Morgan Stewart Says...

[morganstewartsays-blog-blog]

Blog Review for David Leighty

David,

Among the greatest strengths of your blog is its careful balance of objective analysis and personal synthesis. First and foremost, you provide a thoughtful interpretation of what a particular filmmaker has done and why. Any opinion offered alongside it is well-grounded and appropriate, never littered with superlatives.You regard the material with the eye of a critic-- an uncanny achievement. Each post reads as an interested engagement with the avant-garde in all of its manifestations, rather than as the fulfillment of a required homework assignment.

Also admirable is your ability to look beyond what exists on-screen, taking the time to consider social and historical contexts and the relation of one film to others. I was especially impressed with your entries “Descriptions, language and poetry in film” and “Dada/Cubist film”, which dealt with the material in a cohesive, intertextual manner. Your inclusion of referential images I found very helpful as well-- a visual aid to the comparisons drawn.

My only (minor) criticism is in regard to your comments on others’ blogs. Your responses themselves are just as strong as your own blog posts: carefully weighed, respectful, engaging. It’s consistently apparent that you’ve thoroughly read and considered the words of the post you’re commenting on; your responses turn a lone blog entry into a dynamic dialogue. I only wish you had branched out with whom you chose to interact with. Perhaps I missed something, but it appears you’ve only engaged with Alex and Nelson, which is a shame-- I think many students would have benefited from your insight, especially the ones struggling with that balance I initially spoke of, the one of which you’ve mastered.

On a brief and final note, I enjoyed the occasional injection of humor into your analyses; it kept weighty aesthetic concepts light and interesting (your words on Infinity Kisses in particular made me smile). Thanks for the insightful and entertaining blog!

-Morgan

[dlkarl-blog-blog]

Part of the challenge in learning new material, or engaging historical lineage is to connect and relate the ‘new thing’ to your current scope of knowledge. In viewing and discussing new work the best way to deconstruct and/in order to build an understanding is to relate it to movements, works,...

[ubfilmtheory]

I know I’m not the only one who drew comparison of Stan Vanderbeek’s Science Friction to South Park. The film itself was very entertaining and I can only imagine how difficult it must’ve been back in those days to use animation and stop motion. I enjoyed the film a lot but I’m sure theres more...

[morganstewartsays-blog-blog]

I think that "static" feeling you described was also encouraged by the accompanying sound. While early avant-garde films using shape or line to convey the movement of an object in or through space often seemed to choose musical scores, this film included the whiny buzz we associate with technology (especially "older" technology). Even when we caught glimpses of representational forms within the lines, their quick departure, along with the whining soundtrack, never let us forget that this was an exercise in technology.

[morganstewartsays-blog-blog]

Liquid Perception in Avant-Garde Practices

H2O (Ralph Steiner, 1929) I believe it was in Scott McDonald’s article on the eight intersections of the avant-doc that poetic nature films were discussed; H2O immediately brought that to mind. The first portion of the film portrays water quite literally, in all of its manifestations: flowing streams, rushing waterfalls, falling rain. It offers itself as an establishing shot for the more abstract second half of the film, which observes the patterns created by light on water’s surface. At moments the surface reflections appear almost animated, creating the impression of mixed modalities. Reflecting Pool (Bill Viola, 1977-79) Like Fleming’s Waving, Viola’s Reflecting Pool considers liquid perception through the relationship between water and human body. The relationship in each, though, culminates very differently. In Waving, focus is on the body as it exists within water; the water is a condition imposed upon the body, which has in a sense breached it. Viola’s film positions the water itself as the dominant figure instead, and the body as something that interacts with but does not dictate the water’s movement. This sense is achieved by not including any footage of the body disturbing the surface of the water-- only of the figure poised to enter and, later, suddenly emerging back onto land. This editing empowers the water, in a sense, in that it emphasizes it as a body itself. Waving (Ann Marie Fleming, 1987) Fleming takes advantage of water’s ephemeral qualities by using it as a visual aid to the monologue on her grandmother’s death. It creates a parallel between language and image; as she transcends into memory, her body transcends into water on-screen. Fleming’s immersion into water sets her into a state of suspension, where she seems to float somewhere between reality and thought, as well as her own identity and her grandmother’s (“I was just like granny,” she says at one point). The soundtrack and the outfitting choice of loose, billowing dress fabric together create a scene of peaceful contemplation rather than one of panic or intense emotional strife, as if the mediation of the water allows her to think of death serenely. Lost Avenues (Bill Morrison, 1991) Morrison uses chromatic hybridity and the distortion of film stock to defamiliarize the image of a whale, and even more importantly, render its environment ambiguous. The expected blue picked up by the submerged camera unexpectedly switches to a disorienting sepia; we need that natural edit to be included beforehand in order to understand what we’re looking at after the switch. The disturbance of the water by the leaping of the whale simultaneously disturbs the eye as it fills the screen with abstract flashes like something out of a Brakhage film. The juxtaposition of the whale with footage of humans offers for comparison two different modes of interaction with water: submersion versus immersion. Commingled Containers (Stan Brakhage, 1997) The beauty of Brakhage’s film lies in its liquid perception gleaned not from water’s surface but from actually being immersed within. The abstraction of the stream’s image when viewed from underneath its surface amplifies the sense of tranquility created by its flowing water; we focus no longer on water as a familiar body fallen under the gaze of the lens, but rather as a source of rhythmic movement, of softly refracted light. It changes from object to experience. The situation of the camera also makes Commingled Containers a sensual, subjective experience, because of the close relationship created between the camera and the water passing over it.   

[daominhn]

Final Week: Haptic Imagery and Liquid Perception

In the last week of studying Avant-Gardes films and movements, we were presented to two new norms: haptic imagery and liquid perception. According to Laura Mark in her essay “Video haptics and erotics”, haptic perception usually involves with the combination of tactile, kinaesthetic, and proprioceptive fuctions, the way we experience touch both on the surface of and inside our bodies”. It means that through haptic point of view, our bodies becomes one of the character, who can feel, touch and experience all the motion beside our eyes. Likewise, liquid perception is one of three signs of perception-image, which “…marks the transition of the solid to the gaseous, or of the gaseous to the solid. This is where the camera in movement constructs flowing images in long takes continually reframing environments and bodies… and sees images beginning to be organised to compose characters…” Watching the works of some Avant-Gardes film-makers, such as Bill Morrison, Ralph Steiner, Stan Brakhage, Bill Viola, Carolee Schneemann and Ann Marie Fleming, we are able to experience such notions.

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[morganstewartsays-blog-blog]

I wonder how different the film would have been had her object of affection been another person rather than her cat. I do think the oddness of it which you point out is important to her purpose-- we anticipate kissing to take place between two human beings, so here we’re forced to redefine how we consider the act and its meanings. The split-screen format is also a great example of defamiliarization and haptic image; on the left we see things from a comfortable distance, but on the right, we’re brought up against the image, so close that it’s blurred and distorted to the eye, thus altering perception.

[morganstewartsays-blog-blog]

Film in the Digital Age

Science Friction (Stan Vanderbeek, 1959) This underground film is composed of physical collage that lends its images a cut-out, textural quality, stylistically influential on the later Monty Python animations. The rearrangement of images torn from a variety of media sources suggests that Vanderbeek had a social purpose in mind, related to the brainwashing aspect of cold war culture and science. I was reminded of a point made by Lev Manovich-- that modern media is already saturated with so many images, it can sometimes be more effective to revise and recirculate preexisting ones rather than adding to the noise. Vanderbeek’s decision to insert culturally familiar images into a visually playful field suggests that when signifiers are shifted through reappropriation, an image can be used against itself in critique.

Catalog (John Whitney, 1961) This analog video instantly called to mind the line/shape films of artists like Norman McLaren and Harry Smith, only updated with digital technologies. Like McLaren and Smith, Whitney works with the mutation of shape and form in screen-space; unlike them, his studies seem to derive in part from the possibilities of the pixel. In Catalog, line and shape are made up of a collection of individual, colored dots. Because our eye automatically fills in the gaps when they’re arranged close together, the minute en masse is able to form a visual ‘whole’. The effect created is like a wire Lotus flower, whose flexible network of wires can be twisted to change its collective shape. The opening credits work similarly, in that sole letters twist together into a web of Lotus-like lines.

Cheap Imitation (David Rokeby, 2002) In Cheap Imitation, cubism meets computer in the updating of 20th-century painting to a 21st-century aesthetic. Rokeby’s film is a “cheap imitation” of Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, so the two-dimensional conveyance of bodily movement is also at the heart of his project, though explored through a new medium. The digital “shattering” of Nude Descending allows Rokeby to take Duchamp’s concept a step further by syncing its facets’ movement to the actual movement of the viewer, thus reanimating Duchamp’s 2-D interpretation of animation. The Street of Crocodiles (Quay brothers, 1986) This film, the brothers’ best known, provides above all a wonderful haptic display. The dark, eerie puppets brought to life share the spotlight with the richly constructed space they move through, thick with dust, rust, and shadows. The cluttered confusion of the space is amplified by the strategic placement of reflective surfaces (mirrors, glass panels) and odd camera angles, which together cultivate a tone of mysteriousness/otherworldliness. The use of miniatures also seemed interesting to me, especially in terms of two relationships: the puppets to the old man who brings them to life with a spit into a kinetoscope, and the puppet-world to real post-industrial urbanity. In both cases, using animated miniatures allows the brothers Quay to creatively explore (and possibly critique) the consequences of modernity.

Scan Processor Studies (Woody Vasulka & Brian O’Reilly, 1973, 2009) If we’re talking about the changing forms of film at the hands of technology, Scan Processor Studies is like a visual journey through its history, not to mention a great resource for connecting the dots in our class material. Not only does this film contain within it the technologies of two different eras, but its abstract style refers to the early “shape” films exploring the movement of line on camera, like Len Lye’s Free Radicals. The first portion of Scan Processor Studies-- footage from a 70s scan processor-- also uses white line to animate black space, though in a more complex way, thanks to technologies unavailable to Lye. The artisanal quality of early filmmakers’ handwork is replaced here with processor-generated lines, which through varied spacing together create sophisticated, contoured shapes. Twice removed from the shape films of the first half of the 21st century is the computer-manipulated footage seen in the second half of Scan Professor Studies, where the use of digital technology allows for solid three-dimensional shape to be created.

Watch (David Rokeby, 1995/2003) Watch examines the interaction between object and space, as well as the relationship between movement and stillness. By separating through a split-screen objects active in a field and ones remaining static, the viewer is made more aware of the void between each. The active group, for instance, keeps our eye in constant motion trying to follow various figures around the screen. It encapsulates the bustle of bodies and traffic generally associated with the city. What becomes even more visually interesting, though, is oddly the inactive, which is what the eye tends to gloss over in real time. Seeing the number of still objects within the bustle-- not only inanimate things, but also unmoving human bodies-- makes the viewer startlingly aware of the quietude coexisting with but often cloaked by an environment’s dynamism. Watch exemplifies the emerging possibilities given to filmmaking through technology; Rokeby’s project wouldn’t have been possible without the digital tools at his disposal.

[morganstewartsays-blog-blog]

Black and White Screens, (Ir)rational Montage, and Gender

A Movie (Bruce Conner, 1958) Conner, like other Flux artists, seems to have an interest in the filmic physicality of text-- the way it presents itself on screen. Here, it is used on intertitles in order to break up A Movie into segments, or even mini-films of sorts. The repetition of frames with “The End” throughout, along with “Movie” (sometimes upside down) playfully challenges the way in which we use conventionally and unquestionably use language. The technology-centric images of the film aim to do the same, representing what are considered some of civilization’s most progressive feats in stages of destruction: the car crashing, the bridge collapsing, the bomb exploding. Conner arranges his montage and soundtrack with careful irony, most notable when the horn-heavy, triumphant music associated with patriotism is laid over sequences of the dead.

Intervals (Peter Greenaway, 1969) Intervals seems to deal with the relation between urban environment and those who inhabit it. An opening montage of the street locations upon which the film is to structure itself reads like a character list, allowing us to consider what space is without occupancy-- especially interesting because, though devoid of human bodies, the selected environments are all still heavily marked by the presence urban life. Long shots show us how the spaces are omnipresent while figures come and go; as a viewer, we are made to know the space better than the faceless occupant. The film’s name correlates with the temporal intervals the spaces are shot at, which, along with the staccato clicking sort of sound throughout, allows Greenaway to portray the spaces as he does.

Scar Tissue (Su Friedrich, 1979) Similarly to Intervals, Scar Tissue deals in themes of modern urbanity, though it does so through an apparently feminist scope. Here, it is not the environment that is important but the occupants, who have been divided very distinctly by their gender. Figures are never shown in their entirety, but rather through identifying body parts: the heeled feet and bare ankles of women, and the girthy midsections of businessmen, hands dangling near their belts. The women’s feet move quickly and nervously, the men stand confidently in groups. Black frames operate in between to create impression rather than narrative, and to encourage this sense of gender division. Obviously a commentary on gender roles can be assumed here, but there’s also a potentially sexual dimension. This is most pertinent through the montage of a woman running with the mid-section of a few standing men, perhaps suggestive of the phallus as something threatening. Also telling is the sole image of a woman’s face (no men are ever related to by the camera/Friedrich in such a way). She watches the street timidly from around a corner; when she notices the camera, she looks alarmed, angry and frightened, and disappears. To me, this was probably the most important moment in the film, because it presents women as unfairly posited by society as the demure and submissive of the two sexes--the bearers of social scar tissue.         Blue (Derek Jarman, 1993) This film, visually, is an hour-long confrontation with blue. From the moment the credits end, the viewer is surrounded, immersed in an unchanging screen whose color doesn’t even waver in its shade. Despite this, what’s astounding still is the the way our relation to the blue can be so altered through the attachment of informing sources-- in this case, sound and text. “In the pandemonium of image, I present you with the universal blue...infinite possibility becoming tangible”, (one of) the narrating voices says. For Jarman’s purposes-- representing and working through AIDS and his resulting blindness-- blue is both nothing and everything. To him (and to us, by his filmic conveyance), blue is “dawn’s first light,” it is the holy sound of a chorus, it is the dilation of the eyes with nightshade, it is a woman sobbing in the rain, it is the nightmarish fear of decline. It is intimate, and its usage in Blue ultimately reveals that to lose one’s sight is not to lose one’s vision.

[morganstewartsays-blog-blog]

1960s Counter-cinema

Entrance to Exit (George Brecht, 1965) Again, I think this film could be considered an example of paracinema. It eliminates the screen as a space for projected image and instead posits it as a surface over which shadow can pass. At the ‘entrance’ of the film, the screen remains plain white; then, slowly, a shadow creeps along the right-hand edge of the screen, so faint that at first it’s hard to discern whether or not it’s part of the film. After edging its way left, it eventually it overpowers the white and casts the screen into complete shadow; the word ‘exit’ appears. Like Word Film, Entrance to Exit plays with the concepts behind words and how they can be interpreted visually. Here, Brecht redirects language, applying words that have a connotation of space to a context of duration.

Word Movie (Paul Sharits, 1966) Fluxists are known for an interdisciplinary approach to art, and in this instance Sharits is merging the lingual with the auditory with the visual. The words provided to us both on screen and on the soundtrack are all medical: names of body parts and surgical tools, verbs with surgical implications. When we come across these words in a medical textbook or from a doctor’s mouth, they seem clinical, unthreatening, even sterile. Word Movie inverts their on-page static nature by presenting them as flickering, dissolving objects. Rather than having ‘safe’ contextual words surrounding them, as we would encounter in a textual paragraph, Sharits forces us to experience them without a buffer. One after another they appear, and with the addition of two echoey voices monotonously reading medical texts, the bombardment of medical language-- language of the ill-- comes across as threatening. As demonstrated by Word Movie, artistic disciplines have more of fluid boundaries than formalists claim, and by exploring them we can open up new channels for their use.

Artype (George Maciunas, 1966) This film is similar to The Flicker in its stroboscopic nature, but with the addition of shape that complexifies itself as the film goes on. First, we’re confronted with a simple, two-dimensional white circle pulsing on a black background. Though we know we’re looking at a flat plane, the screen is still dynamic with its flashing and inversion of colors (the white circle on black soon flashes to a black one on white). The circle then multiplies itself until the screen is filled not with objects, but with a singular pattern. There’s a graphicness to it that, like Talis, reminds me of Norman McLaren’s Synchromie. Maciunas intent seems to be purely optical-- a presentation of shape and line as objects of motion.

The Flicker (Tony Conrad, 1966) Conrad’s paracinematic work is a repetition of two alternating black and white frames, utterly devoid of imagery, narrative, or any other of the various tropes used in traditional filmmaking (a term not to limit itself to mainstream filmmaking, but also some of the avant-garde as well). The Flicker’s stroboscopic effect created by the harsh visual contrast of white to black is purely optical, and seems to operate as a method of entrancement. Without any suggestion of space existing within the screen, the eye has nothing to focus on and begins to stare almost blankly, transfixed by the quasi-hallucinatory flickering of light and non-light. I think the pleasant opening credits, with its voluminous lettering and inviting musical score, provided a jarring impact with the silence and blankness proceeding it. Conrad’s purpose seems lie in challenging established definitions of film along with the procedures for displaying it. Maxwell’s Demon (Hollis Frampton, 1968) Like Len Lye, Frampton seems to have an interest in science and its potential interactions with art. Where Lye’s Tusalava borrows images from cellular biology, Frampton transfers physics from the theoretical realm to an aesthetic one. The hypothetical illustration of Maxwell’s demon involves a being that sets separated molecules into motion by opening a door that allows them to flow into each other’s space. Perhaps the man in the workout video clips is a representation of Maxwell’s demon, and his physical movements relate to the kinetics dealt with in the theory. The workout sequence is spliced with two types of frames: various solid-colored ones, and an image of an ocean also suffused with unnatural color. The movement of water is suggestive of a flow, which is what particles do in the theory. As the film progresses, the man becomes more active and the ocean sequences become more frequent, implying an overall increase of motion.

Tails (Paul Sharits, 1976) Vaguely reminiscent to me of Brakhage’s Mothlight, formal images are made impressionistic through rapid frame velocity. In Tails, frames on a film strip appear as uninterpretable shapes rather than objects (with the exception of a girl’s face, shot in close-up). As the kino eye passes down the length of the strip, the frames blend into a smear of color punctuated by the occasional light flare. The visual presence of the film sprockets on each side of the strip frame and provide structure to the onscreen images and draw our attention to the physicality of the film stock not only as an instrument of recording, but as an aesthetic tool in itself (as does the inclusion of the end of each strip, demarcating ends and beginnings). The white and yellow light shining through the sprockets along with the black silhouette between them create a graphic frame that calls to mind the moving squares of McLaren’s Synchromie.

Wavelength For Those Who Don’t Have the Time (Michael Snow, 2003) WFTWDHT is Snow’s clever revisitation of his 1967 film Wavelength. Wavelength concerns itself with form, and the way space is presented through cinematic devices like the long-shot and the zoom. It holds an integrity of shape and mood, as Michael O’Pray puts it. Wavelength For Those Who Don’t Have Time is a condensation of the original through the superimposition of its images-- interesting because all of the images take place within one room. The resulting effect is not of different spaces existing at once, but different temporalities. In opposition to narrative cinema, it is not the people inhabiting space that are of importance, but solely the space and its relation to the camera. For instance, the close- up of the door and the room in its entirety can be considered simultaneously as coexisting objects, rather than the door simply being an individual part of the larger room.

[ubfilmtheory]

Meshes of the Afternoon is short experimental film directed by Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid. This film reminded me of a psychological horror film. Through out the film there are numerous symbolic images such as the women holding the flower, a key falling and mysterious women who has a mirror...

[morganstewartsays-blog-blog]

I agree that Meshes in the Afternoon is tied to distress of the mind-- the “psychological horror” of uncertainty. The image of the knife, which reappears cyclically throughout the film, seems to symbolize mistrust, danger, paranoia. The character (played by Deren herself) is trapped in a nightmare of sorts, haunted by a deathly hooded figure whom she can never quite catch up to. I took the mirrored face as perhaps a metaphor for the way the woman’s dream and her reality eventually mirror each other.

[morganstewartsays-blog-blog]

American Avant-Garde

A Study in Choreography for Camera (Maya Deren, 1945) Deren’s purpose is revealed in her title: the examination of movement, both organic (the human form) and technical (the film camera). Though McLaren’s Pas de Deux operates with a similar intention, I found their different choices in setting fascinating. McLaren films in a highly controlled environment, where he can provide a precise lighting effect, one of drama and theatrics. Deren, on the other hand, relies on natural lighting, in an outdoor setting oblivious to her filming. Instead of the structure of McLaren’s ballet, Deren’s sole dancer moves fluidly, as if moving because he can. Deren’s camera not only records his movement but also explores the camera’s own kinetic possibilities as she plays with panning speeds and angles of shooting.        Fireworks (Kenneth Anger, 1947) From the examples of quasi-narrative experimental film that we’ve viewed thus far (as opposed to the utterly abstract ‘shape’ film like Richter’s Rhythmus 21 or McLaren’s Synchromie), it’s apparent that a surreal arrangement of images and a black-and-white format lend themselves well in creating an impression both dreamlike and alluringly dramatic. Fireworks is no exception in its convolution of the waking world and the dreaming one. By beginning and ending the scene in the same young man’s bed, it becomes uncertain whether his venture to the street really occurs or exists only in his slumbering mind. The motif of light connecting fireworks, homoeroticism and violence is played up by the absence of color; by converting everything to black and white, the visual contrast between shadow and light is heightened. Film No. 3: Interwoven (Harry Smith, 1949) This film mimics synesthesia in its crossing of music with color and shape; rather than simply co-existing to comprise the film, the movement of the shapes actually seem to be dictated by the direction of the music. It’s like the shapes are dancing, and slow down, speed up or change directions depending on what the musicians do. The big-band sound ‘produces’ equally energetic shapes, whose bold colors and pronounced forms are kept playful (instead of becoming intimidating) by a watercolor texture and relaxed manner of moving. Reflections on Black (Stan Brakhage, 1955) Similar to the Hitchcock opening credits we viewed in class, Reflections on Black uses abstract sound and image that, while not directly pertaining to the proceeding narrative, still establishes its tone and mood. The black -and-white grid behind the titles is striking and graphic, and the staccato soundtrack, like gunshots or fireworks popping, evokes a sense of intensity or maybe even danger. What’s most notable though is the intercut of black slides with the titles/grid/soundtrack; it creates unsettling breaks in procession that jar the eye. Use of contrapuntal sound continues throughout the film and encourages a feeling of anxiety when added to such shadowed, moody scenes: the staccato popping; high-pitched whining; mouth-whistling with no apparent source. The extreme shadows created by black-and-white further aggravate our anxiety, especially at moments when most of the screen is filled with black and we feel as if we ourselves have suddenly plunged into the dark. Black Ice (Stan Brakhage, 1994) Despite its silence, Black Ice can be considered a form of visual music. Brakhage does, after all, refer to himself in the credits as its composer and to printer Sam Bush as the “visual musician.” Colors like individual instruments interact cooperatively, contributing their unique notes to create an entire composition. I think a soundtrack would actually be extraneous here, as the colors speak for themselves. The flash of the colors, their movement and their different sizes give the effect that the viewer is moving through three-dimensional space, colors flickering toward him and disappearing as he passes them. Because of the colors’ formlessness and fleeting presence onscreen, it also struck me as something one might envision when shutting one’s eyes and trying to envision color: the colors of the unconscious. Terra Incognita (Stephanie Maxwell, 2001) Terra Incognita is almost like a painting come to life, of whose daubs of color have suddenly been granted the ability to move at will. The ‘daubs’ seem to pulse along with a spliced soundtrack, which at times sounds like television static. Streaks of color ‘paint’ and then erase themselves, as if trying to get the composition just right. The screen is not a flat canvas, however-- Maxwell uses image placement to manipulate space, so the eye can never be sure whether it’s viewing something 2- or 3-D. Sometimes white lines break up space into multiple planes; in other moments, the camera lens itself looks splashed with paint, while other colors move in the distance.

[inbody-blog-for-film-theory-blog]

“Pas de Deux” was a fascinating piece. The dancers drifting in and out of copies of themselves made the film feel very much like a dream, and the flow and rhythm of the piece was very well done. The techniques used to make this film are still a complete mystery to me. While this may be insulting to the filmmaker or reductory to the work, I’d say that this film would make a great opening credit sequence for a feature film.

[morganstewartsays-blog-blog]

After watching those Hitchcock opening credits whose abstract designs are stylistically reminiscent of certain avant-garde filmmakers (Psycho/Richter, Vertigo/Fischinger, North by Northwest/Eggeling), your last remark seems totally appropriate. Even though the narrative-driven feature film sometimes operates under different motives and intentions than the avant-garde one, the experimentalism of the latter still seems to provoke the interest of the former. Even though the feature filmmaker may not wish to accomplish entirely the same aims that the avant-gardist achieves through abstraction, the flexibility of an opening sequence still allows him an opportunity for visual or metaphorical exploration that perhaps wouldn’t make sense incorporated into the film elsewhere.

[morganstewartsays-blog-blog]

Film Theory: The British Avant-Garde

Tusalava (Len Lye, 1929) As we’ve already seen in other avant-garde films of the early 20s, Tusalava at first presents a spread of assorted 2-D shapes in motion across the screen, whose forms seemingly represent nothing greater than themselves. Lye’s here are more organic than most others we’ve seen and arranged neatly into vertical lines. Also unexpected is the slow pace of the forms’ upward trajectory, which prolongs the process of the forms’ evolution and misleads our (non-?)expectations as viewers. As the forms become (or more appropriately, grow) increasingly complex, the viewer’s attention heightens, not unlike the way it would as a narrative film unfolds. The product of the evolution is two alien-like forms whose ‘biological’ development is emphasized through a faster tempo in movement. Overall, Tusalava visually enriches the term ‘animation’ and plays with the relationship between the abstract and formal.

A Color Box (Len Lye, 1935) Despite the very abstract nature of A Color Box, it still manages to be referential, even intertextual, in a way much of Lye’s body seems to. Where the evolving images of Tusalava pointed to cellular biology, A Color Box extends itself to the ancient art of the Aborigines, whose colored cave drawings are some of the earliest examples of art in existence-- in a way, an ironic juxtaposition to the technological advancements of art exemplified by 20th-century film. In lieu of developing coherent visual forms, Lye focuses on the power of color itself, especially in its ability to ‘move’ independently. Streaked across the screen and pulsing alongside a lively musical score, the imprecise images of A Color Box seemed almost ahead of their time, like a prophecy of Rothko.

Free Radicals (Len Lye, 1958) Lye gets physical with his experimentation here, choosing to actually scratch his linear images into the emulsion for a surprisingly powerful, chalk-like effect. With all frills cut away, the viewer is confronted with nothing but line and its movement. In consideration of Lye’s interest with animal biology, the sharpness of a single white line jumping vertically across a black screen instantly called to mind the linear fluctuations of a heart monitor. As the film goes on, the addition of tribal music seems to send the line into frenzy, so that it defies its vertical placement and freely writhes across the screen with its brothers and sisters at will. Free Radicals, similar to A Color Box, recalls the primitivity at the heart of art, regardless of its technological evolutions.

Synchromy No. 4: Escape (Mary Ellen Bute, 1937) Similar to Lye and McLaren, Bute explores the manipulations and potential implications of form in space, sending colorful shapes into motion with the guiding (but never forceful) hand of music. Often in these films, the shapes coexisting within a frame have a relationship to one another, whether it be through similarity/contrast in appearance or through physical interaction. In Escape, Bute sets up the relationship as a negative one, where an orange triangle finds itself trapped by black bars. By placing shapes at such specific odds with one another, their relationship is cultivated and they are given quasi-identities and motivations (the triangle wishes to escape, the bars wish to contain), an abstract narrative is developed, similar to Lye’s Tusalava. Bute’s treatment of space stands out as well, in her playful decision to use special affects that contrast with the animation of the foregrounded shapes.

Pas de Deux (Norman McLaren, 1968) This film stands alone in its abstraction of a cognitively established, very recognizable form: the human body. The art of dance already involves a metaphorical, unordinary use of the body, but the body as a formal vehicle always remains visually understandable. In Pas de Deux, however, McLaren goes one step further by semi-distorting the realistic form using multiple exposure. Because the dancers’ bodies retain most of their realism, the emotion of their performance is still preserved; the unnatural multiple exposures act almost as an extension of their movement through space. The absence of color and the intense chiarascuro places dramatic emphasis on the forms of the dancers and at moments isolates body parts as their own peculiar forms (an effect also created in Fischinger’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor).

Synchromie (Norman McLaren, 1971) The graphic color-blocking of McLaren’s images coupled with a digitalized musical score allows for a precise synchronization to occur; with every glitchy sound emitted, the bands of rich color onscreen would stutter themselves. The simple, striated visuals-- slightly reminiscent of running film strips-- multiply and become more complex over the course of the film: the lone blue “film strip” on a blue background reproduces and then begins to diverge in hue, until we’re at last faced with many strips in an assortment of colors, the opposite of where we began. Overall, the rather robotic image-and-sound correlation displayed by Synchromie, along with its color choice, creates a sense of modernity.

[kt-watches]

WELL..remember how I mentioned Fantasia in the last review? Well this next short piece coincidentally turned out to be from Fantasia. Now if you go through my past few most recent posts, you’ll notice that the common topic is abstract films. So, does this one fit with the others? I believe so. It...

[morganstewartsays-blog-blog]

Where you point out that we’re “deprived full vision of the humans” -- I think this film excerpt and McLaren’s Pas De Deux relate in that way. There’s an interesting method of defamiliarization at play in both, where the human form is made partially foreign through a manipulation of variables: light, shadow, movement, color, etc. It creates a sort of dual perception, in which on one hand we understand a familiar form to be performing a known task, and on another we are engaged with purely aesthetic and abstract visuals.

[morganstewartsays-blog-blog]

Film Theory: Early Abstract Film

Rhythmus 21 (Hans Richter, 1921) As suggested by the title, Richter’s Rhythmus 21 manipulates the movement of shape (and the tempo thereof) in order to create a rhythm coinciding with a composition by Liszt. It’s fascinating to see the difference in effect between abstract art films using colored shapes and those that stick with black and white. Because of the individual dialectics within the spectrum of color as well as its sheer number of assorted hues, it 1) can make conveying certain emotions easier and 2) enhances the “spectacle” aspect. The appeal of black and white-- demonstrated by Rhythmus 21-- is the concentration of impact into a singular palette while still allowing for variances of tone, which distinguishes shapes from one another but not mutually excluding them from having a visual relationship. The absence of color is also one less element for a viewer’s eyes to contend with, making his focus purely on form and its movement through space. Lightplay: Opus I (Walther Ruttmann, 1921) I found it interesting that Ruttmann, whose city symphonies (in both film and audio formats) we have already encountered, could also accomplish a work so unspecific to human existence. As the city symphony is the boiling down of daily urban life into its most representative shots or moments, an abstract-image film like Opus I could be considered an even further reduction of familiar, proper forms into the basic shapes that constitute them. In fact, at moments his simple, colored subjects do bear a resemblance to recognizable objects: the area of yellow concentrated at the top of the frame and sweeping back and forth like a spotlight, or the reddish ‘sun’ hovering over a fuzzy-edged white blob that is slightly evocative of foaming surf. Before the mind can decidedly classify the shape to be such, however, the shapes are already morphing into something else that forces the audiencial eye to contemplate the screen alternatively. Diagonal Symphony (Viking Eggeling, 1924) Rather than manipulating geometric shapes whose forms are confined within inflexible borders, Eggeling creates movement with lines whose fluidity lends itself well to the project in that they can not only move through space, but distort their own entities. While in the case of solid shapes the eye tends to linger, lines instead draw it from one end to another. When the lines are ‘alive,’ then the gaze is constantly in motion. Though circles have closed borders, their curved circuits are still easy on the eye and thus also fit well into the Diagonal Symphony. Ghosts Before Breakfast (Hans Richter, 1928) Though Vormittagspuk (or, Ghosts Before Breakfast) is more Dada in its random collection of often startling visual impressions, the recurrence of floating bowler hats reminded me of the surrealist painting “The Son of a Man” by Rene Magritte. Richter seems to hold a fascination with manmade things as they exist separate from man, as throughout the film he gives them a life of their own: the dancing hats, the stop-animation bow tie, the spinning gun, the unaided filling of a tea cup. By animating the inanimate, Richter makes objects as much characters as the people he shoots. As with much of Dada cinema, Ghosts Before Breakfast rejoices in its own whimsicality and nonsensical visual tricks. Optical Poem (Oscar Fischinger, 1938) Though it doesn’t seem to play a significant role in the philosophy or purpose of the “Optical Poem,” I found Fischinger’s use of hand-cut paper shapes as opposed to animated ones unique in its inclusion of a third art form, physical paper art, to the already established interplay of film and music. Most of the time it was impossible to tell that the shapes occupied physical space because of their two-dimensionality, with the exception of a few moments when Fischinger moved them backward from the camera and their changing location minutely altered the reflection of surface light. Given the exploration of shape and form (Fischinger called it a “scientific experiment to convey mental images in visual form”), it would have been interesting to see the optical and spacial effect of some 3-D paper shapes thrown into the mix. Another aspect of “Optical Poem” that stood out was the occasional placement of the colored forms, already forming visual patterns of their own through variation in size and arrangement, over a background patterned with flat, 2-D shapes of its own. Instead of overwhelming the eye, it creates a pleasing illusion of the extension of space. Toccata and Fugue in D Minor (Oscar Fischinger & J.S. Bach, 1940) As a child I watched Fantasia a countless number of times, over and over again finding myself entranced not so much by the scenes containing narrative but by the filmic symphony’s swirling colors and the bold music that accompanied them. Now as a student watching with a more educated eye, I can better appreciate and admire the thoughtful synchronicity of the visual with the aural -- the synesthesia that initially (though ignorantly) held me enraptured in my youth. In the scene featuring a composition by Bach, “Toccata and Fugue in D Minor,” the marriage of image and sound is perfected through chromatic stylization and shadow play echoing the drama of the orchestra. Though actual performers with their instruments are shown on screen, the line between reality and animation is blurred by intensely colored lights in contrast with the silhouetted, semi-surreal figures of the musicians. The scene transitions into the abstract animation of a sky whose colors change to reflect the mood and movement of Bach’s piece: swirling red and black as the symphony darkens, Rococo and light-streaked when the blaring horns become triumphant. Finally we are left with the image of the conductor’s figurative outline in real space, silhouetted against such a striking red that, in a way, qualifies color as an instrument in the piece itself.

[ubfilmtheory]

Entr’Acte is a very interesting short film film. It uses various film techniques such as superimposing and slow-motion to create a very unique feel. What I enjoyed most was the humor that was involved, from a slow motion mob running forward to a scene of ballerina with a fake beard. Whoever the...

[morganstewartsays-blog-blog]

The lighting in Un Chien Andalou (and other films for that matter, like La Coquette et le Clergyman) also seemed Hitchcock-worthy to me; I wonder whether he took direct inspiration from these early avant-gardes or if the correlation is simply an inescapable result of unconscious influence. Regardless, the dark, ominous mood culminated by such extreme light/shadow lends itself nicely in both cases.

[morganstewartsays-blog-blog]

Surrealist & Dada Films

La Retour a la Raison (Man Ray, 1923) After a lifetime of Hollywood conditioning, I’m finding it difficult to approach and consider these Dada films, I think because of a cognitive expectation (a demand, almost) for a sensical ordering of images. I’m sure this is a similar experience of many viewers, 20th-century and turn-of-the-century alike -- and while I haven’t done the historical research yet to confirm or deny, I assume that Man Ray and the other Dadaists intended to challenge and destroy such an established, consumerist reaction to art. La Retour a la Raison is a mere two minutes long, but packed into its limited screen time is a barrage of arresting sequences devised not to soothe the eye, but to assault. The most noteworthy element of this film I found to be its exploration of spacial planes: two-dimensional shape versus three-dimensional form.The black-and-white format lent itself well in that aspect with its placement of emphasis on texture. Ballet Mecanique (Fernand Leger & Dudley Murphy, 1924) Like Man Ray, Leger and Murphy utilize surreal montage as a tool for confusing and alluring the senses. Despite the film’s title, no ballet imagery is included, at least not in its anticipated form of willowy, leotard-clad dancers. Instead what is created is a riff on ballet’s movement -- not the fluidity seen in figures gliding across a stage, but the mechanics of it, the clockwork of bodies’ discipline. Through the repetition of absurdist sequences and especially as a result of the ‘mechanical’ score, the classicism of high-brow ballet is catapulted head-first into the modernism of technology. Entr’acte (Rene Clair, 1924) Two different aspects of this film surprised me. The first was that, like Balle Mecanique, the art of dance was considered thematically. Unlike Leger and Murphy’s film, however, Clair used realistic images of a twirling ballerina, but shot from underneath the floor as a way of defamiliarizing her form. In this angle, the toe shoes’ satiny texture is highlighted flatteringly, only to be juxtaposed later with a straight shot of the figure in harsh chiarascuro worthy of Hitchcock’s Psycho. A visual parallel is created by a bag blowing among the rooftops, ‘dancing’, as it were. The second surprising moment in Entr’acte was the featured image of a chessboard, also suggested in La Coquille et le Clergyman by a dance floor. Each film placed upon them unexpected objects (a city street and waltzing partygoers, respectively), perhaps to imagine these things as pawns, or perhaps just to reflect the game-like nature of surrealism. La Coquille et le Clergyman (Germaine Dulac, 1928) Considered the first exploration of surrealism on film, La Coquille et le Clergyman incorporates narrative but as a subversion lending itself to Dulac’s mind-altering purposes. Through the loose tale of a priest lusting after an officer’s wife (bizarre in itself), visual metaphors are played with as an affectation of perception. The perception of how figures move through space seemed of particular interest to Dulac, who frequently sped up or slowed down running characters. There also seemed to be influence from Melies’ early cinema-of-attractions works in which a magician performed tricks for the viewer; in this case, filmmaker behaves as magician with editing tricks like the sudden appearance of flames superimposed onto the fallen seashell bra. L’Etoile de Mer (Man Ray, 1928) I find it appropriate that even a week after screening Man Ray’s film, the same fever-dreamlike experience is created upon confronting my notes; it’s like the abstract quality of the montage allows for one’s memory to continue splicing and reconfiguring its images residually, a case that is not found after viewing film with linear narrative. In L’Etoile de Mer, some sort of diffusion filter is applied to the camera lens to give a soft blur to shots of a strolling couple, creating a sense of recollecting a distant and slightly fuzzy memory. Poetic intertitles about the beauty of woman appear to be written in chalk, giving the text a soft and imprecise appearance itself. The symbolism of the starfish is beyond my grasp, though I’d like to think that, following the aesthetic of Dadaism, it’s meant that way -- as a meaningless object that in a dream seems to be everything. Un Chien Andalou (Louis Bunuel & Salvador Dali, 1929) Bunuel and Dali don’t shy away from graphic imagery here, but rather, create a space within montage for it as a conveyor of the absurd, the twisted, the undesired. The infamous depiction of a razor slicing through an eyeball struck me as one of the most important images within all six of these surrealist films because it can be taken as a metaphor for the intents of Dada: shock or assault to visual perception, often in a way that is disconcerting; in the film’s case, an eye is literally opened. Also of apparent interest to the filmmakers is the unreliability or fleetingness of visual reality, revealed in the turn of one object (the hair of a man’s armpit) into a similar-looking yet completely unrelated one (a beached sea urchin).

[dlkarl-blog-blog]

Manhatta (1921)

Manhatta is an example of a city symphony, though the visual exploration of a city in this film has elements that seem unusual. Many of the shots in this film follow the view aesthetic; a still camera takes in the activity of a particular or action. This approach highlights...

[morganstewartsays-blog-blog]

I’m really interested in that connection you make between early avant-garde practices and those of today. Not unlike your reference to Flickr videos and “Reconstructing the Truth” in relation to Man With a Movie Camera, I noticed parallels between Ruttmann’s sound-only city symphony and some 21st-century pieces I once viewed in an experimental photography course here at UB. I think it’s important to recognize that, though our own context as viewers and/or filmmakers differs from Vertov’s and Ruttmann’s and the like, their work continually enters into a conversation with ours, sometimes without our knowledge.