MAKING LIGHT OF IT

The Machine

2012-01-30T15:57:00.000-07:00

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(texts from Theories of Modern Art by Herschel B. Chipp)

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(stills from Ballet Mécanique by Fernand Léger & Dudley Murphy via Anthology Archives)

Cracking Up

2012-01-27T17:03:00.000-07:00

(The Girl's Nervy by Jennifer Reeves)

(Light Work Mood Disorder [left side] by Jennifer Reeves)

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"For instance, Mary Beth and I as we worked together on the Persians, are often speaking of Jenn Reeves's hand-painted films. And wondering, just to be specific, how does she get the paint to crack like that- we've tried burning a match over it, match under it, setting it in the sun, using India ink and so on, but she produces a distinctive cracking in her painting that's absolutely hers and of course we're not really supposed to have it, we're playing in a way, but in the mean time we're discovering other ways of creating that organic cracking of the paint or the substance of the paint."

-Stan Brakhage

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(He Walked Away by Jennifer Reeves)

(When It Was Blue by Jennifer Reeves)

Cinemology

2012-01-23T16:23:00.001-07:00

(from Experimental Cinema in the Digital Age by Malcom Le Grice)

Regrets

2012-01-20T18:21:00.000-07:00

"I used the word 'structural' to describe a tendency in certain films. I never spoke of structuralism. I never spole of structural film-makers, but of particular tendencies in particular films. The use of the word meant to have nothing to do with anything in Levi-Strauss, or French structuralism. I had no notion, at all, that this article would catch fire, more than anything else I had ever written; that it would become a disease; that it would come back to haunt me. It was hopeless. But it's a word that has stuck, and I'm stuck with it. You're right, I wish I had thought of a different word at the time. I want to state my total agreement with you on this thing- that that was a mistake. I am sorry about it, but the mistake of associating structuralism with structural film was not in the text of mine."

-P. Adams Sitney in a 1977 debate with Malcom Le Grice

Trichotomy

2012-01-17T21:28:00.000-07:00

(From Ronald Johnson's Modernist Collage Poetry by Ross Hair)

R.I.P. Robert Nelson

2012-01-12T20:45:00.000-07:00

R.I.P. Robert Nelson

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The following interview is from Scott MacDonald's absolutely essential A Critical Cinema series. If you have not yet done yourself the favor of exploring these works, please do so immediately; they offer a voice to many filmmakers who've often been and since remained criminally underheard. Reprinted with permisson...

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(From Plastic Haircut by Robert Nelson)

(From Bleu Shut by Robert Nelson)

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The following is from the No. 48 issue of Film Culture...

The Return

2012-01-07T14:01:00.000-07:00

(The Return by Nathaniel Dorsky)

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(The Return by Ezra Pound)

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"What 'The Return'...accomplished, precisely, was to shift our attention away from a search for what some dramatic character, identified or not, might be saying to something more nakedly present: what the poem before us is creating. It is undoubtedly easiest to recognize the visual aspects of such a nakedly present creation-the picture or 'image' the words conjure up. Yet obviously Pound's sense of the image as an 'intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time' suggest more than the visual element stressed in his definition of 'Phanopoeia': 'a casting of images upon the visual imagination'. The 'intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time' is well on the way to our conception of the tonal center or affect....As for 'The Return' it is neither wholly speech nor wholly a succession of images cast upon 'the visual imagination'. But if we see it as a progression of tonal centers, we shall indeed find something of 'interest' to say about it-and we shall point ourselves towards the evolution of the sequence in our century". -The Modern Poetic Sequence: The Genius of Modern Poetry by M.L. Rosenthal and Sally M. Gall

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(The Return by Nathaniel Dorsky)

Rhythm & Blues

2012-01-03T17:03:00.000-07:00

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(From The Films of Stan Brakhage... by Bruce Elder)

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(Unconscious London Strata by Stan Brakhage)

SHIRLEY/STORM

2011-12-31T15:41:00.000-07:00

(Storm de Hirsch)

(Divinations by Storm de Hirsch via Anthology Archives)

(Third Eye Butterfly by Storm de Hirsch via Anthology Archives)

(Peyote Queen by Storm de Hirsch via Anthology Archives)

BABEL

2011-12-27T17:31:00.000-07:00

Last Friday saw the culmination of a year and a half long wait as Boris Lehman's BABEL- Lettre à mes amis restés en Belgique finally arrived on my doorstep. As agonizing as the wait may have been, it was no doubt worth it as Re:Voir has put together an exquisite treasure-filled box set for the film. Included are the following: a large booklet containing texts and images from the film as well as various essays on the work (in French only unfortunately), a large map retracing Boris' journey and three DVD's housed in two cases containing the 380 minute film...

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As for the film itself, substantial thoughts will come in the future as time is still needed to absorb its six plus hours, but suffice it to say it is an extremely warm, genuinely humble and humorous journey of intersecting lives and personalities, all filtered through Boris' self-effacing and restless personae. It's an extremely somatic affair, constant focus is placed on the hands/feet and functions of the body (eye exams, physicals, dentist and countless meals) and the way that time and space affect these processes...

In the meantime in lieu of further ruminations I include these many images from the film itself, because as Boris says:

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The sincerest of thanks should go to Lehman, Yellow Now and all those involved in the production of this DVD, especially Pip Chodorov and Re:Voir, whose efforts to release experimental works is absolutely invaluable. It should be noted that BABEL has turned into something of a life-long work, and as such Lettre à mes amis restés en Belgique is only the first part. Lehman has so far completed several other parts, and perhaps not by coincidence the latest STORY OF MY HAIR/On the Shortness of Life is screening at the Microscope Gallery in New York on Thursday. Lehman usually accompanies most screenings of his films, so for those that are able to I can't recommend attending highly enough...

INCITE #3: "New Ages"

2011-10-31T15:16:00.001-06:00

It should be news to absolutely no-one that quality publications on experimental film are few and far between, so when one of the most valuable currently around, INCITE!, needs some help, it's definitely worth getting behind. See below for details on the forthcoming issue and links to the Kickstarter campaign currently underway...

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"New Ages" will feature over 160 pages of writing, art work, interviews, scholarly articles, more than 20 full color images, and contributions by 25 artists, filmmakers, writers, curators, and scholars from across the U.S. and Canada. We recently launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise funds for the printing of the issue, which ends in early November.

INCITE #3 aims at addressing the generational shifts and divides in today’s experimental film, video, and new media spheres, utilizing the 2010 International Experimental Media Congress as an opportunity for reflection. In addition to compiling a dossier of idiosyncratic reflections on the Congress, this issue also focuses on the renewed fascination with "New Age" spirituality, philosophy and aesthetics among contemporary media artists. You can view the Table of Contents for Issue #3 and read the Congress Dossier online.

Some highlights of this issue include Walter Forsberg's wide-ranging essay about the computer animation (and accidental 3D) pioneer Lillian Schwartz, Thomas Beard's astute analysis of Shana Moulton's Whispering Pines video serial, a Jacob Ciocci and Jesse McLean "G-Chat," Marisa Olson on Transcendentalism, and Brian L. Frye's citation study of The New York Times, which measures the relative importance of avant-garde filmmakers.

Contributors include: Dominic Angerame, Jaimz Asmundson, Jeremy Bailey, Christina Battle, Thomas Beard, Roger Beebe, Michael Betancourt, Mireille Bourgeois, Jacob Ciocci and Jesse McLean, Clint Enns, Walter Forsberg, Brian L. Frye, Benj Gerdes, Brett Kashmere, Eliza Koch, Kevin McGarry, James Missen, Shana Moulton, Peter Nowogrodzki, Marisa Olson, Andrew James Paterson, Ken Paul Rosenthal, Ekrem Serdar, Leslie Supnet, Tess Takahashi. Cover design by Jacob Ciocci.

The website for the journal is here:

http://incite-online.net

Details about the Kickstarter campaign are here:

http://kck.st/incite3

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Smells and Visuals

2011-10-13T15:58:00.000-06:00

Ah the Temenos....some day....some day...

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Shades of Light

2011-09-26T16:29:00.000-06:00

An appropriately mysterious picture of Jordan Belson, from FC No. 48-49...

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Saying Goodbye

2011-09-09T17:56:00.001-06:00

It's been a rough year for the avant-garde community, with Tuesday's passing of George Kuchar and Jordan Belson adding to a list of recently deceased names whose contributions to said community were, and yet remain, invaluable. Kuchar and Belson were at opposite ends of the spectrum, both in terms of the work they produced and seemingly in their respective personalities, but both were essential all the same. Thankfully for us their work will continue to live on, containing innumerable wonders yet to be discovered...

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This first piece is an early 1967 interview conducted with the Kuchar brothers by Sheldon Renan which appeared in the no. 45 issue of Film Culture...

(Naked and the Nude by George & Mike Kuchar; via Anthology Archives)

(Lust for Ecstasy by George & Mike Kuchar)

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This second piece is an excerpt from Gene Youngblood's seminal Expanded Cinema, which was included in the no. 48-49 (1970) issue of Film Culture (apologies for the blurring, but I thought it was still readable and hopefully will serve as an encouragement to seek out Youngblood's Expanded Cinema, no doubt a must-read...

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Views from the Avant-Garde 2011

2011-08-27T17:18:00.000-06:00

The cinematic wonderland that is Views From the Avant-Garde is back in it's 15th edition this year, shaped as always by the sensitive and discerning hands of Mark McElhatten and Gavin Smith. The eye-popping schedule is as follows..

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VIEWS 2011 15TH EDITION

Curated by Mark McElhatten and Gavin Smith

Friday October 7

(The Return by Nathaniel Dorsky)

FRANCESCA BEALE THEATER

12:30pm

1. The Soul and the Stem

Señora con Flores / Woman with Flowers

Chick Strand, U.S./Mexico 1995/2011, 15m (preservation print from the Academy Film Archives)

Jan Villa

Natasha Mendonca, India/U.S., 2010, 20m

The Sole of the Foot

Robert Fenz, U.S/Germany 2011, 34m

Correspondence

Robert Fenz, U.S./Germany 2011, 30m

Total running time: 99m

3:15pm

2. Ben Rivers

Sack Barrow

U.K., 2011, 21m

Slow Action

U.K., 2010, 45m

Total running time: 66m

5:45pm

3. Bitches Brew

Posthaste Perennial Pattern

Jodie Mack, U.S., 2010, 3m 38s

Babobilicons

Daina Krumins, U.S., 1982, 16m (new 35mm preservation by the Academy Film Archive)

You Are Now Running On Reserve Battery Power

Jessie Stead, U.S., 2011, 11m

Hull

Tara Merenda Nelson, U.S., 2011, 7m 32s

from Jhana and the Rats of James Olds:

Telephone Call

Stephanie Barber, U.S., 2011, 1m

Billy and the Magician

Stephanie Barber, U.S., 2011, 3m 18s

Little Kitten

Stephanie Barber, U.S., 2011, 42s

Zero Buoyancy

Stephanie Barber, U.S., 2011, 4m 53s

Romance Novels

Stephanie Barber, U.S., 2011, 1m 4s

A Party Record Packed with Sex and Sadness

Bobby Abate, U.S., 2011, 10m 11s

Praxis 8 – 12 Scenes

Dietmar Brehm, Austria, 2010, 25m

Taste Test

Andrew Lampert, U.S., 2011, 2m 30s

Bitch-Beauty

MM Serra, U.S., 2011, 7m

Total running time: 107m

8:45pm

4. Ladders and Tracks

Berlin Tracks 18h00-20h00

Shiloh Cinquemani, U.S./Germany, 2011, 2m 7s

(k)now (t)here

Hey–Yeun Jang, U.S., 2011, 8m 50s

Subway

Angela Ferraiolo, U.S., 2011, 7m 40s

Village, silenced

Deborah Stratman, U.S., 2011, 4m 56s

Snakes and Ladders

Katherin McInnis, U.S., 2011, 3m

Longhorn Tremolo

Scott Stark, U.S., 2010, 16m

Land Fill

Jennifer Reeves, U.S., 2011, 8m 52s

Barren

Katherin McInnis, U.S., 2010, 2m

Back View

Vincent Grenier, U.S., 2011, 17m

The Toy Sun

Ken Kobland, U.S., 2011, 33m

Total running time: 104m

WALTER READE THEATER

1:00pm

5. OpenEndedGroup

Upending

U.S., 2011, 65m (digital 3-D)

3:30pm

6. Ken Jacobs:

SEEKING THE MONKEY KING

U.S., 2011, 40m

5:30pm

7. Ernie Gehr

Crystal Palace

U.S., 2002-11, 28m

Thank You For Visiting

U.S., 2010, 12m

Mist

U.S., 2010, 9m

ABRACADABRA

U.S., 2009, 39m

Total running time: 88m

8:30pm

8. George Kuchar

Lingo of the Lost

U.S., 2010, 37m 45s

Empire of Evil

U.S., 2011, 50m

Total running time: 87m

Saturday October 8

FRANCESCA BEALE THEATER

11:15am

9. Cabinet of Curiosities

Between Gold

Jonathan Schwartz, U.S., 2011, 10m 42s

Tin Pressed

Dani Leventhal, U.S., 2011, 6m 23s

Fifteen an Hour

Kevin Jerome Everson, U.S., 2011, 6m

Tableaux Vivants

Vincent Grenier, U.S., 2011, 10m 20s

Curious Light

Charlotte Pryce, U.S., 2011, 4m 12s

Forms Are Not Self-Subsistent Substances

Samantha Rebello, U.K., 2010, 22m

The Matter Propounded, of its Possibility or Impossibility, treated in four Parts

David Gatten, U.S., 2011, 13m

from Jhana and the Rats of James Olds

Miniatures

Stephanie Barber, U.S., 2011, 2m

Degas

Stephanie Barber, U.S., 2011, 58s

The Eclipse

Stephanie Barber, U.S., 2011, 33s

ransom notes

Kelly Egan, Canada, 2011, 4m

Conjuror’s Box

Kerry Laitala, U.S., 2011, 4m

Total running time: 82m

1:45pm

10. Looking Through a Glass Onion

Passage Upon the Plume

Fern Silva, U.S., 2011, 6m 46s

Shayne’s Rectangle

Dani Leventhal, U.S., 2011, 5m 4s

Line Describing Your Mom

Michael Robinson, U.S., 2011, 5m 50s

Gossip

Bobby Abate, U.S., 2011, 8m 19s

from Jhana and the Rats of James Olds

Tatum’s Ghost

Stephanie Barber, U.S., 2011, 3m 45s

The Death of the Gorilla

Peter Mays, U.S., 1966, 16m (new restoration by the Academy Film Archive)

By foot-candle light

Mary Helena Clark, U.S., 2011, 9m

A LAX RIDDLE UNIT

Laida Lertxundi, Spain, 2011, 9m

Sounding Glass

Sylvia Schedelbauer, Germany, 2011, 7m

The Evil Eyes

Bobby Abate, U.S., 2010, 18m

Total running time: 89m

4:15pm

11. Betzy Bromberg

Voluptuous Sleep

U.S., 2011, 95m

7:15pm

12. Jerome Hiler & Nathaniel Dorsky

Words of Mercury

Jerome Hiler, U.S., 2011, 25m

The Return

Nathaniel Dorsky, U.S., 2011, 27m

Total running time: 54m

9:30pm

13. John Zorn: A Film in 15 Scenes

15 scenes: 254 shots

Gobolux, U.S., 2011, 15m

Well Then There Now

Lewis Klahr, U.S., 2011, 19m 30s

Bare Room

Joey Izzo, U.S., 2011, 31m 33s

arcana

Henry Hills, U.S./Austria, 2011, 33m

Total Running Time: 97m

WALTER READE THEATER

11:00am

14. Jean-Marie Straub

Lothringen!

co-directed with Danièle Huillet

France, 1994, 20m

Un héritier

France/South Korea, 2011, 20m

L’Inconsolable

France, 2011, 15m

Schakale und Araber

Switzerland, 2011, 11m

Total running time: 66m

1:15pm

15. Klaus Wyborny

Studies for the Decay of the West

Germany, 2010, 80m

4:00pm

16. Daniel Eisenberg: The Unstable Object

Less and Less / Toujours moins

Luc Moullet, France, 2010, 14m

The Unstable Object

U.S./Germany/Turkey, 2011, 69m

With

Total running time: 83m

6:45pm

17. Kevin Jerome Everson

Quality Control

U.S., 2011, 70m 42s

The Prichard

U.S., 2011, 11m 18s

Total running time: 82m

9:45pm

8. George Kuchar

see Friday October 7, 8:30pm, Walter Reade

Sunday October 9

FRANCESCA BEALE THEATER

12 noon

1. The Soul and the Stem

see Friday October 7, 12:30pm, Francesca Beale Theater

2:45pm

12. Jerome Hiler & Nathaniel Dorsky

see Saturday October 8, 7:15pm, Francesca Beale Theater

5:30pm

13. Ladders and Tracks

see Friday October 7, 8:45pm, Francesca Beale Theater

8:15pm

18. The Red and The Black

River Rites

Ben Russell, U.S./Suriname, 2011, 11m 30s

Shadow, Seed, Spagyric

David Baker, U.S., 2011, 5m 12s

Peril of the Antilles

Fern Silva, U.S., 2011, 5.51m

A Preface to Red

Jonathan Schwartz, U.S./Turkey, 2010, 6m

Protocol

Lina Rodriguez, Canada/Colombia

2011, 1m 15s

Imperceptihole

Lori Felker & Robert Todd, U.S., 2011, 14m 37s

Light Licks: By the Waters of Babylon: I WANT TO PAINT IT BLACK

Saul Levine, U.S., 2011, 12m

Third Law: N Kedzie Blvd.

Mike Gibisser, U.S., 2011, 7m 10s

Slow Burn

Jesse Cain, U.S., 2011, 19m 46s

Total running time: 86m

WALTER READE THEATER

1:00pm

19. Virgin Springs

Baptismal Sticks and Stones

April Simmons, U.S., 2011, 6m 50s

Devils Gate

Laura Kraning, U.S., 2011, 20m

Twice Removed

Leslie Thornton, U.S., 2011, 11m

Ricky

Janie Geiser, U.S., 2011, 11m

Silent Springs

Erin Espelie, U.S., 2011, 12m 57s

Gazette

Eliénore de Montesquiou, Russia/Estonia, 2009, 4m 12s

Kudzu Vine

Josh Gibson, U.S., 2011, 19.52m

Total running time: 86m

3:30pm

20. Lewis Klahr

The Pettifogger

U.S., 2011, 65m

6:00pm

4. John Zorn: A Film in 15 Scenes

see Saturday October 8, 9:30pm, Francesca Beale Theater

9:00pm

21. James Benning

Twenty Cigarettes

U.S., 2011, 99m

Monday October 10

FRANCESCA BEALE THEATER

11:00am

9. Cabinet of Curiosities

see Saturday October 8, 11.15am, Francesca Beale Theater

1:30pm

22. Aurand/Muñoz/Sami

Villatalla

Jeannette Muñoz, Switzerland/Chile/Italy, 2011, 21m 59s

A Year / Ein Jahr

Renate Sami, Germany, 2011, 12m

Young Pines / Junge Tiefern

Ute Aurand, Germany/Japan, 2011, 43m

Total running time: 76m

3:45pm

10. Looking Through a Glass Onion

see Saturday October 8, 1.45pm, Francesca Beale Theater

6:30pm

23. Paul Clipson Super 8 performance

Chorus

U.S., 2009/2011, 8 min

Compound Eyes No. 1-5

U.S., 2011, 27min

Light from the Mesa

U.S., 2010, 7m

Chorus

U.S., 2009/2011, 8m (16mm version)

Morphologies

U.S., 2011, 20m

Total running time: 70m

8:45pm

3. Bitches Brew

see Friday October 7, 5:45pm, Francesca Beale Theater

WALTER READE THEATER

11:30pm

14. Jean-Marie Straub

see Saturday October 8, 11:00pm, Walter Reade Theater

1:45pm

6. Ken Jacobs

see Friday October 7, 3:30pm, Walter Reade Theater

3:00pm

20. Lewis Klahr

see Sunday October 9, 2:30pm, Walter Reade Theater

5:00pm

19. Virgin Springs

see Sunday October 9, 1:00pm, Walter Reade Theater

7:30pm

24. Ben Rivers: Two Days At Sea

U.K., 2011, 86m

Elinor Bunin Munroe amphitheatre

Premieres presented on the Film Center’s Panasonic 152-inch 4K plasma screen

Daily Friday October 7-10

Open to the general public, with no admission charge

All the work will be repeated across the four days in groupings and individual rotations several times a day.

Confirmed:

John Krieg Exiting the Falk Corporation in 1971

James Benning, U.S, 2011, 71m

Soft Palate

Martin Arnold, Austria, 2010, 3m 10s

Self Control

Martin Arnold, Austria, 2011, 1m 56s,

Picture Taking

Ernie Gehr, U.S., 2011, 9m 30s

Armoire (Four Parts)

Vincent Grenier, U.S., 2007-2011, 9m 5s

TBD

Dani Leventhal

Traders Leaving the Exchange, A Guard and the Street

Les Leveque, U.S., 2011, 15m

from The Binocular Series

Leslie Thornton, U.S., 2011

(The Toy Sun by Ken Kobland)

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One Breer, Please...

2011-08-13T20:06:00.000-06:00

Re-posting this interview in light of the passing of yet another singular avant-garde artist, Robert Breer, R.I.P.

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[the following was included in the No. 56-57 Spring 1973 issue of Film Culture]

INTERVIEW WITH ROBERT BREER CONDUCTED BY JONAS MEKAS AND P.ADAMS SITNEY ON MAY 13, 1971-IN NEW YORK CITY

JONAS MEKAS: I don’t know if it will work, but ideally I’d like to concentrate only on your last three films, 66, 69 and 70. I think that they differ from all the others. Or no? What do you think? Do they differ, for you?

ROBERT BREER: Yes, they do. But you know, Form Phases IV is very much like those films. Form Phases IV was made in 1956 or something, and tha was my last abstract film until the film 66 which was in 1966 or 1967. In between, I made those collage and animated cartoons and people films. 66 was very much a return to Form Phases IV. It’s a funny kind of retrogression, I guess. 66 was purely geometric, abstract. 69 was another abstraction; and then, 70. They have numbers and they group together, developments of each other, I guess.

MEKAS: Most of your films before 66, I mean the period between 1960 and 1966, deal with certain collage areas-even the films with people. They don’t go that deeply into the explorations, in a sort of minimal way, of color, the illusions of the eye, the…I don’t know how to describe it.

BREER: But that’s where I started. My first film, Form Phases I, in 1952, as a matter of fact, it’s an abstract film. That is an abstract film, and it came right out of my paintings and elements in it were taken from my paintings. In fact, it was meant to be just an elaboration on the painting I was working on at the time. I wasn’t really interested in film; I didn’t know if I was. So now I am going back to that again. I don’t paint anymore. Oh, I fell into a certain dead end in the painting, at that time, and the neo-plastic ideal. Films were very liberating, so I took advantage of it. I wanted to see some things I’d never seen before. Actually, those collage films were in the same spirit as the abstract paintings, trying to distill the essence of the medium. For me, film was another medium that permitted mixing all this other extraneous stuff, ideas and words and configurative elements that I couldn’t justify putting in paintings anymore, and I was sort of trying to come to terms with conventional cinema as opposed to film, but still, very basically, abstract, you know, examining the material, what was possible in film. So now, I’ve come back.

MEKAS: Parallel to your film work, you continued working on your moving sculptures.

BREER: I made paintings and films for about six years and I kept on painting. Gradually, I stopped painting. And then I went through a period when I cam back here from Paris, well, for maybe two or three years, when I didn’t do anything but films. Then I wanted to bring film back into… I got disoriented by the theatrical situation of film, by the fact that you have to turn out the lights and there is a fixed audience, and when you turn out the lights you turn on the projection light and you project the piece of magic on the wall. I felt that this very dramatic, theatrical situation, in some ways, just by the environment of the movie house, robbed some of the mystery of film from itself. My early sculpture was an attempt to make films concrete that could be seen in daylight. Well, the kind of effect that I got out of flip-books, where you hold something in your hand and you flip three images together and they flow into one image. And that is a very concrete situation. It’s something you hold right in your hands, something that you are looking at in normal circumstances, under light, without sitting in a chair, or something, and art is always presented that way. In a gallery, you walk around and look at it on the walls. I couldn’t go back to static painting anymore after film-so I started making objects that had some kind of development in time and yet could be looked at as concrete objects. So, I started making these bent wire objects and mutoscopes, flip cards.

MEKAS: You may be interested to know that there is now a screen invented which allows one to project films in bright daylight. As a matter of fact, the brighter the room, the more clear the image will be.

BREER: Well, there is one already, it’s called television.

MEKAS: But this new screen is specifically designed for projecting films. I don’t know the principle, but it was demonstrated half a year ago.

BREER: Well, I still felt a kind of remoteness between the projector and the screen. The pleasure I get out of making drawings and then looking at those drawings immediately, is something I thought I lost somewhere in cinema. It was made up for by these effects that you couldn’t get any other way, these collage effects, but I still felt a loss there and I wanted to get closer to the direct action of an artist or somebody making art, I guess. Even a screen in daylight, when you can now get a very bright image, still seems to me that the image on the screen has gone through a mysterious process, it’s back in the booth some place. So it’s trying to be concrete about cinema that got me into making sculpture, and the things that creep around on the floor came five years ago, I guess. There was a period when I was searching around for something that would be the equivalent of what I thought was-I hate to use these words-mystery….and wonder…killing words…It’s a very fragile thing for me and I felt that it had to be distilled somehow and isolated and it had to be really strong; it ‘had’ to be. It seems like a contradiction in terms, but they had to be singled out, with nothing extraneous around, just that phenomenon, and I don’t know how to describe that, I don’t know what it is, I guess it’s what people see when my things are successful, that’s what they get. So that these things move around on the floor, just dumb objects, and all they do is just move around very slowly, and I try to keep it as simple as that. There are a lot of ramifications, but I am not talking about film now, of course.
(Interruption)
BREER: I am trying to explain the evolution, you know, back and forth between films. I never quit making films, but I just change emphasis. It’s something about the work habits that makes me go from film scale back to concrete objects. It’s a kind of nice, stimulating process for me. If I get bogged down in making objects, or somehow I come to a point where there is nothing going on, I can use this change of scale and material to revive my ideas. There are some practical things about that, working in a small scale, the way I do with the films, just sitting in one place, and…It has a lot to do with the…kind of….declaring the limits to the means ahead of time so that then you can work within these self-imposed limitations and you don’t have to think about the limitations anymore. In that sense, I guess, it’s kind of conceptual. This is the effect that you are going to get…Like, I made ‘Breathing’ as a film. A little self-consciously, I had a sing up, and I was working on the…I work in strange little rooms and places, I like to do that…to get myself a room some place and close to the door and sort of work in there….So, I had a sign for making Breathing, which involved making thousands of drawings over a period of a couple of months-and I had a sign which was going to be the title of the film, for a while-I’ll be damned if I can remember it exactly-I think it was: THIS FILM IS WHAT IT IS WHAT IT IS WHAT IT IS WHAT IT IS-and had the sign around and that was a reminder for me, as a kind of discipline that I didn’t refer to anymore after I wrote it, but it was there to remind me that I was making a really concrete film; I wasn’t going to digress; I was going to keep on making ‘direct’ film. So it is a kind of compulsion to define my limits.

MEKAS: A “direct” film?

BREER: Well, in that case, I was drawing on cards and animating and the temptation, with my background, when I start drawing, is to let things flower out into other areas and make cartoons and bring in extraneous material, and so forth. In this case, I decided that the limit was going to be…I was going to keep very close to direct, concrete imagery. It is my own, private classification…I didn’t invent it, the term, but that was my meaning of it. I guess, that the movement of that line, and its place on the screen, and its density, the rhythms, and so forth, were going to be the totality of the film, and I’d concentrate on that.

MEKAS: This is a silly question, but could you try to sum up, what, for you, cinema is, as opposed to painting? Are those two directions, areas, clear?

BREER: I use the word “threshold” a lot, when I am thinking about what I am doing. I have a notion about conventions or disciplines, they are inter-changeable words for me. The sum total of the, let’s say, cultural history of the…
(Interruption)
MEKAS: Yes, we were on the word “threshold”.

BREER: Yes. Somewhere, in all my work, I tried to amaze myself with something, and the only way you can amaze yourself is to create a situation in which an accident can happen. The accident is relative to what you’re trying to do. It’s only an accident because it’s unforeseen. And somehow it always gave me that opportunity. It’s narrowing down now, in such a way that the accidents are smaller and smaller…That’s the terrible thing that happens with the kind of control that you have. Still, it’s very important. And that’s where I consider the threshold of what I know about a given medium and what happen when I violate that threshold at the moment I consider I am doing something worth pursuing. So, every film has to get me interested, while I’m doing it. This has to happen somewhere along the line. It’s a notion, like…It’s probably an old idea about avantgarde, you know, about breaking ground and about defining limits of something by breaking those limits all the time. I consider limits very important, if only to serve as a basis for rupturing, you know? This is the only reason for doing this thing, it’s a matter of bringing life into something. You break a leg and you know what your are made of; if you get sick, then you know what you are, or, maybe in a more positive way, if you have some great paroxysm of joy. I mean, sexual revelation, all kinds of physical revelations, like that. And in an art form, it takes a more formalistic…

MEKAS: Do you see any different steps in your work-can you group your work in some way, in groups? Periods? Technique-wise or subject-wise or threshold-wise..?

BREER: Yes, because I have tried a lot of different things, to amaze myself. I guess, there are. The first films were working out painting problems. But my work habits are such that for a long time I used to alternate from one kind of film to the other-the other being an antidote to the one I just did.

MEKAS: From anecdote to antidote…

BREER: Yes. The anecdote was one of the things that bothered me, so I used to alternate between them, I guess. If you went back and looked at dates and things, you’d see that I went from collage things, very dense kind of, chopped up imagery, to something that I…that would serve least in working as an anecdote, and that’s when I got into the line…the flowing…the kind of floating through things. And so I really alternated those types of films.

P. ADAMS SITNEY: You mean, did one collage, and then one…

BREER: Yeah.

MEKAS: When I say “groupings”, I don’t necessarily mean groups that are separated in time. They could be overlapping.

BREER: That’s right. They do. They overlap; they almost alternate one after another.

SITNEY: When did you start the alternation?

BREER: Right at the beginning. I went first from geometric films, in 1942, that first, little one, Form Phases I. A lot of bad and successful experiments…I had to work through everything I had seen, too, and try everything I had seen. So it started right at the beginning. I went from that fairly rigid constructivist type film to using flowing inks, and so forth.

SITNEY: Which ones?

BREER: They are on ‘that’ reel…I don’t know if they are on ‘that’ reel. Well, there were more Form Phases…Some of them are mainly titles…very out of frame, you know…unhappy lighting, and so forth. But still, the basis was there. Once I did that, O.K., enough of that…now it’s time to break up everything and do the other thing. It got to be kind of a habit, doing that. I don’t know how long you want to go on…

MEKAS: If you have time, we can run as long as the tape runs.

BREER: O.K… It doesn’t show very well on the films that I show normally, because I suppress a lot of films. What I found was that when I make a film which I really like very much, I try to make a sequel to it. And that was always…it was just the energy that I put into that film, the impetus of it it carried over into another footage which sometimes would be called, you know, a sequel to the previous film. I mean, I’d have Recreation 2, which was a result of making Recreation 1, where I really tried to exploit what I discovered in that film. Those were very self-conscious efforts and usually not as interesting as those first ones, and that stands to reason. And so there is always that little film after the one that I considered good. Then I’d throw all that out when I realized what I’d done. Later on, I quite making those sequels, I’d just eliminate that stage. I realized that that was my way of dissipating the energy by making a phony film…I’d just spend it out until it was really driven into the ground, then I’d start all over again. It’s a strange business of self-hypnosis, you know.
Generally, there is a shift, I guess, from the early geometric things to when I decided that maybe I could break out of these notions of plastic formalism altogether. The cinema really provided an opportunity to forget about continuity, that’s one of the things about cinema which was there waiting for me, as a trap. I decided, since I don’t know about continuity, I don’t have to think about it, and I’ll just put it out of my mind, and I’ll do it in a very methodical way, which was by fracturing, shattering the image so there wasn’t a flaw in it.
So that the collage thing was a kind of deliberate-like the first ones, Recreation and the loops I made before that-were done really in a kind of deliberate feeling of wonderment: “What the hell will this look like?” You know, that kind of thing, and “I don’t want to know, I can attach no value to it. I don’t know whether this is cinema or not, it doesn’t matter.” It was that kind of thing. Then I go back and try to incorporate some notions of control and construction, and so forth. I think Jamestown Baloos was a film where I felt I was riding kind of high on that film and mixed in everything, every discipline I could think of, very conspicuously, and would carry it off just on the level of drive and euphoria, and it would work because I’d will it to work, that’s all. Then, after a more sober reflection, I’d go back to another film. Then, there are films that I did out of…

MEKAS: Horse Over the Tea Kettle seems to me to be one of those films with several satellites…

BREER: All of them…A Man With His Dog Out For Air, I did it to celebrate the birth of a child, and also because Fanny way in the hospital, I had a week of being alone. I worked very intensely…Those films are done deliberately very quickly, so that I don’t think about them. They are done in…I don’t work in anger or anything like that. I kind of work best when I am well fed and well screwed and everything…very peaceful, happy with myself and feeling quite congenial, and that’s when I work best. Nothing works out of anger…

SITNEY: It seems, there are films, like Horse Over Tea Kettle and Man Out For Air, they look like they were made first on cards, or something, first on drawings and then film. Other films look like they were made at the projector.

BREER: There are cards, of course…This is the scale thing in cinema that intrigues me, and I don’t know what I means, but I started working on these small cards. Man and Dog was made on regulation size 8x12-or whatever-sheets of paper. The problem there was covering that amount of area in depth through several thousand images, it’s a lot of ink. I scratched film too. But it’s really against my better judgment. I knew that the results would be limited to looking like every scratch ever made…So then I came to these cards, and I don’t remember how I discovered ‘that’ as the way of doing things-it seems very simple-minded, but certainly it was the right scale for me, because they allowed me to work very quickly and eliminated a lot of the…Oh, there are so many advantages, I don’t want to go into it, but working on cards, it was a beautiful thing that happened to me. That, of course, makes the images look very direct, because of the scale-the line is blown up, it’s almost like a drawing on film. Is that what you mean by having that kind of presence on the screen? It does. But the thing is that working on cards, you can work through five images, relate five images together, you know, the light would shine through five cards. If you work on film, even 75mm film, at most, even with McLaren’s device of seeing, overlaying, you know, with the prisms seeing-two images one on top of other-you can’t do that.

SITNEY: It’s not what I meant. What I was asking is this: some of your films look like they are cleared out completely in advance. The images were made on cards, or paper. Others, like Recreation obviously were made while the camera was going.

BREER: I see. That’s right. That’s a good point. That’s what I was telling Jonas, before you joined, that I like to work in a room…The thing about film is that you can…I take a long time working out something, I refine it way down, I am very reductive in my work. I sit and I look at them, at a box I’ve made, for days at a time, you know, until I’m absolutely at ease with it. I might change something after a week or so. With film, I like the same amount of control. The interesting thing about film is that the act of filming sometimes can be very wild. I permit myself full freedom with film because I know that I can chop it up later, or I won’t show it, I can burn it more easily, I can destroy it, or I can reconstruct it. So that puts a kind of curb on this tendency to distill everything all the time, that’s what’s nice…

MEKAS: It’s funny-but yesterday I spoke to some writer who said she had just destroyed all her writings, and she said, if this would have been film, probably she wouldn’t have destroyed it. She felt the writing was much easier to destroy….and film, she wouldn’t destroy, she thought. And now, you say, you can destroy it because it is film. Sculpture-you wouldn’t destroy that easily…So I am interested in these subtle gradations of destruction…

BREER: I mean, it’s harder to do away with it, you know. More concrete, that’s what I was saying; one objection to film was that. It’s playing off of this discipline, narrowing down, narrowing down, narrowing down….Sometimes it goes beyond the limit of felicity, you know, you get….it dies. Well, with the film, you can chop off the dead extension of that kind of energy, or do it all over again.

MEKAS: I will go back to the attempt of grouping….I am curious that you don’t find that much difference between your last three films and the previous films. I projected, yesterday, to a group of people, here, at Anthology, your film 69. And I could talk about any other film, any film-but I practically couldn’t say a word about 69. I don’t know how to approach it, or how to talk about it, although it may be my favorite film of yours. I don’t know how to begin to talk about it.

BREER: I couldn’t talk about 69 either for a while. Because I am one film beyond it. I think 69 goes from a kind of very deliberate, repetitive opening sequence that seems to be very locked in on itself, and gradually disintegrates, right? And it goes dark, and it ends dark. Things break up completely. Somebody asked me at the Flaherty Seminar or some place, what was the meaning of the last part of 69 when the flow that was previously there, on the screen, began to break into pieces? And I said that that was the analysis of the synthesis. I broke up those motions and actually shuffled the cards to get that effect, you know-I shuffle and shoot them, and I shuffle them again and I shoot them again…

MEKAS: It was done on cards?

BREER: Yes. So then, I was analyzing the construction of the film. That’s part of my idea about concreteness and exposing the materials of film itself and that was the way of doing it. But I think that film…

SITNEY: When you shuffled the cards, how many frames did you take of each card?

BREER: Well, only one. There’d be one or two, it depends. Sometimes four, it’s something I decide while I am shooting. This is what happens with age and experience…I’ve been working the same way for so long a time now that I finally have the shooting rhythms and the drawing rhythms and the screening rhythms sort of built in. I know, if I hold this four frames…-I don’t think about it anymore, it’s reflexive, you know. It’s not necessarily a good thing, but that’s what’s beginning to happen, and I can pretty well predict how it’s going to look now. That is very bad. This means I make pure films or I won’t make films after a while. Because, as I say, I can’t surprise myself anymore without going out of my way.

SITNEY: Although you use cards, it seems the materials changed in the last three films, haven’t they? 66 is one material, 69 is another, and 70…

BREER: Yeah. It’s a question of getting the right image. You know, all of those films are concerned with, or use, single frame alternation, working out, let’s say, interweaving, three different themes, maybe, by alternating the images of them, you know, until finally you can stack up about three or four things, like working on a fugue. Instead of double exposing or overprinting all the material, I just alternate the frame. I can do that, because I have frames in my hand. Those cards are frames. And so I am playing with a piece of film, really. I am editing with individual frames.

SITNEY: The actual materials that you put on top of the cards seem so different.

BREER: In 69 I used the kind of self-sticking commercial plastic with different colors, called zippatone.

MEKAS: Your earlier films were not noticed much for your use of color. Color is more noticeable in your last three films-subtle blues, and yellows…

SITNEY: You say you use zippatone-you cut the shapes out?

BREER: Yeah. You use the knife and a rule for straight lines, and things that you are told not to use, in art school, but it takes the sentimentality out of the line, it takes the nerve out of the line, you know, lines are enervated, like the free flowing cartoon films. And that has a certain quality I was trying to eliminate and so the films are more brittle, the edges are sharp. Now, in the last film, I used pray paint, and a knife, so that the combination there is soft and hard. You noticed, in the last film, some of the shapes dissolve into softer shapes. Even if they have hard edges, the triangle turns into a lumpy shape. And it is a kind of intellectual comment on the evolution of form, from geometric to organic that takes place in that film all the time.

MEKAS: I see that you are still using all the tools you used in painting and sculpture. Now you use them to make films. I think it’s funny.

BREER: I guess I do.

SITNEY: Was 69 hand-drawn?

BREER: Oh sure. That was done with a knife and a straight edge for a straight line. There are elements of free lines there, but very much reduced and eliminated. You know, there are things you don’t see in the films, that I cut out. I had one still reminiscent of the earlier films, incongruities that I put in to sort of define the film. I have a feeling that , well, one you mentioned in 70, when that big dome shape, which is a slow zoom, approaches, it seems like it is incongruous, it is very disturbing, it’s something like a piece of dust in your eye, and you’re looking at the thing in the convention which is predictable, and then this thing comes in and it seems to be discordant. I’ve always done that, that’s the basis of the first film, mixing things up and then…There are still leftovers of that in these films. I have a feeling that it’s like…stepping off the screen or turning on the lights, so people know that they are in the theatre, it’s something to break up the format, so that you can better appreciate the format. Otherwise you get absorbed into a discipline, you have no reference points anymore, except maybe to put your hands in your pockets or something, but I inject those things for myself. It’s like taking the camera off the stand and walking outside with it in Fist Fight. It’s a deliberate intrusion. It’s for myself.

SITENY: But in general, in Fist Fight, there were more intrusions. Fistfight wasn’t made on cards, was it?
BREER: No, that was every size, every format. I decided then that that was too…as an antidote to a film I made before, I’ve forgotten which. Breathing? Breathing I shot over-I shoot these films over. Breathing I shot four or five times in 16mm. I edited it and then I arranged the cards the way I wanted. I took it into town and rented a 35mm camera for one day; I shot something like, I don’t know how many frames, over 8 thousand in a day, for ten hours without even standing up. I never made a cut in the film. All the images were in exact order.

MEKAS: You mean, you used it as is, in big chunks?…

BREER: It was all shot in one day. But I had shot it several times before, and I went back and edited my images, so that when I got back my 35 print, I didn’t have a splice, which is a kind of tour-de-force. I don’t know why I did it that way. I think I am just more at home with the cards, and no reason to cut film if I can…you know, I feel it’s kind of artificial that way…

SITNEY: With Fist Fight, did you cut the film or did [sic] it directly?

BREER: Oh yes, sure. I always, you know, edit a lot. But with ‘Breathing’ it was also money saving. I wanted the quality of 35. So I made sure that I could do it very quickly.

SITNEY: But Fist Fight seemed to consider all the techniques-cartoons, and collage, and…

BREER: That’s the throwback to Jamestown Baloos. All my films refer back and it might take a few years to finish them. I think everybody must do this. So now I have gone back to Form Phases. I have no interest in Form Phases at all now. But I just notice that there is this, after all these years, this funny kind of connection. As if all other stuff drops out of sight.

SITNEY: But there is something in Jamestown Baloos that I haven’t seen in any other films, that tri-part structure.

BREER: Yeah. It was a triptych. And I was actually thinking in terms of the triptychs that I had seen, I guess, in Germany. You know, they fold, they close, and I think there is one in a Northern German town (Lubeck), in a big church there…I don’t know whose it is, maybe a medieval German artist-it’s black and white on either side and color in the middle, and this was, I think, the basis for making Jamestown Baloos that way. Three parts. The color is silent, and the other two parts have sound on them. So that the film is…the idea was that it’s a completely symmetrical piece of film, it has no real beginning or end, you could close the black and white things in…I think of the films as objects sort of, rather than continuities. You should be able to hold them upside down. But that is not true, you can’t show them backwards, it wouldn’t make any sense…I think of them as blocks of time, in which no time takes place.

SITNEY: It seems to me that Blazes and Form Phases came together. The shape of one and the speed of the other, and something new is born of that union in the last three films. But each of the three films, they seem to be quite different.

MEKAS: You didn’t play before with the screen itself. But in your last three films, you seem to make the audience conscious of the screen and of the space into which we are looking, in some way.

BREER: Well…For one thing, in 69, I was flowing those things way back into space, and yet it is a flat screen. The first time I was making films, the idea was that I could accept film on the basis that the screen was a flat plane. And that was a painting discipline brought over to film. It was a flat plane on which things took place as they do on paintings, the whole neo-plastic ideal, which came out of cubism, I guess. Concentration, awareness, and even a heightened use of the picture plane. You know, Cezanne shuns the use of perspective; he permitted himself to go behind. Well, if he went behind the plane a certain amount, you have to come forward a certain amount, to finally locate that plane right on the wall, and that was the idea of painting as a concrete object. Picasso slapped a newspaper on the Cubist painting; that declared it was an object independent of its references. And, of course, this was brought into film, from the neo-plastic disciplines of Mondrian. I think any art discipline, or any kind of expressive disciplines are arbitrary. They are useful at the time, as a means of explaining oneself to oneself or whatever it’s all about, but, they’re perfectly open to complete violation. I don’t think there is any sacrosanct-I don’t believe, in other words, the picture plane is…It’s an interesting concept. It’s valid if it’s done right. The truth is somewhere in how it’s done, not in itself as some kind of moral edict, you know. What the hell is wrong with the hole in the wall? So when these things are flowing back in space, they’re still on the white surface and they’re drawn things, so maybe, it’s a violation of a principle that I used for a while, and that’s what you’re talking about. But I still…..Oh, blah-blah-blah….Jesus!

Mekas: This talk was not intended to be a methodical, chronological discussion anyway. I wanted to ramble around the margins of your work. So it’s fine to blah-blah-blah.

BREER: The…One gets seduced by ideas. Like Andy’s approach to the turned on camera, a one-to-one time ratio thing. It’s a marvelous cleansing kind of thing. My God, it seems like the most obvious thing-the best things always are-and, for me, it was a very cleansing thing, because…You know, the time when you are working on an animated film, the time ration between the amount of work on images…the scale of working from small things are eventually shown at my dimension, large or small, which we don’t have much control over-from all thse little drawings, it takes you a day to do one second…All these things you have to come to terms with, somehow. It means that the film discipline, animated things, for all your control, you’re really giving up a lot. Unless you finally come to terms with that. And that’s what I’m trying to do. I am trying to make sense, biologically, or kinesthetically, with myself, between what comes out on the screen and how much time I put into it. I don’t know if it’s a matter of just developing a rationale for that, or actually making some kind of time connection. So that when I do, when I work for a year, in a little room, to make a film, and I shoot it all on one day and then it’s projected for twenty years after that on different sizes of screen-I am aware that this is all; I did it all at first, in that one room. It become direct. It seems like the long way around, but I don’t know another way. But that’s why these dumb creeping things of mine, I spent a year and made thirty pieces. I had to run them all day long. I make one and add it to the others, and I kept adding, and it was one big piece, like a tapestry which got bigger and bigger, and they’re all related to one another. I can only work on that with all the others running around me. I kept expanding out from the one thing I started with, and it bothers me when I think that they are all dispersed somewhere in different places and that they’re not running and, you know, all destroyed now, really.
…Well, it’s this tremendous scope of possibilities of cinema. Brakhage’s view of…encompassing the universe, you know…I don’t know, I have to quote you, from your lecture (to Sitney)…but the romantic ideal, the cosmic view…of incorporating the whole world in the film…Whether you use the word “world”, “universe”, the symbol like that…

MEKAS:…or that little room in Palisades, New York…in which all those things are put together…

BREER: …I think there is this compulsion, I think you are right. What you’re defining, the kind of cinema, Brakhage and Blake, the poet-are cases of self-consciously doing this and incorporating signs and symbols of this effort in their work, in really successful work it takes…cosmic ramifications. It can be just as radical a change in somebody’s life to see a….to have an experience of film that excites them. Film can be something utterly banal…I guess, what I am saying, every artist is working for this kind of final nirvana in his work, it has to encompass all truth, truth about everything.

SITNEY: Do you think of some of your films as more particularly successful than others?

BREER: Oh, yes. I am not very happy with some. There are parts in Fist Fight that bothered me very much. But I learned not to go back and hack at it.

SITNEY: Which parts?

BREER: Let’s say, that there are parts that I like very much and the rest I am indifferent to. Parts that I like very much, I think people will be surprised…I mean, they’re the emptiest parts…and why should anyone know it? I don’t know, maybe people see it this way too, but from comments and things I…I kind of like the parts that have to do with rather sparse structure. It’s hard to say that about a film like that, so full of imagery, but…

SITNEY: I am interested in what you consider “sparse structure” in that particular film.

BREER: Well, there are sections in there that I could tell you about, like after these racing cars appear, where there is a little line that goes across the screen and there is a certain glimpse of cartoon imagery and a thing that falls down this way (Breer demonstrates), and then maybe nothing for a while, and another image that comes in, and there is a kind of severity in the structure there that I like. What I don’t like are the things that seem more…they’re more amusing or distracting. You see, that film started as an autobiographical film and all the elements are photo-album-kind-of-memory-things and I just changed it into Originale film, halfway through. Actually, it was done by that time. It was to be called ‘Cookies’, or something. So I used all autobiographical material, thinking that was the most neutral metrial I could use, because it was so personal that it was all loaded with emotional stuff, emotional references, that that material would cancel itself out; it was better than avoiding it, you know. But now, it seems, when I look at it, the things that…my own picture in there bothers me, and things that do refer to the stuff I am most familiar with…

SITNEY: How did you get the sound?

BREER: Oh, that was taken from five performances of Stockhausen. I had fifteen hours of sound, I had long tapes, and I picked out stuff. I have sort of the feeling I’d rather have-in the spirit, I’d rather have Fontana Mix by Cage rather than Stockhausen. I am not a profound admirer of Stockhausen. I admire him, I guess, in a way, and I dislike him very much in other ways. But he saw it, and I don’t know what his real feelings were, but he said he wanted to take all his own music and chop it up the way my film was, but he probably felt like burning what I did to his sounds. Which is reasonable. Because, in fact, even on that track, one of the actors criticizes the happening, very critically of Stockhausen and I think he was sincere.

SITNEY: I think the soundtrack is particularly successful.

BREER: Yes, it’s probably because of the Stockhausen stuff.

SITENY: No, no. There is a sequence where you see a gallery. I guess it’s at your gallery and you hear all kinds of noise in there and it works together very successfully. I think due to the qualities of the sound, it has a special quality that suggests a room and space…

BREER: Yes.

SITNEY:…with special images in the film; it works very well.

BREER: You know, my sound often has special qualities because it’s recorded in the room where windows are open, and you hear the airplanes or other things. Some of the sounds are made by hanging the microphone out of the window, and there are accidents that I use all the time.

MEKAS: This is a film which you said bothered you. Which ones do not bother you?

SITNEY: I ask more dangerous questions…

BREER: It’s funny. I don’t know how to explain it, but my…Well, let’s see…I have some nostalgic feelings about cartooning. There is a thing, I was going to be a cartoonist, when I was a kid, and I thought that the beauty of that was that I’d be able to stay at home and work, you see…and I liked that idea very much. The other thing was tempting too, to get tuberculosis and be able to work under, you know, hospital conditions, so I wouldn’t be bothered and I could play with the nurses, probably…and probably, what comes from childhood memories of working, sick and drawing something…So cartooning still has attractions to me. It’s like Fahlstrom said about animation one time, that it’s you own little universe. You can create people and destroy them and make a whole world and…So it’s that, combined with-it has to do with the joy of drawing. It’s a very joyous thing, drawing. A marvelous thing. And so I like to…Right now I’m doing that. I’ve got a kid’s film in the can. It got way out of hand. It’s something I’m doing for the Big Brother of Sesame Street. And it got to be more work that joy. The confines are too small. But it’s kind of a sickness I have.

SITNEY: I’ll ask a more dangerous question which we never ask anyone.

BREER: Wait. I haven’t yet answered your other question.

SITNEY: I am curious, and you have to answer this honestly: what do you think about the selection of your films by the Anthology Film Archives?

BREER: Oh…Welll…I am honestly pleased to have my films selected. I was surprised in some sense, but not amazingly surprised by the choice, when I saw it. I thought that it was historically correct, in my own little history, to pick out Recreation, because, after all, this is the first showable single frame collage film that I did, and since a lot of my work followed that-that made sense. And also, it’s a film that has a lot of spirit to it. That’s okay. It’s a good film. I’ll tell you honestly, I don’t like the way they look together. But obviously, it’s very subjective…

MEKAS: Which of the films would you add to what we have?

BREER: I thought about it, and I don’t know. When a group of august judges chooses your films, you get a little…You have a moment of wondering whether your evaluation is worth anything at all. So that the films which I felt kindly about were, for reasons that had nothing to do with the film at all, such as Horse Over Tea Kettle. You are asking…It is a dangerous question. An artist, what does he think about his own work? And how valid is what he thinks about it? That’s what made me think how valid my own stuff was. I am glad that anything gets through at all, I am happy for that. It sounds super-modest, but…

SITNEY: We always wanted not to have the work which was the most polite to us, which would please…but to try to get the works which we felt had the greatest investment of energies and the….

BREER: I guess, what I would, for my own image, public image, have liked, it would be sort of wider spread, more examples further afield, less similar. Except for the last three films.

MEKAS: I’m certainly for having in Jamestown Baloos.

SITNEY: Well, I mean, I don’t think we can rehearse here the debates that occurred. But there are other films that various members of the Selection Committee would want, the things cancelled out…But I think ‘Jamestown’ is important.

BREER: Jamestown Baloos, I felt, was a turning point. It was a breakthrough for me. I’ve never shown Recreation with Jamestown. I always like Recreation, but when I make my own programs, I wouldn’t show Recreation because I felt that it was contained in Jamestown, in the middle section, the same kind of film was in there, and I didn’t want to be repetitive. So those two kind of play again each other. So I don’t know now, whether you want to show them both.

SITNEY: It’s not the question of that, no.

MEKAS: I have a few questions here. You’ll have to be very fast. It will have to be from the top of your head. Try not to delay. Name three colors!

BREER: Oh, my God…Well, Red. Green. Yellow.

MEKAS: Name three red things, objects-whatever comes to your mind, whatever.

BREER: Well, I have to name the flag, and blood, and I have to name red.

MEKAS: Name three blue things. Anything blue.

BREER: Sky. Must I say water? Shirts.

MEKAS: Yellow?

BREER: I have to think of urine, and yellow…I tell you yellow is a Buddhist color, a color that is very ephemeral. It’s a color of nothingness.

MEKAS: Drop three names of three artist, no matter from what field.

BREER: If you promise not to print.

MEKAS: You don’t have to choose the very, very greatest ones. Just rattle off the names.
BREER: Vigo. Oldenburg. Frank Stella.

MEKAS: Now you have to rattle from the top of your mind twelve disconnected words.

BREER: I have a feeling I’ll pay for this….How many? Twelve? Oh shit. Mother. Film. Discipline. Flying. Floating. Lightness. Cat. Dog.

MEKAS: Your are thinking.

BREER: Oh, I’m not supposed to think. Card. Rug. I want to know the results of this.

MEKAS: These are very innocent…

BREER: It’s not all innocent.

Owen Land (George Landow) Interview

2011-07-14T15:18:00.000-06:00

In Light of his passing, the following interview between Owen Land (George Landow) and P. Adams Sitney is from the No. 47 issue of Film Culture circa 1969...

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(image via Art in America)

(from Fleming Faloon via Anthology Archives)

(from Film In Which There Appears... via Anthology Archives)

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For a more recent encounter with Land, see the following videos with Land from the LAFF:

Pt. One

Pt. Two

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R.I.P. Owen Land

2011-07-13T16:19:00.000-06:00

"By the way, the film was booed at the Cinematheque and it was cut off before its proper time (twenty-two minutes). Someone shouted, and he meant it as a joke: 'Another genius was born tonight at the Cinematheque!' But I state it here in all seriousness."

- Jonas Mekas on George Landow aka Owen Land circa 1965

Bloggers Discovering the Lumiere Feed

2011-07-12T16:50:00.002-06:00

Embarrassed that it has taken me this long to discover it, but wanted to pass along a link to the Vimeo account of multicultural magazine LUMIERE, which has an absolute treasure trove of insightful works including recently uploaded videos of Nathaniel Dorsky discussing his films. Be sure to check out the magazine itself as well (Google Translate is your friend!)...

An Object of Nature

2011-07-06T17:35:00.000-06:00

Unsere Afrikareise, without a doubt some of the most visually/audibly challenging 12.5 minutes in all of cinema. The following brief interview is once again from Mekas' Movie Journal, which I've recently just reread for the umpteenth time (Mekas' unbridled enthusiasm, swimming throughout Movie Journal, is perfectly exemplified in the opening paragraph)...

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(Stills via Anthology Archives, copyright Peter Kubelka)

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Planting the Tree of Life: David Brooks

2011-06-30T18:34:00.000-06:00

Like many I recently had a chance to attend a theater screening of Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life, and while there were several sequences of an intense and weighty moment-to-moment/frame-to-frame clarity and specificity, I was little reticent invoking a term like “visionary” considering the previous precedence of a considerable amount of the film’s formal strategies (albeit on a much humbler scale). Such precedents have previously been highlighted by several very knowledgeable sources, from Belson to Davis, Brakhage ((indeed when many years ago Marie Nesthus, writing on the influence of Messiaen on Brakhage, wrote that "Each begins with the 'ordinary' material of life and filters it through his complex and highly sophisticated/totally naive artistic consciousness in the attempt to depict a reality based on interior (or perhaps, transcendent) truth" she could have just as well been speaking of Malick)) to Baillie, Beavers to Dorsky, and even Scott Nyerges, from whom Malick chose to license work directly. While in some alternate reality it would somehow be possible for the film to prominently acknowledge these various poles of influence, I recognize that harboring some form of malcontent over the issue is completely unproductive and unfair, and would instead like to use the recognition sparked by Malick’s film to bring a few of these various works closer to the forefront. One such film that I have not yet seen mentioned is David Brooks’ The Wind is Driving Him Towards the Open Sea. Like Malick’s work it is a restless and somewhat tortured exploration that vibrates on both a macro and micro wavelength, with a montage that cascades in a manner at once jarring and fluid. It is a work of remarkably assured vision for a filmmaker who at the time was only in his early twenties. Tragically it would be his final statement, as a year later he was killed in a car crash. In all my searching since having seen the film I have only come across two reviews of the film, one from Fred Camper and the other, as one might expect, from Jonas Mekas. I’ve included Mekas’ review along with his fiery eulogy (both can be found in his Movie Journal: The Rise of the New American Cinema 1959-1971):

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(stills via Anthology Archives)

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The film is available for rent from the Film-makers Co-op, along with several other works by Brooks which I have not yet seen…

Adolfas Mekas

2011-05-31T14:09:00.004-06:00

Another melancholy post to make, this time to recognize the passing of Adolfas Mekas, brother of Jonas, whose passion for cinema easily equaled that of his more (publicly) prominent brother. It was Adolfas who co-founded Film Culture magazine back in 1954 with Jonas, a magazine that continues to be an endless source of fascination and insight for me even many long years after its cancellation (as evidenced by the many scanned pages to be found here on this blog). Best wishes to his many friends and family...

(the Mekas clan from Reminisces of a Voyage to Lithuania, via Anthology Archives)

R.I.P.

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"'We' means Adolfas and me."

(-Jonas Mekas in A Critical Cinema 2)

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Finger-Poppin Music

2011-05-27T21:50:00.000-06:00

Yes, yes it is...

R.I.P.

A Rolling Stone...

2011-05-14T18:17:00.000-06:00

Been at a bit of a crossroads of late, uncertainty over which direction to take consuming most of my time and energy, though I hope to return with gusto very shortly...

In the meantime...

Text of Sight: In Focus (Pt. One)

2011-04-29T22:37:00.000-06:00

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Introductory Post

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(From latent by Peter Miller & Robert Todd)
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Helianthus annuus

2011-04-19T18:25:00.000-06:00

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(From Ronald Johnson's A Line of Poetry, A Row of Trees)

(Les tournesols colorés by Rose Lowder)

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The "T" Word

2011-04-12T10:34:00.000-06:00

Chagrined to admit I had not before discovered this gem floating amongst the Youtube detritus...

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Cover Up (Pt. 2)

2011-04-05T14:46:00.001-06:00

Part One...

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(Vol. 1 no. 4)

(no. 2)

(no. 63-64)

(no. 65-66)

(no. 67-69)

Important Letter From Canyon Cinema

2011-03-31T18:25:00.003-06:00

Absolutely "sick-to-your-stomach" type news. Hopefully the 16mm projector next to my bed gets a much needed workout soon...

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To the Film Community:

This is a very serious letter. It was emailed to our filmmaker members and we would like to share this with the larger community. It concerns the survival of Canyon Cinema. As most of you probably know, film rentals over the past few years have been steadily declining. This is a result of the proliferation of digital media. Many of Canyon’s major filmmakers who have brought substantial income to the organization have now made their work available in digital formats. Many of our renters, especially in universities, no longer have access to adequate film projection. Often after the purchase of a DVD, instructors of cinema studies continue to use the digital media and forsake the renting of the original 16mm prints. This is partly due to their own dwindling rental budgets and the lack of well functioning projectors.

In addition, a part of our annual income has traditionally come from bank interest rates. In previous years Canyon has earned more than $4,000 per year this way. In the past three years we have earned almost nothing in this area. We are also very dependent on the money collected from our annual distribution fee from our filmmakers. Many filmmakers do not to pay their yearly fee. Canyon Cinema should be collecting more than $32,000 from its 320 members. Last fiscal year we collected approximately $21,000 in this manner.

During the past decades Canyon Cinema has been able to survive entirely from earned income generated from rentals, sales, distribution fees, bank interest and occasional donations. Each year, since our inception, Canyon Cinema has been successful economically, albeit with a very small margin of excess. We are now in a state where we can no longer continue to operate as we have in the past. This is a very real thing.

World wide interest in our celluloid film collection continues to be strong. There are even indications of a resurgence of interest by a new generation of film enthusiasts, filmmakers and scholars. Last year our gross rental and sales totaled more than (purposely left blank). This is not insignificant. However, this is not enough to continue to run our business in its present form.

It is apparent that Canyon Cinema can no longer continue as it was originally conceived and changes need to be made that are appropriate to our present day and age. The Board of Directors and the staff have been working on solutions. However, after many discussions, meetings with advisors, and inquires made directly to people who might help us we find that we are at a loss to solve the problem. Currently Canyon Cinema is losing $2,000 a month, approximately the amount of our rent. At this rate of loss, Canyon Cinema could be out of business within two years.

In short, we need any tangible help or advice that our community, or other contacts that might be able to offer. We mean this very seriously. The members of the Board of Directors and the staff of Canyon Cinema are experimental filmmakers like yourselves. We need all the help that our fellow members might be able to offer in terms of contacts or ideas. This is very important.

The five other major distributors of experimental film which are located in New York, Paris, Toronto, Vienna and London now receive substantial funding from government agencies on both a national and local level. These distributors, despite the fact they are “small businesses” are recognized as irreplaceable cultural entities which like any other municipal arts organization such as a symphony orchestra need additional support in order to survive. This is far more difficult in the United States.

Here are some specific examples of experimental film distribution companies modeled after Canyon Cinema currently receiving substantial funding. The Film-Makers’ Cooperative in New York City is currently funded by the Experimental Television Center as well as New York State Council for the Arts. They have also received a life saving donation of free rental space. Light Cone in Paris is funded by several governmental agencies including Le Centre National de la Cinematographie, Le Ministere de la Culture, La Region Ile-de-France and La Ville de Paris. LUX in London is funded by the Arts Council England and the Leverhulme Foundation for Educational Activities. In Canada the Canadian Filmmaker's Distribution Centre in Toronto is funded by the Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council, The Ontario Trillum Foundation and the Toronto Arts Council. In Vienna, Sixpack Film is most generously supported by the Federal Ministry of Art, Culture and Education (Department for Film), City of Vienna - Department of Cultural Affairs, the Provincial Governments of Lower Austria, Upper Austria and Salzburgh, and the Trade Association for Music and Filmindustry.

In contrast Canyon Cinema has not been able to obtain funding from federal, state or local governments. It is not that we have not tried. All recent efforts to procure funding have been rebuffed due to the nature of the way Canyon Cinema is structured as a for profit shareholder
corporation. This is how the organization was set up since the late 1960’s. Canyon Cinema has attempted to become an IRS approved non profit corporation at least twice in the past years without success.

Fortunately we have enjoyed many contributions from our members and members of the greater film community over time. We are extremely appreciative of that. Lucasfilm Foundation has been very helpful in recent years. However they have indicated that they will no longer continue their support. Stanford University Media Library acquired the Canyon Cinema paper archives for a generous amount of $100,000 in 2009. It is those funds upon which we are currently operating.

Now what do we do?

These are some of the ideas the Board and staff have been discussing. Nothing has been decided upon. We feel that our filmmakers must be informed of some of the possible solutions being discussed. We need your help in determining the direction we should take. The solutions are not easy and some may appear radical but are necessary. The question is: what is most important to preserve in Canyon Cinema as a motion picture film distribution company. Is it to have faith in the eventual value of celluloid projection and find a way to survive through patronage? Is it to expand into a digital world, a transition for which we do not have funds or staff? Is it to face the reality of the present day and age of film presentation and radically alter the nature of Canyon Cinema as a celluloid distributor? Here are some possible solutions that have been discussed and investigated:

1) Dissolve the share holder corporation completely and convert it into a small business, modeled as a non shareholder for profit company distributing filmmaker’s work that generates income. This would enable Canyon to streamline its operation and be responsible for a much smaller inventory.

2) Dissolve the corporation and start another organization that is a 501 3(c) non profit and still operates as a distributor. The cost of converting the present company into a non profit is prohibitive and not recommended by all of the legal advice we have received along with our past history of this request to the IRS. We have also been advised by many significant non-profits in the Bay Area that becoming a non profit is by no means a solution for fundraising.

3) Dissolve the company and create a 501 3(c) company that can expand distribution to include all media, and forms of moving imagery. This would include the difficult and expensive project of digitizing the current films in the collection.

4) Find a patron who can donate to Canyon Cinema approx 850 square feet of office/film storage space, saving us almost $25,000 per year. Or find a long term patron that can provide a contribution of $25,000 cash per year for operational expenses.

5) We have explored the possibility of merging with a large more stable organization within the film community such as the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco, Pacific Film Archives, Stanford University Media Library. So far these organizations do not have the interest or resources to engage Canyon. There may be other film/art organization that might want to form a relationship with Canyon (possibly outside the Bay Area).. The idea is that Canyon’s unique film collection and distribution skills would be preserved under their protection.

Please take a moment to consider these options and what you feel would be in the best interest of Canyon Cinema.What can you personally do to help us at this urgent moment? What resources, connection or contacts can you share with us? We are interested and considering any kind of solution, including relocating from the Bay Area to a less expensive location.

Please email your offers of help, feedback and responses to: dominic@canyoncinema.com We have received private donations in the past and can continue to receive such if directed through our fiscal agent the National Alliance of Media Arts Center. Checks can be made payable to this center and mailed directly to Canyon Cinema, 145 Ninth Street #260, San Francisco, CA .

Canyon Cinema’s paypal account is info@canyoncinema.

If you have any helpful suggestions please contact dominic@canyoncinema.com
Sincerely,

Dominic Angerame
Executive Director, Canyon Cinema

S:S:S:S:S

2011-03-24T21:47:00.000-06:00

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(S:TREAM:S:S:SECTION:S:SECTION:SS:ECTIONED by Paul Sharits)

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(Film stills courtesy Anthology Film Archives)

Brakhage Symposium 2011 Recap (Prelude)

2011-03-22T17:37:00.000-06:00

Damned school work once again stealing away the bulk of my time seemingly without remorse, so like last year I'm throwing up my notes and the (painfully amateur) pictures I took to both buy myself more time and hopefully help my general thoughts on the experience materialize in a more concrete manner...

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(Sally Berg)

(Bill Nichols)

(Abraham Ravett)

(Scott MacDonald)

(Alfred Guzzetti)

(James Benning)

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Brakhage Symposium 2011

2011-03-08T15:19:00.001-07:00

Hard to believe it's already been a year, but the 2011 incarnation of the now Seventh Annual Brakhage Symposium gets underway this weekend at the University of Colorado at Boulder, with a specific focus on exploring "expanded notions of documentary and ethnography." Especially exciting for me will be having the opportunity to listen to Scott MacDonald in person, as his writings have been as invaluable as any in fueling my passion. I'll be driving down Friday afternoon to attend the events on Saturday and Sunday, and will have a recap (hopefully with plenty of pictures this time) sometime shortly thereafter...

In the meantime a fairly detailed schedule has been put online for your browsing pleasure...

Old EZ

2011-03-05T17:11:00.002-07:00

A sketch given to me by a friend and talented artist, Chuck Landvatter...

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"It certainly 'seems' like Ezra Pound is primarily involved with telling his mind; you know, he's telling what he thinks is good and what he thinks is bad, but I hear his song, and I heard it even when I was utterly baffled by a book that obviously had been given to me as a joke. It wasn't just stubbornness, and I had certainly encountered other books that were tough and tougher to read than that; but after comprehending something of them I threw them out. Here was one that the more I understood the more yield came to me. So here became the great book for going over and over and over. Now I would say that I can read six to ten, in some places twenty words in a row, which isn't very much still, but it's good progress in a life time's worth of reading. I'm working on it. I've got some of the major slogans that were to sustain me all of my life, prayers, like 'All that is is light.' That is enough to return me to that kind of person Pound is who would know how important it is to say and give Erigena a translation-'All that is is light.' It's so powerful in that context. That's something of what I mean by meaning."

- Stan Brakhage on Pound's The Cantos

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(Also be sure to check out Yoel Meranda's excellent recent post involving Pound as well...)

Uncommon Sense

2011-03-01T18:09:00.001-07:00

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The above are from a small booklet entitled "The Searching Measure" containing a collection of essays by Robert Beavers, published by the UC Berkeley Art Museum and the Pacific Film Archive. I was given the booklet by Beavers when I drove to San Francisco to attend the screening of his complete film cycle "My Hand Outstretched to the Winged Distance and Sightless Measure", one of the great cinematic encounters I've yet been blessed with...

"A" Very Strange Encounter...

2011-02-24T18:59:00.000-07:00

At the local Barnes & Noble...

Can you spot what doesn't belong in this picture?

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No need to adjust your monitor, that is indeed a copy of Louis Zukofsky's "A" tucked into one of two whole shelves B&N deems their poetry section worthy of...

What miraculous forces conspired to bring about such an absurd sight? It just so happens that New Directions Publishing recently released a republished version of "A", complete with a lovely new introduction by Barry Ahearn. Though perhaps it is not the easiest starting point, now that it is no longer out-of-print and easily attainable I can't recommend it to those who've yet to discover Zukofsky highly enough. Without a doubt one of a small handful of the most important pieces of literature in my daily life...

Homespun

2011-02-23T13:53:00.000-07:00

"The day is not so very far away when all of these detailed descriptions of splicemaking and zoom lens focusing, when these words of advice on laboratory communications and projector setup will grow dim. Handmade films will have to be seen in the new light of purely mindmade films. Our most sophisticated light shows and brilliantly programmed computer films, and all that cunning and ingenious farrago called mixed media, or expanded cinema, will pale. However, the most straightforward handmade home movies will, I believe, still be the most lucid contribution, for they will transcend invidious comparison with the technocratic artist's dream finally fulfilled. So it is that we wait in the dawn of the age of the autocerebroscope."

- (final paragraph of Lenny Lipton's 'Independent Filmmaking')

(Lenny Lipton)

Ritual in Transfigured Time

2011-02-17T19:15:00.001-07:00

Guess Who?...

(From FC No. 72-75)

Time-Capsule Pt. 2

2011-02-15T17:30:00.000-07:00

Before Agreement

2011-02-10T17:49:00.000-07:00

The following appeared in the No. 22 (Winter/Spring 1989/90) edition of "Millenium Film Journal"...

Time-Capsule

2011-02-08T17:58:00.000-07:00

The Text of Light

2011-02-03T19:14:00.002-07:00

"All that is is light." - Dun Scotus Erigena

"To see a world in a grain of sand." - William Blake

These the primary impulses while working on this film. It is dedicated to Jim Davis who showed me the "first spark" of refracted film light.

-Brakhage's program notes for The Text of Light

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(From The Text of Light by Stan Brakhage; courtesy Anthology Film Archives)

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(From Canto LXXIV by Ezra Pound)

(From Canto LXXXVII by Ezra Pound)

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(From The Films of Stan Brakhage... by Bruce Elder)

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See Robert Grosseteste's On Light here...

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(From The Text of Light by Stan Brakhage; courtesy Anthology Film Archives)

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Rebirth of Cégeste

2011-01-31T19:33:00.000-07:00

(From Le testament d'Orphée by Jean Cocteau)

Fade to Black

2011-01-28T21:19:00.000-07:00

(From La Vie Nouvelle by Philippe Grandrieux)

Synchronic Form

2011-01-27T17:19:00.000-07:00

The following is a graphical chart by P. Adams Sitney from the first of his four lectures at the Museum of Modern Art in the spring of 1971, entitled The Idea of Morphology (which appeared in full in the No. 52-55 edition of Film Culture)...

Videodrome

2011-01-25T18:11:00.002-07:00

In some respects I'm a bit late to the party on this one, though is such an expression applicable when the party has seemingly been so sparsely attended in the first place? A few minutes with the video work of Kyle Canterbury and one is ready to curse such injustice, but rather than wallow in indignation I suppose its better to instead simply try and make a few more humble invitations...

So first a link to his Vimeo page

An appropriately enthusiastic introduction by way of Fred Camper

Like all invitations this is post is just an announcement, an announcement that will hopefully give way to a more substantial gathering once I'm able to collect thoughts that have been sent scurrying in all directions. These videos have a pulse unlike any I've encountered, a pulse that reverberates on the surface of the eye in an entirely unfamiliar way. So to spruce this invitation up, some images from the work itself and few more words to liven up the mood...

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(7 Videos: #7)

(19: Passage)

(A Video)

(Bird)

(Color Shifts)

(Fragments from a Room)

(Man)

(Origins)

(...seven parts...)

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Elusive Lucidity blog post

"For the past several years Kyle Canterbury has been quietly, in the shadows, creating a stunning body of work.His videos are among the richest expressions of cinema of the last several decades. His eye for color and texture, rhythm and composition, rival many of the masters of experimental film. But comparisons are facile - Canterbury is working different terrain. He is rooting to the primal essence of the video medium unlike anyone before." (White Light Cinema)

"But such pieces as Color Shifts, Building in Detroit #2, 7 New Videos #3, 7 New Videos #7, and LX evoke for me some of the graphic power of the very different Oskar Fischinger, which goes to show the diversity of Canterbury's work. And he does some things with rhythm and texture I haven't seen before in film or video." (Jonathan Rosenbaum)

"Canterbury continues to be the most astonishing (and still overlooked!) artist working today." (Patrick Friel)

More to come for certain...

Independently Minded

2011-01-21T17:48:00.002-07:00

Front and back covers to my copy of of Lenny Lipton's Independent Filmmaking. Well worn and sturdily taped for good reason, as after countless time spent amongst its pages I can say unequivocally it is the most insightful, humorous, good natured, enthusiastic and accessible filmmaking book I've come across. Even if you have no interest in the process whatsoever, it's still remains a must read. Much more to come down the line...

Happy B-Day

2011-01-14T21:17:00.000-07:00

As you may or may not have heard, today was Stan Brakhage's birthday. I won't say much, as the unquantifiable importance his work has held in my own life since my first chance discovery has been elucidated here time and again. It was a discovery that gave me my sense of wonder back, a wonder that has deepened every day since. Instead I'll post the following brief but exquisite essay by Kristin Prevallet entitled Angels in the Apparatus...

(screen captures from Orpheus by Jean Cocteau)

A Bit More Radical...

2011-01-11T17:41:00.000-07:00

Just a few more scans from the recently released wonder Radical Light to supplement the lovely in-depth Moving Image Source review Zoom Out, Pan Around by Tom McCormack and hopefully convince any of those with one foot still on the fence to jump in wholeheartedly...

Ripple-Counter-Ripple

2011-01-07T21:43:00.001-07:00

What daily life without these two would be I care not to know...

(From The Mammals of Victoria by Stan Brakhage & ARK: Beam 29 by Ronald Johnson)

Through the Fog

2011-01-05T16:30:00.000-07:00

The gentle unfolding of perception against an unassuming grid-like visual field; the simple yet profound pleasures of patiently studying the slowly shifting frames of Larry Gottheim's films...

(look closely, there is more than initially meets the eye)

(from Fog Line by Larry Gottheim)

Slave for You

2011-01-03T17:22:00.003-07:00

For a few weeks now we've all been privy to the glutton of 'best-of-the-year' lists that is more or less an annual rite of cinephilia (the positives and negatives of such a practice have already been discussed ad nauseam and need not be mentioned any further here). I've already elucidated my current situation with regards to accessibility, i.e. any list of 2010 favorites I could come up with would inevitably be severely undermined and most likely less interesting than the list of films of equal importance that I have not been fortunate enough as of yet to see (a point of frequent lamentation to be sure). With that in mind rather than parading about a diffident line-up I thought I would keep it simple and just quickly point out my favorite 2010 film I did manage to see; T. Marie's exquisite J.M.W. Turner inspired film Slaveship, a patiently undulating digital exploration of time, space and most importantly color. It's a film to let sweep over you, at once both ominous and serene...

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(Slaveship by T.Marie)

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Quick Billy DVD/Ronald Johnson's Modernist Collage Poetry

2010-12-06T23:28:00.001-07:00

Another day, another reason to get excited for the holidays, as two more essential items have arrived:

(Quick Billy by Bruce Baillie; courtesy Anthology Archives)

First, the long awaited release of Bruce Baillie's 1971 Masterpiece with a capital M (the first five minutes will make your head spin) Quick Billy. This third release is available through Canyon Cinema , $50 for home use and $300 for institutional use. An immense amount of sacrifice and effort went into the creation of this DVD, so sincere gratitude is owed to many (especially Baillie himself and John Carlson, who aided with the transfer and color coding). The beauty of the film is difficult to put into words, but as Bruce Elder says of the film:

"One masterwork in the cinema that depicts the process by which its maker attempts to recover the true self -- or, if not the true self, an authentic self that enters into uncorrupting relations with the world beyond it -- is Bruce Baillie's 'Quick Billy (1970). Here an attack on the body, a bout with yellow fever, brings Baillie to confront his mortality. This confrontation brings him to revise his understanding of himself, his family, his personal history, and his goals. 'Quick Billy' tells the tale of his falling ill, of his becoming delirious and delusional and experiencing memories of his former self, of his transformation, and of his rebirth as authentic individual. While Baillie patter the film on the 'Bardo Thodol (The Tibetan Book of the Dead)', the matrix from which 'Quick Billy' arises is really Gnosticism. Like the similarly Gnostic/Eleusian 'Cantos' of Ezra Pound, 'Quick Billy' is a tale of going into the underworld, experiencing terror, undergoing transformation, and being reborn. The agency that brings on the transformation in both cases is the experience of light." - (Bruce Elder in 'A Body of Vision')

(Quick Billy by Bruce Baillie; courtesy Anthology Archives)

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By now anyone who has followed this blog should know that the importance of Ronald Johnson's poetry in my life is and has been immeasurable, so the upcoming in-depth survey of his work (more or less the first of its kind aside from the wonderful Ronald Johnson: Life and Works) Ronald Johnson's Modernist Collage Poetry by Ross Hair is not to be missed. I've yet to get my hands on a copy as it will not be released until the 21st, but when a groundbreaking work like this comes along there is no doubt that it demands consideration. The description is as follows:

Ronald Johnson’s Modernist Collage Poetry is the first monograph to address the legacy of the American poet, Ronald Johnson (1935-1998). Drawing upon never before seen archival material, this book sets out to understand Johnson’s poetry in the context of the “New American” collage tradition, stretching from Ezra Pound to Louis Zukofsky and beyond. Additionally, Ross Hair assesses Johnson’s work in relation to wider questions concerning literary chronologies, especially the discontinuities commonly seen to exist between nineteenth-century Romantic and twentieth-century modernist literary forms.

So far the reviews have been understandably effusive:

"Whitman’s famous injunction--'To have great poets, there must be great audiences'--can usefully be modified to say, 'Great poets require a great reader.' In this groundbreaking new book, Ross Hair proves himself to be the great reader Ronald Johnson’s work has needed: someone to connect and synthesize the different traditions Johnson availed in creating his powerful poetry – from the Transcendentalists, to Pound and the Modernists, to concrete and visual poetries from mid-century – all the while alerting us to the central creative principle that drives Johnson’s work. Namely, a recovery of an Edenic innocence enabled by unironic acts of assemblage and vision, where beauty and pleasure are the desired goals. Johnson was one of our finest visionary poets; Hair’s illumination of Johnson’s ‘ocularcentric concerns’ shows us why, especially in the ways 'ocular' is transformed into 'oracular' in Johnson’s generative poetics. Hair’s sense of Johnson’s work is as keen as it is profound; his readings of Johnson’s work – especially of Johnson’s major long works, including his masterpiece ARK – are invaluable for seasoned and uninitiated readers alike. Ronald Johnson’s Modernist Collage Poetry will take its place as the Thoreauvian cornerstone for all subsequent understandings of Johnson’s poetry."--Peter O’Leary, executor for the literary estate of Ronald Johnson, author of Gilding the Buddha: My Apprenticeship with Ronald Johnson

"In Ronald Johnson’s Modernist Collage Poetry, the first book-length study of Johnson’s work, Ross Hair ably demonstrates that Johnson’s poetry 'proposes innocence as an epistemological condition, denoting a way of experiencing and responding to the world of events without prescription.' A visionary bricoleur and direct heir of the American Transcendentalists, Johnson brilliantly appropriated and revised the revolutionary principles of his modernist precursors (Pound, Williams, Moore, Zukofsky, Olson…), producing one generous vernacular masterpiece after another. Exploring archival materials, analyzing intertextual relations, and closely reading Radi os, The Book of the Green Man, and most importantly, ARK, Hair shows both new readers and those familiar with the work why Johnson is one of the most important poets of the second half of the twentieth century: an invaluable contribution to our understanding of contemporary American poetry."--Norman Finkelstein, Professor of English, Xavier University and author of On Mount Vision: Forms of the Sacred In Contemporary American Poetry

"'The test of poetry,' Louis Zukofsky once wrote, 'is the range of pleasure it affords as sight, sound, and intellection.' Page after page, Ronald Johnson’s poetry passes that test with flying colors, and Ross Hair’s new study shows how. Exploring the poet’s relationships with Transcendentalism, the modernism of Pound, Olson, Zukofsky, and Moore, and with his poetic contemporaries, from Guy Davenport and the Language Poets to British authors Thomas A. Clark and Geoffrey Grigson, this book invites us to rethink the story of American poetry since the 1960s, putting Johnson and his collage poetics center stage. Hair’s sharp eye and attentive ear serve him well in deft close readings and in fresh archival discoveries (Harold Bloom was a fan? Who knew?), and he gives an illuminating, poignant account of the poet’s occlusion in the 1980s and ‘90s, as critical fashion passed him by. That time in shadow has passed, this groundbreaking book suggests. I am glad and grateful to see it."--Eric Murphy Selinger, co-editor of Ronald Johnson: Life and Works

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The light that has lately graced these brisk Winter mornings certainly just got a little bit brighter...

Head Doctor

2010-12-03T16:10:00.001-07:00

The specter of the ENIAIOS cycle continues to visit my dreams weekly...

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(Markopoulos in Robert Beavers From the Notebook Of...)