dufort had presented some video samples of his work at Gallery 1313 a few nights before. He now presented 2 beautiful audio pieces, Grain du Sable for the tsunami victims of 2004 and Hi_res, both of which were dense explorations of the possibilities of new music coming from the computer (MAX/MSP base). Unfortunately, Dufort's presentation was again interrupted by surround computer problems. He also showed a single-channel version of a multi-channel video+sound work called Flesh, in which he plays with porno image and sound loops and which I found less interesting.

Saturday closed with a performance by trio PHH!K, whose uncertain stance between worldbeat-jazz and academic new music was uncomfortable; it was a taste of the 1980's, with lyrics lifted from Marshall McLuhan and "Que Sera Sera" twisted infinitely ala Ursula Dudziak or Annette Peacock, with gurgling Kurzweil and MIDI saxophone rounding out the anachronism. One highlight of SOUNDplay was seeing Bill Daniel, the gypsy-tex filmmaker who did a long residency at ATA in SF, also in Toronto showing his Bozo Texino film at cine-cycle the same night we played. I have finally seen Bozo Texino, thanks to Bill's willingness to trade dvd for drinks, and it's a beautiful film about tramp life on the rails, with gorgeous hi-con B+W footage taken from wide-swung boxcar doors all across North America, great interviews with spokesmen of this dying outsider breed of wild person, and great train sounds. Anyone interested in trains should see this film (go to Bill's website: http://www.billdaniel.net/, it's very cool). Saturday we visited cine-cycle, where Martin Heath and Janet Attard (cine-cycle t-shirt stencil artist) showed us around. An old 19th century horse stable, cine-cycle is a wonderful alternative film space, hidden in the alley behind the fancy 401 Artists studios building.

The Big Apple and the Garage
Nadene lifted us to the airport Sunday where we conscripted our own minivan for the trip to Kingston, a third and final show in Canada, this one in a municipal parking garage. The weather remained above freezing. We did make a stop on the highway at The Big Apple, a famous tourist trap offering mediocre apple pie, coffee, a putt putt course, a gifte shoppe, and a giant red apple about 30 feet high, that you can sometimes walk into, but we couldn't. The Tone Deaf festival had kindly gotten us each a room at the Kingston Days Inn, ahh. Then we made our way to the parking garage, met host Matt Rogalsky and set up, wind-proofing the place a bit using local detritus (nice work, Steve). We ran to get food and returned to watch Wendy Luella Perkins lead a group circle in voice, percussion and garbage (plastic bags, tin cans). Peter and Steve couldn't stand it, but I rather liked the open aspect of the piece, inviting everyone to sing with each other or to themself (to keep warm). A circle of paper bag lanterns pushed the seasonal ritual aspect; it was pleasantly feminine, somewhat mysterious and uncomfortable, but good in a lysergic kind of way. You were left looking at yourself in response to a piece which is really no more than the people collectively assembled there.

Following this, Wet Gate did one of its best shows in a long time, at least in my opinion. (Steve felt differently.) Perhaps it was how shitty I felt our Toronto show had been, that I had been crushed by the problems there (wanting to give Toronto a great show) and the 10 days trapped traveling on top of each other, now was the release. I do think it was a very good show and it was ironic that such a simple set up, again in freezing weather and on a cold concrete floor for hours, could make for the best show of our 3 Canada dates. Matt gave us wood TV dinner trays for our electronics, classic! I had fun ripping apart sounds inside that parking garage. The goodness of that show salvaged what was a pretty difficult small tour for me; I mean, performance-wise Montreal was even, Toronto a bit negative, and Kingston quite good; that balances out a bit above even. Throw in the personalities of 3 "grown men" acting like school boys across Canada and you have destination Mars, an asteroid belt. Once the third show was done, we could relax a bit and gaze at the October Ontario foliage en route to the airport home. Pearson airport (YYZ) is a maze of circling overpasses; we eventually got the rental to where it was going, wheeled our projector bags through Customs, enjoyed a final Canadian airport meal and ale and said goodbye. I flew to my new town, Los Angeles.

Post Intelligencer
Wet Gate has been a wonderful off-and-on project for me, a way to bring together many of my interests and keep a performative aspect to film going in my life. It's a good occasional band. I would love to see us use Wet Gate more as an umbrella for greater collaborations, under which we can work as individual artists and mix with other artists in unique combinations, which might bring excitement back to working with each other. I think filmgroup silt has grown considerably in recent years as "solo" artists, using the strength of their siltiness to go off in new directions individually, and then return to group work out of the strength gained from the separate studies. Certainly the members of Wet Gate lead independent creative lives; I'd like to see our independence grow in relation to one another. Otherwise the group concept can be stifling. I could hardly get a word in edgewise with my 2 coffee fueled companions on this trip.

There was a rumor of going to St. John's for the Sound Symposium 2008; Peter said Gayle Young of Musicworks had mentioned that possibility. I'm all for it. I've always wanted to "do" the Sound Symposium. I love Eastern Canada, having visited Cape Breton 2 summers when I lived in Maine. But I would want to see Wet Gate as the vehicle that gets us there and then be free to do my own work, which requires attention and nurturing. (The Wet Gate group is almost instant and easy, we grew out of a stump fully grown.) I would imagine going there, presenting a Wet Gate performance, and then being free to do other work, perhaps compose a radiophonic piece on my own and collaborate with another visiting artist.

The idea that Wet Gate is viable as a serious source of financial income is laughable to me; it entails much more input than return financially. This Canada trip almost broke even, and that's good for Wet Gate. This is not a cash cow we're milking, even if it can be productive until doomsday. Of course, we each must measure our sense of what we put in and what we take out, which is the reality of all relationships. Unfortunately, under present kill-bill capitalism, funding matters in what art you are "free" to pursue, or how intensely you pursue it.

Wet Gate: 16mm Projector Band

In 1995, a woman named Laurence called to ask if I would take part in a performance of hers, opening for the Seamen (a Survival Research offshoot) at a club in San Francisco. She had gotten my name from NY filmmaker Bradley Eros, a common friend. A few days later I met Steve Dye and Peter Conheim, who, along with David Sherman and Mark Gergis, had been hired as projectionists for an "act" she did called "ReInventing the Wheel", where she hung a few bicycle wheels from the ceiling and we projected wheel imagery loops. It was a small disaster. But I enjoyed meeting Steve and Peter, who'd known each other for some years and were discussing "what a projector band would be like" as we loaded or unloaded our projectors that day. As they kicked it around, I said: "OK, let's do it. I'll be in the projector band with you." Did we have any idea how much loading and unloading of projectors we would do for the next 10 years? Well, we did probably about 30 concerts, some excellent and others not perfect.

Wet Gate has occupied its own interesting niche as a film performance group playing 16mm projectors as musical (and image) instruments. Each of us has been obsessed by THE LOOP, the beautiful economy of a film (or audio) loop, turning one short filmic phrase into an endless or unlimited (duration) piece of film-time. We each brought our own personal attractions to working as a group. Steve Dye had done experiments with Press-on Letraset patterns and how they played when applied to the optical sound region of the film strip and brought that process to Wet Gate, which has been a major aspect of our performance since the start. (I forgot to mention that we agreed that Wet Gate's philosophy of performance would be playing sound which is generated ONLY by film passing over the optical sound head on the 16mm projector.) Steve also plays clarinets and homemade wind instruments and studies West African drum and dance. Peter Conheim was a serial-looper, working with Mark Gergis and friends as Monopause, a band of lo-fi post-prog anti-rockers out of Oakland. He started the record label Electro-Motive to release music from the underground Oakland music scene (get "Live From The After World" at www.electromotiverecords.com/). Peter also scored a huge archive of educational 16mm films when the Berkeley School System threw its collection in a dumpster and he was alerted of it. Today, Peter is the most obsessive 16mm collector I know and he has helped revive the Guild Cinema in Albequerqee, NM the last few years. He's also working regularly with Don Joyce and Negativland. Peter's Negativland contacts opened many opportunities for Wet Gate concerts. My own (Owen) contributions included experience with multiple projections from my Filmers Almanac project, building custom screens using artist vellum papers, an interest in mirrors as a projection tool (O'Toole) and a studio in Berkeley where we rehearsed for several years. We each found films and brought carefully clipped loops to show off to each other, like a kind of contest. We invented ways for projectors to speak together as an ensemble, learning how to segue from one sequence of images and sounds to the next. Projectors were adapted for line out audio, eliminating amplifier noise. Notes from rehearsal improvisations were hammered into setlists, often just prior to a performance. Bay Area filmmakers Gibbs Chapman and Maximillian Godino became some-time members of Wet Gate. The group enjoyed a type of artist-in-residency at Craig Baldwin's Other Cinema New Experimental Works shows. The Bay Area flourished as a center for experiments in multiple projector film art, now sometimes called "Performance Cinema" in university syllabi.

After peaking in the late 90's, Wet Gate gathered less often to invent new forest fires. We each had other projects and life turns. I moved to Mendocino County for several years. We did a performance for 2003's Faits de la Lumieres international projection day, projecting onto the satellite reception dish at KZYX, the radio station I worked at (see www.wetgate.net/ for documentation of that and other band history). And we started receiving calls of interest that took us to Australia in 2005, Rotterdam in early 2006 (see my review of that under Wet Gate at www.filmersalmanac.net/) and then a tour of Montreal, Toronto and Kingston, Canada in October of 2006. So Wet Gate remains a working group, even if that is occasional, the only 16mm projector optical sound band on planet Earth.

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)