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.
Monday, September 14, 2009
Tuesday, August 18, 2009
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.
Friday, February 20, 2009
The Making Of Jalopy Hour, part 1
Jalopy Hour was shot in New Orleans during June of 1998. It was intended as a short comic film/TV pilot (30 min +/-). The filming turned out to be more difficult than expected and communication skills between the principle participants broke down. Frank Schneider, the one real actor among us, admits to being partly possessed by spirits either from the City of New Orleans or the African mask he slept with. I had met Frank in an "action theater" class and invited him into the project to act and coach the rest of us into some sort of acting.
Jeff Plansker and I drove from LA to NO in November of 1997 with the goal of finding some old loft-like building we could rent for the first 6 months of the year wherein to develop ideas into the film. We drove through an amazing blizzard in a mountain pass in New Mexico while listening to Art Bell talk about recent UFO sightings near Seattle. We did succeed at finding a great old building near Magazine Street in NO. I moved from Berkeley to NO the first week of 1998. The owner of our rental was kind enough to put me up on a couch until I found an apartment. I got to know New Orleans while waiting for my creative partner to show up. Jeff had gotten dragged into doing a car commercial, the first in a long line of those. I followed the Mardi Gras parades and fortunately had some visitors, Jazz Fest etc. Jeff came to town a few times during the first 4 months and we argued over red wine about how to make the film. We did agree to operate a pirate radio station and invited an expert friend in who set up a fully functional 100-watt station in our building. There were some memorable radio nights, like when Andrew Blustain visited and we broadcast the audio from the entire 2001 film. The radio station was to be the workshop for our film ideas: that we might spin some records and then rant, and in recording those rants find the seed material from which to write the short film. Unfortunately we were never all there long enough to make that pattern happen. We did bolt some rough ideas into place which became the working film treatment. Then Jeff called in the troops and a slew of people arrived from LA to help make Jalopy Hour Jalopy Hour.
To be continued...
Please see a portion of Jalopy Hour at www.jalopyhour.com
Friday, June 27, 2008
Antique Film Project
About 15 years ago I became aware of antique recordings, 78s and Edison diamond discs. I heard a radio show on my old station WMFO while driving up to Maine where the DJ played sides by The Happiness Boys, Ernest Hare and Billy Jones, from the 20's and 30's. I was hooked and slowly began researching the topic. I now have a very good collection of antique music on LP, CD and in 78 form, and also have 2 Edison players, a cylinder and a disc player. After studying avant-garde music for 25 years I came to see antique music as avant-garde simply because the so-called new music was losing its newness to me, so little is really ground breaking. Looking back to the beginnings of recorded sound became equally if not more exciting. Old music was new to me. I began a radio show at KZYX (Dark Matter) which presented both antique and avant-garde music in a freeform manner, as I pleased to present it, sometimes with wonderful results. The abutting of antique recordings up against truly new experimental work could be glorious in the frission generated, or could fall flat. A weekly radio show can't always sound inspired, especially if you work a day job at the same station, which I did for 3 years.
The interest in antique music could not help but spill over into my interest in film, and they both being roughly contiguous: the history of recorded sound roughly coinciding with the history of filmmaking; there are many connections. Antique music is naturally the soundtrack material for old films, or could be. I made many notes towards making a film about antique music, focusing first on the Happiness Boys, then conceiving of a section called Chinese Radio, and then I imagined a final section on current HiFi equipment and the people who follow it, perhaps to include selections of very modern music also. These ideas have not been realized. But they have metamorposed, just like the found footage in my collection, which has aged and some has been destroyed. There is still life stirring in those ideas or the ghosts of those ideas.
Reading recently about my friend Alex MacKenzie's use of a hand crank projector in performance, mimicking the earliest of film show techniques, has me re-excited about the possibilities. Alex and I have agreed so many times on our belief that film performance can be a more vital approach to film; that finished film reels represent the mechanized methods of distribution and repitition that have strangled our culture under consumerism. Have we just failed to successfully manufacture film products? Yes and no. The inability to make product may be just as much a refusal to allow film to become product or the struggle to keep it from being only that.
Dealing with elements of antique film seems like another way to turn against the grain of standardized film culture, although there has certainly been a trand also in this direction, especially with all the "100 Years of Cinema" hoopla. It is wonderful to see filmmakers like Guy Maddin successfully bridge the antique film image via hand held super8 cameras with electric computer editing (I find his editing a bit antagonistic actually, the Darren Ornofsky effect...). Shooting new film using stylistic elements found in antique film, while not always innovative, can certainly be a source of renovation in film language and use.
An Antique Film Project would attempt to collect and preserve reels of film footage shot before the sound era or through and including the 30's. (At this point almost any 16mm found footage teeters on the edge of "antiqueness", so maybe dates are pointless. I have a few reels of Spanish Civil War material that was to married to some travelog super8 of mine from Spain and called A Climate For Rebellion. Unfinished at this date.
The interest in antique music could not help but spill over into my interest in film, and they both being roughly contiguous: the history of recorded sound roughly coinciding with the history of filmmaking; there are many connections. Antique music is naturally the soundtrack material for old films, or could be. I made many notes towards making a film about antique music, focusing first on the Happiness Boys, then conceiving of a section called Chinese Radio, and then I imagined a final section on current HiFi equipment and the people who follow it, perhaps to include selections of very modern music also. These ideas have not been realized. But they have metamorposed, just like the found footage in my collection, which has aged and some has been destroyed. There is still life stirring in those ideas or the ghosts of those ideas.
Reading recently about my friend Alex MacKenzie's use of a hand crank projector in performance, mimicking the earliest of film show techniques, has me re-excited about the possibilities. Alex and I have agreed so many times on our belief that film performance can be a more vital approach to film; that finished film reels represent the mechanized methods of distribution and repitition that have strangled our culture under consumerism. Have we just failed to successfully manufacture film products? Yes and no. The inability to make product may be just as much a refusal to allow film to become product or the struggle to keep it from being only that.
Dealing with elements of antique film seems like another way to turn against the grain of standardized film culture, although there has certainly been a trand also in this direction, especially with all the "100 Years of Cinema" hoopla. It is wonderful to see filmmakers like Guy Maddin successfully bridge the antique film image via hand held super8 cameras with electric computer editing (I find his editing a bit antagonistic actually, the Darren Ornofsky effect...). Shooting new film using stylistic elements found in antique film, while not always innovative, can certainly be a source of renovation in film language and use.
An Antique Film Project would attempt to collect and preserve reels of film footage shot before the sound era or through and including the 30's. (At this point almost any 16mm found footage teeters on the edge of "antiqueness", so maybe dates are pointless. I have a few reels of Spanish Civil War material that was to married to some travelog super8 of mine from Spain and called A Climate For Rebellion. Unfinished at this date.
Found and Lost Footage Etc.
The Film Prayer by A.P. Hollis was written in 1920. Hollis made the poem available to all non-theatrical film distributors to promote better handling of film. Hollis never copyrighted the poem.
"I am celluloid, not steel, Oh God of the machine, have mercy, I front dangers whenever I travel the whirling wheels of the mechanism. Over the sprocket wheels, held tight by the idlers, I am forced by the motor's might. If a careless hand misthreads me, I have no alternative but to go to my death. If the pull on the take-up reel is too violent, I am torn to shreds. If dirt collects in the aperture my film of beauty is streaked and marred, and I must face my beholders--a thing shamed and be spoiled. I travel many miles in tin cans, I am tossed on heavy trucks, sideways and upside down. See that I don't become bruised and wounded beyond the power to heal. I am a delicate ribbon of film - misuse me and I disappoint thousands; cherish me, and I delight and instruct the world." -- A.P. Hollis 1920
I found this quote on a film projector-related website today. Seems like a good place to start.
I use film. And so I collect films (mostly 16mm), not avidly or fervently, but I stumble across them and pick them up occasionally if I see a reel that looks interesting. I have found some wonderful films, perhaps most notably a 16mm educational film on the Amazon, called something like The Sleeping Giant. Incredible color and great lush scenic photography from the 50's I think. I have had to move numerous times over the past 10 years and this collection of films (and records and a good piece of my past, machines and cameras etc) has had to move with me, sometimes into not ideal storage situations. Leaky garages and storage spaces, poorly cooled closets. The last house had a garage which flooded the day after we moved in, soaking the bottom 6 inches of maybe 20 boxes containing books and films, original super8 reels and found 16mm reels. The Amazon reel was one of those, altered forever. Fortunately there are other prints of that film out in the world. I cannot promise to protect anything from the elements, as much as I'd like to say that I can.
I have 3,000 LP records which get decent treatment, but aren't always kept in optimally air-conditioned space. Many of them may be getting "lip warp", where the bottom edge of the disc, that sitting on the ground, begins to curl and makes the start of track 1 on either side sometimes untrackable. There are also several boxes of 78s that I take with me and the heat cannot be good to them; I hope to transfer them over to digital media but it's a cumbersome process.
Back to the films. I finally have a room that seems to be water-tight and I may be able to archive/organize all these little pieces, and find out what made it through the many moves and what didn't survive. There are prints of the films I myself made, the original super8 reels of the Filmers Almanac. There are several reels of found footage, educational films I gathered often with some re-use in mind. I also had a small collection of feature or featurettes on 16mm but I had to sell most of them because I lost faith in my archival abilities and didn't want to see films get ruined. 2 Japanese features with Takemitsu soundtracks. I still have a nice 16mm print of Peter Watkins The War Game that I'd like to show soon.
Wet Gate was a major instigating force for finding new reels of film and we cut out material for use in performance as loops, largely for the quality of sound on the strips. Film preservation often came up as a topic on Wet Gate performance tours; we encountered art world curator people for whom preservation is an important topic, and each of us has different takes on preserving film. My own attitude has remained largely that film, like other materials, has a finite lifetime, especially if played over and over as loop. So I lost my sense of need to preserve and maintain and pretty much came to see film material as something like paint or pencil that I could use and use up if needed. Of course the line was generally drawn to include old prints that were not rare or particularly special and to leave good, projectable reels of film alone, safe from the loop cutter.
Over the past year or so I have moved towards wanting to project No Film, simply using the projector as an interrupting light source to be manipulated, seeing the projection of light as a pure form of (futuristic) communication. This may have partly been a result of not being able to properly access film clips from a collection. But with the new (old) garage I have I am excited to think how I may rediscover footage. And also generate new footage. There is a Steenbeck in storage waiting for me to bring it into service once again. There are several unfinished films on hard drives awaiting final cutting also.
I use film as an artist uses paint and pencil, or magazine photos. It is material collected for use in the studio. It has perhaps lost its connection to film-time and history, being boxed and carried over distances. Standing on 2 feet perhaps I will see with both eyes and be able to recognize material appropriate for "appropriation", that overused term from 90's film art. Better said: material that may be ground down and partially destroyed, turned into something else, degraded, even de-based: emulsion taken off the film base. Is there no respect for history here? Have I lost hope, that the future may want to see exact replicas of what was? How much is worth preserving in a culture that seems bent on suicide (via the automobile and coal power plants)? Is the decadence of my film archive chaos a symptom of this disbelief?
The wonder of film is that it can be so many things, serve so many purposes. I always hoped to make influential films that might make the world a little better, to serve as an educational force. Great films do that. (Perhaps aspects of the Flamethrowers, the Almanac, Wet Gate have served...?) To be continued.
"I am celluloid, not steel, Oh God of the machine, have mercy, I front dangers whenever I travel the whirling wheels of the mechanism. Over the sprocket wheels, held tight by the idlers, I am forced by the motor's might. If a careless hand misthreads me, I have no alternative but to go to my death. If the pull on the take-up reel is too violent, I am torn to shreds. If dirt collects in the aperture my film of beauty is streaked and marred, and I must face my beholders--a thing shamed and be spoiled. I travel many miles in tin cans, I am tossed on heavy trucks, sideways and upside down. See that I don't become bruised and wounded beyond the power to heal. I am a delicate ribbon of film - misuse me and I disappoint thousands; cherish me, and I delight and instruct the world." -- A.P. Hollis 1920
I found this quote on a film projector-related website today. Seems like a good place to start.
I use film. And so I collect films (mostly 16mm), not avidly or fervently, but I stumble across them and pick them up occasionally if I see a reel that looks interesting. I have found some wonderful films, perhaps most notably a 16mm educational film on the Amazon, called something like The Sleeping Giant. Incredible color and great lush scenic photography from the 50's I think. I have had to move numerous times over the past 10 years and this collection of films (and records and a good piece of my past, machines and cameras etc) has had to move with me, sometimes into not ideal storage situations. Leaky garages and storage spaces, poorly cooled closets. The last house had a garage which flooded the day after we moved in, soaking the bottom 6 inches of maybe 20 boxes containing books and films, original super8 reels and found 16mm reels. The Amazon reel was one of those, altered forever. Fortunately there are other prints of that film out in the world. I cannot promise to protect anything from the elements, as much as I'd like to say that I can.
I have 3,000 LP records which get decent treatment, but aren't always kept in optimally air-conditioned space. Many of them may be getting "lip warp", where the bottom edge of the disc, that sitting on the ground, begins to curl and makes the start of track 1 on either side sometimes untrackable. There are also several boxes of 78s that I take with me and the heat cannot be good to them; I hope to transfer them over to digital media but it's a cumbersome process.
Back to the films. I finally have a room that seems to be water-tight and I may be able to archive/organize all these little pieces, and find out what made it through the many moves and what didn't survive. There are prints of the films I myself made, the original super8 reels of the Filmers Almanac. There are several reels of found footage, educational films I gathered often with some re-use in mind. I also had a small collection of feature or featurettes on 16mm but I had to sell most of them because I lost faith in my archival abilities and didn't want to see films get ruined. 2 Japanese features with Takemitsu soundtracks. I still have a nice 16mm print of Peter Watkins The War Game that I'd like to show soon.
Wet Gate was a major instigating force for finding new reels of film and we cut out material for use in performance as loops, largely for the quality of sound on the strips. Film preservation often came up as a topic on Wet Gate performance tours; we encountered art world curator people for whom preservation is an important topic, and each of us has different takes on preserving film. My own attitude has remained largely that film, like other materials, has a finite lifetime, especially if played over and over as loop. So I lost my sense of need to preserve and maintain and pretty much came to see film material as something like paint or pencil that I could use and use up if needed. Of course the line was generally drawn to include old prints that were not rare or particularly special and to leave good, projectable reels of film alone, safe from the loop cutter.
Over the past year or so I have moved towards wanting to project No Film, simply using the projector as an interrupting light source to be manipulated, seeing the projection of light as a pure form of (futuristic) communication. This may have partly been a result of not being able to properly access film clips from a collection. But with the new (old) garage I have I am excited to think how I may rediscover footage. And also generate new footage. There is a Steenbeck in storage waiting for me to bring it into service once again. There are several unfinished films on hard drives awaiting final cutting also.
I use film as an artist uses paint and pencil, or magazine photos. It is material collected for use in the studio. It has perhaps lost its connection to film-time and history, being boxed and carried over distances. Standing on 2 feet perhaps I will see with both eyes and be able to recognize material appropriate for "appropriation", that overused term from 90's film art. Better said: material that may be ground down and partially destroyed, turned into something else, degraded, even de-based: emulsion taken off the film base. Is there no respect for history here? Have I lost hope, that the future may want to see exact replicas of what was? How much is worth preserving in a culture that seems bent on suicide (via the automobile and coal power plants)? Is the decadence of my film archive chaos a symptom of this disbelief?
The wonder of film is that it can be so many things, serve so many purposes. I always hoped to make influential films that might make the world a little better, to serve as an educational force. Great films do that. (Perhaps aspects of the Flamethrowers, the Almanac, Wet Gate have served...?) To be continued.
Wednesday, January 23, 2008
Lessons of The Videomaster by Skip Blumberg
Just watched Skip Blumberg's Hommage to Nam June Paik, a nice document focusing on the wake. Nam June's Wake... run riverun. Uptown to where the black clad artists comb their hair before paying respects to such a man, open casket, who single-handedly wielded the porta-pak that invented video art. Wielding his own modern-day porta-pak on the streets of NYC, Blumberg asks the people he meets at Paik's wake what they learned from Nam June, inserting little graphics and inset frames of clips from historical Paik video like "Global Groove" or 1984's international satellite telecast "Good Morning, Mr. Orwell". In the gallery-like setting of the wake, students rub shoulders with dignified art stars and come away equals in Paik's democratic kingdom of video. The disc includes documentation of the event held at the Guggenheim Museum to honor Paik, a beautiful performance by Yoko Ono that is the crown jewel of this dvd.
A blow-by-blow description of the Paik wake and Guggenheim event can be found at Yoko's website:
http://www.a-i-u.net/paik_rev.html
A blow-by-blow description of the Paik wake and Guggenheim event can be found at Yoko's website:
http://www.a-i-u.net/paik_rev.html
Tuesday, October 9, 2007
Miranda July 1: Me and You and Everyone We Know; Learning To Love You More
I was on a Film Arts Foundation panel with Miranda July about 7 years ago in San Francisco. I don't recall exactly the subject, perhaps distribution of film in the future or alternate forms of film presentation, but we 3 Wet Gate members were there along with Miranda and several other artistes. I do recall that Ms. July directly contradicted something I said and I felt that the way she did it was authoritarian, it pissed me off and I lost some respect for her then. I'd heard of her work distributing women's film and video on VHS tape collections and bought 1 years ago at Amoeba records for its inclusion of Naomi Uman's "Removed", an old porn film reworked with nail-polish remover to erase the female image. She has since directed a major independent feature (Me and You and Everyone We Know) which won a number of major awards and now has a group of printed page publications coming out, including the "arts education" book Learning To Love You More. Clearly, July is an energetic and innovative person, and she is moving fluidly from the margins of the art world into a vocal role in the culture at large. I respect her for it and wish her the best.
I liked Me and You and Everyone a lot and recommended it to everyone I know, but was disappointed that July made some story decisions that made the film unviewable for older and perhaps slightly more socially conservative persons. There is sexual language in the film that is simply too crude for most older audiences and I'm sure there were lots of walk-outs at the theater. At the same time I realize the film is largely/partly about children having sexual lives or that there is no definite time at which children should or shouldn't be exposed to the truth of the sexual world. There is a current of film using extreme sexual situations I think for gratuitous effect or in a kind of cold cool that demands that the viewer push themselves through new ways of thinking about sexuality, or be offended and leave the room. While I'm not too easily offended by frank sexual material I am turned off by smug tough guy use of it, and I felt that from this film, some of the same things I feel from Todd Solondz films and other current young directors. I simply believe there are ways of saying things that don't alienate a whole portion of the viewing public. There are so many good sequences in July's film that I felt it was a failure to have to make a small section of it lurid in a Pink Flamingos kind of way. I wonder if July's decision to co-write the film with visitors to her website, collecting comments written there and shaping them into a script, allowed her subjects to get out of hand. The idea of co-writing a script with many semi-anonymous others is certainly innovative and pushes the usually auteurial film-making towards the more collectively creative. But something in the way of soul, or accountability perhaps, can be lost.
Miranda does translate previous video art pieces of her own very nicely in Me And You, showcasing her personal vignette style of video-making as a recurring motif in the film and depicting her character as one trying to connect to a museum or gallery curator with varied success. It's a nice autobiographical storyline and perhaps the best depiction of "what is a performance artist" in recent film.
I saw 2 new books by July at Vroman's Books in Pasadena recently, a book of short stories and this art book, "Learning To Love You More". It looks like an intriguing collection of assignments for art school students and the products of such assignments and I think this could be very useful for teachers and students of creative process. Again, July has opened her authorial access into a show of works and ideas by a lot of the young and unknown people and students she interacts with. She has taken some ideas basic to Fluxus, particularly the idea that a work of "art" can be a score or instructions open to interpretation by a multitude of other people. The creative act is not so much a lonely studio creation, but is the social nexus or network created through ideas and communication itself. Like a new telephone. Could be good, could cause unwanted long distance charges. Could ask us to review the work of Yoko Ono, Joseph Beuys or Linda Montano. I also can't get my head around the Learning To Love You title. Smarmy. I like the proposition that art can be psychologically healing, but July comes across a bit like an inflatable doll with such a title, willing to be bent into any position to please. Or appear that way, Bambi-eyed, only to slam you down later in a dark alley. The provocation is good PR but presses the Oh No button. What, you? Love me? You didn't at the Film Arts round table. I guess my reaction is par for the course, to barter in cliches.
The world has become a big magazine rack and everything on it is instantaneous and disposable. Ironic? Well, nice in a mean kind of way.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)