VIDEOTHERWISE

'Roundhay Garden Scene' Of 14 October 1888

2009-05-14T07:07:00.000-07:00

No other strip of film has ever been produced which pre-dates this one. This 'film' was never shown by Le Prince and exists today only as a result of photographic copies of the original paper frames (made by the NMPFT in 1930), and reconstructed animations. Le Prince's original pictures where photographed using his 16-lens camera (the LPCC 16-lens camera) and used Eastman Kodak film-paper. They were shot at sixteen frames per second.

source: Paul Burns
THE COMPLETE HISTORY OF THE DISCOVERY OF CINEMATOGRAPHY
http://www.precinemahistory.net/index.html

what is it?

2009-04-20T06:06:00.000-07:00

“Whatever you say it is, it isn't.”-Alfred Korzybski

The word “food” cannot be eaten. “The word is not the thing," As Korzybski said. And then, it follows that the word "thing" is not a thing.

But there are ways of speech to communicate the unspeakable. Artful nonsense. Speaking in tongues, mantra or the noise of ecstasy: Onomatopoeic speech: Extended vocal techniques: phonetic poems:

Cutouts

2009-04-17T10:31:00.000-07:00

Old question: What came first the chicken or the egg? In the end it is a question that is nothing but philosophical circularity. It has no definitive answer, but it has been said that the chicken is one egg’s way of producing more eggs. Maybe a book is a seed idea's way of producing more idea seeds. So we end up with books about books, paintings about paintings and music about music. And where is the avant-grade in this tautology? What is it that really qualifies artwork as new? New is a very rare thing.

I operate in my personal sphere on the idea that (especially in the arts) everything is derivative. That all artists stem from other artists and that ultimately it is the source of all existence that is the wellspring. It's not my intention here to try to describe universal mysteries, even if I could and I can't. However, at the same time I recognize that there are always pioneers in every field yet “No man is an island unto himself” and therefore a total and pure original. As the Preacher concludes in Ecclesiastes, one should enjoy the good things found in life until death brings oblivion. Although “Vanity of vanity saith the Preacher, all is vanity,” there is in the Preacher’s conclusion an acknowledgment that process itself is worthwhile. Don’t worry, I'm not going to get into theology here, this brief text is more or less about filmmakers. In fact it is about the narrow phenomenon of using cutouts in animation. You know, Monty Python's Flying Circus.

If I had mentioned the work of Stan Vanderbeek (1927-1984), Larry Jordan or Harry Smith as a reference it's likely you would not have had an immediate idea of what is meant by cutout animation. But it is a fact that is given by Terry Gilliam the creator of Monty Python's Flying Circus that he was inspired by Vanderbeek’s work, which was an approach that prefigured the more popularized style by decades. If the avant-guard is anything it is that. The commercial or popular guys pick up on the trailblazers and capitalize from there. The trailblazers end up with very little exposure and are mostly unknown or forgotten in the mainstream. Storytime (1968) was the first film directed by Terry Gilliam. It is the visual style and craftsmanship of cutout animation that is most familiar and instantly recognized by Americans and around the world due to the BBC’s Python comedy being widespread and aired on commercial television.

Terry Gilliam: “After college, I lived in New York with some people who would watch experimental avant-garde films. We embraced them because they annoyed everybody else, even though they were mostly awful. One night we were enduring some of this stuff when on to the screen came a cut-up image of Richard Nixon trying to talk with his foot in his mouth. It was the simplest animation pun imaginable. Years later, when I had come to England and we were working on a TV programme that was meant to make people laugh, there was a problem with dramatizing(sic) one of the ideas. So I got a picture of Jimmy Young, cut it in half, moved his mouth around a bit and everybody laughed. That subsequently became a trademark, for which I think van der Beek (spelling?) should take credit.” --From The 10 best animated films of all time by Terry Gilliam, guardian.co.uk/film/2001

It was the experimental work of Stan Vanderbeek and others working in low-budget “underground” film, while getting creative with primitive animation equipment that forged the leading edge and pioneering ideas in cutout animation. Maybe it’s just me, but I sense that Stan Vanderbeek was more than just a dash of influence on Gilliam. He states that it was that one tiny Richard Nixon pun that inspired him. I find that comment to be suspect in light of all the mimicking of Stan Vanderbeek’s work that can be seen in the ‘better crafted for television’ and ‘slick’ Gilliam “trademark” of cutout animation. And of course, he says: “We embraced them [experimental avant-garde films] because they annoyed everybody else, even though they were mostly awful.” (so says he) Regarding the night that he and his friends were "enduring" these awful films.

“Vanity of vanity saith the Preacher, all is vanity.”

***

Consider what the film experimenter
is about. He is dealing with the substance
of our visual reality.
With how we seize the world
(or are seized by it ).
Motion, time, space, light, shadow:
he is walking the thin edge
between the dream state and the objective
world;
he is picking his way with the methodically
accurate linear instrument the camera,
glimpsing 24 intervals of sight per second ---Stan Vanderbeek, from Film Culture

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Stan Vanderbeek’s films have been posted on YouTube and UBUWEB. Check out his classic films. I don't want to post them here at this time because the films are easy to access elsewhere.

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Still Life (With strings attached)

2009-04-14T08:28:00.000-07:00

Bruce Conner died July 7th 2008. Bruce Conner’s film legacy exists in the Library of Congress and in collections among major art institutions the world over.

A pioneer of found footage re-editing, which has become a major part of online culture. That is, where the use of public domain and other “appropriated” materials are sliced and diced into various kinds of Internet video art. (e.g., on YouTube, video blogs and web sites.)

Bruce Conner was a trailblazer in the experimental film genre and notorious as an artist for using found 16-millimeter footage, which he would obtain from thrift shops and second hand stores. I also read recently that according to the attorney for Jean Conner (Bruce's wife), Bruce was firmly opposed to the display of his films on-line. But it is ironic, I think, that his own appropriated found footage films have been removed from YouTube and elsewhere on the charge of being published without the artist's permission. It makes me wonder if Conner ever got permissions for the found footage he used in his own re-edited films. Finders’ keepers’ losers weepers? I don’t know, maybe he did own the rights to the found footage he used in his movies.

For one example, the National Archives now owns the original Zapruder film outright. According to legal records it was not placed in the public domain until 1998. Conner obtained and used some of the Zapruder footage in his various versions (1963-1967) of his work:“Report.”

I myself would like to see his work again, even if the quality suffers from web video compression.

At one point in the nineteen sixties I went to a screening of Bruce Conner’s films at the School of The Art Institute of Chicago. Mr. Conner was there “in person” to talk to the students and take questions after the screening. I remember his train engineer pinstripe overalls and longhair appearance, which was, in those days, somethimg we didn't much of around town and an unexpected fashion statement. I also remeber my old aritst friend Allan K. observing Conner and commenting that anybody who had the guts to dress-up like that must really be into something else. But I don’t remember much about the content of his talk other than he complained that one of his films had been rejected from the New York Film Festival screening due to its length. The jury said the film was too short, or too fast. It was called: Ten Second Film (1965) I thought that his short film was just right.

*This Still Life (with strings attached) is also just the right length. Don’t you think?

“Oh Dem Watermelons”

2009-04-09T23:23:00.000-07:00

I think it was in 1967 when Robert Nelson came to Chicago as a visiting artist to showcase his films and make personal appearances, one of which I attended. [“A relative latecomer to filmmaking, the 35-year-old Nelson had just begun fooling around with the medium, mostly in collaboration with then-wife Gunvor Nelson.” *] As I recall he was interested in talking about his latest film work The Great Blondino and not so much about Watermelons. But it was Nelson’s Watermelon film, which combined humor and social commentary that interested me. The screening I attended was held at the Aardvark Cinematheque in Piper’s Alley. Nelson had drafted talent from the San Francisco Mime Troupe who commissioned the film as a short entertainment to be screened during intermission for its rather infamous 1965 Minstrel Show (Civil Rights from the Cracker Barrel), which assaulted racial stereotypes by wildly exaggerating them.

I asked Nelson a few questions about the filming of Watermelons. He said he completed the whole thing and had it “in the can” within a week. Much of the editing was done in the camera and the film was shot with a hand-held 16 millimeter Bolex. I asked him how he got some of the shots. In one scene: “I just went up to the heavy equipment operator and asked the guy to smash a watermelon with his vehicle so I could film it, the operator was glad to help us out.”

Avant-garde independent 16-millimeter films were known to be “underground” (in part) because many of the public screenings risked getting busted by the police. I know this was the case because I lived in Old Town in those days. I had screened my own films at the Aardvark and was a part of a filmmaker’s cooperative known as the Center Cinema Cooperative. It is hard to believe now, in these times that back in the nineteen-sixties the Chicago Film Censor Board rejected, then approved on appeal a series of avant-garde films to be screened at the Aardvark Cinematheque, including Robert Nelson’s 1965 “Oh Dem Watermelons.” Which is an experimental stylistic classic that was groundbreaking in 1965 and can still be considered as such today.

It was the year that U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson proclaimed his "Great Society" during his State of the Union Address. It was the year an American white Unitarian Universalist minister from Boston, Massachusetts who, while marching for civil rights in Selma, Alabama, was beaten and killed by white supremacists.

Nelson’s “Oh Dem Watermelons” was hip, funny, satirical and shockingly wild in those days. Hollywood had always been careful to keep the camera steady, but during the sixties they started to pick up on the rough and unpolished look of the independent filmmakers. A young and then not an acclaimed and world famous composer, Steve Reich, created the humorous musical soundtrack in a new approach that would eventually be tagged as minimalism.

[“Reich's raucously repetitive choral arrangement of a Stephen Foster oldie (in which a slave mourns his deceased master) adds another satirical dimension to the color visuals, which direct the campus era's mood of anarchy and impudence toward the watermelon.” * ]

[“Aiming to explode racial stereotypes and their symbols, the film finds melons used as bombs, footballs, baseballs, shooting targets, and even as sensuous love objects. Watermelons are cut-and-pasted onto existing images (from Superman to a NASA missile) and sometimes animated there, à la Terry Gilliam's Monty Python 'toons. Fruits are chased by white male hordes, then turn around (via the magic of reverse projection) to chase them in return." * ]

* UBUWEB

This film has been posted on YouTube and UBUWEB. It's the first time I've seen it since the 60's. A classic, check it out. But I don't want to post it here at this time because it's easy to access elsewhere.

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Realm of Shades

2009-04-09T16:25:00.000-07:00

A short video inspired by a book I've been reading on Shamanism authored by Mircea Eliade. Why Shamanism? The idea that shamans use their drums as a mode of transportaion was enough to spark my interest.

***

“In contrast to the state of affairs in Christianity (at least during its recent history), peoples who profess to be shamanists accord considerable importance to the ecstatic experiences of their shamans; for it is the shamans who, by their trances, cure them, accompany their dead to the ‘Realm of Shades,’ and serve as mediators between them and their gods, celestial or infernal, greater or lesser.”

“This small mystical elite not only directs the community’s religious life but, as it were, guards its ‘soul.’ The shaman is the great specialist in the human soul; he alone ‘sees’ it, for he knows its form and destiny.” –Mircea Eliade, Shamanism, Archaic techniques of ecstasy; page 8

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Wind sei stark

2009-04-08T23:26:00.000-07:00

"Wind is strong" by Jochen Krausser, with music by the Ensemble für Intuitive Musik

(a translation)

Indian summer in 1989, Germans start just in crowds of the east for west – message refugees in Warsaw and Prague, border openings in Hungary – and in the assemblies one protests against electoral forgery and other fraud, the media score on the coming century sensation. During these weeks we begin our shooting to an apparently absolutely old-fashioned film. Three wind turbine farmers speak of her wind turbines and at the same time of themselves, musicians feel intuitively the bicycle farmer motive, dancers recognize that in the mechanics of the wheels human sense is hidden.

A camera assistant asks provocatively what is the topical sense this of our event and can calm down only when the rotary stick is a matter demonstrating together with the co-operating ensemble for intuitive music with a self-tinkered wind turbine on Monday in Leipzig. The ready film creates it in late autumn oddly enough to Upper House to the Dokfilmfestival and harvests there lack of understanding, shaking of the head and refusal. An inclined critic permits the question to himself towards the author what then such a film has to do in his playful harmlessness and where his society-political relevance is hidden. I answer that I exactly cannot say it also, however, anyhow anticipated that it will depend after all understandable mass euphoria and – hysteria soon again more on the singles that these singles must wake one morning and ask themselves who I am without others what I am able to do still who takes me was, and above all what I am worth to myself.‚ wind is strong‘ – maybe a preroad-anticipated cry for help? A wind turbine turns not without headwind. It can be uprooted shaken, and be carried away.

The tar driver cress builds his aerial height wheel against his quälenderHöhenangst. The measurement engineer Schaffer directs his colorful wheel against an animated ear-deafening dirty crossroads and feels free under the pleased and apparently useless rotations of the wings. The painter Sakulowski holds his wheels for self-confident things, which lead her distinct own way of life, counterparts of internal inner conflict explain, and it creates to him internal satisfaction to have released them because of the danger of the decease. Twice seven years have passed since that time. The message of the wind turbines is valid: Wind is strong.

(Jochen Kraußer)

FLOW

2009-04-07T21:51:00.000-07:00

This video was created in AfterEffects CS3 by drumpa. It was screened at Hottie Biscotti for Group 312 films. There was a standing ovation that lasted about three seconds followed by yawns and the clinking of beer bottles. This group is a real kick to hang out with.

Okay, okay, grumpa. . . stop it! They are nice people, I’m not casting any aspersions, and they are hip enough: Maybe a little too hip. It’s the culture. It’s the time we're in, everybody is plugged in 24/7 and in most cases all this information leaves us apathetic and exhausted. Worse yet, we end up indifferent. Everyday we can walk down the street and see people shooting video from cell phones. Images-images-images media (most of it commercial) it’s a good thing \ go ahead, make money / it's bad thing, junk \ it’s an everywhere thing: Mostly what I get to see is thoughtlessness under the brand name of experimentalism. Everybody is a videographer, but not many of the 312 Film Group can remember the enthusiasm, audience and filmmaker involvement at the old Aardvark Cinematheque in Piper’s Alley. The dinky dirty theater (capacity was for 240) showed avant-garde and experimental 16 mm films made by those luminaries who were called “underground” filmmakers and were also working in early video. So when Aardvark started, in the early days, it was a funky anti-commerce thing. Call it idealism if you want, but I’m not suggesting that we should return to the “good old days.” I’m saying it was a pioneering time and enthusiasm about bucking the Hollywood commercial system and their methods of filming was in the air. It’s not the raw talent that’s missing, it’s the enthusiasm that I think is missing when the mere idea is to hurry up and show anything and just slap something together with your laptop five minutes before the screening. Filmmaking meant sweating over a hot moviola, and splicing film to all hours of the night. Well, okay, maybe not sweating. Some of it was intentionally sloppy and shaky. Maybe the “good old days” were not so good as I thought they were, but if you are in for that kind of hand-made torture you measure twice and cut once.

Bottom line:
Eventually the Aardvark went commercial and became a porno house before it closed.

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VIDEOTHERWISE

2009-04-07T17:50:00.000-07:00