#experimenta 2015

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CONTEXT: Jenny Brady, Bone

Sarah Kane, Blasted

“Sitting through Blasted is a little like having your face rammed into an overflowing ash tray, just for starters, and then having your whole head held down in a bucket of offal.” —Extract from review of Blasted by Paul Taylor in The Independent, 1995

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Some thoughts on Mike Kuchar via review of a recent Berlin screening at NYU Local. Rat Nest screened as part of Girls at Play. 

Mike Kuchar is a glowing example of how filmmakers do not necessarily need to adapt to the technology of today in order to remain successful and productive. Kuchar proudly asserted that he does not own a computer, and instead edits his films using a machine called MacroSystem. As the screenings proceeded, some films would be in the incorrect format, causing Kuchar to apologize sheepishly and scurry up to tell the projectionist to correct the error. He returned quickly after realizing the projector was automatic and there was no projectionist—we would just have to see bodies that were a little wider than usual.

Oh, and did we see bodies. The series of shorts, prefaced by a short documentary on the brothers by Rosa von Praunheim, indicate a clear departure from the sci-fi-inspired parody of his earlier films with George. However, they are certainly still silly and campy. Now, his subjects mainly consist of young, hunky California surfer boys with personalities reminiscent of Ethan Kraft from Lizzie McGuire waxing poetically about their own existence. Shot with a camcorder and featuring Powerpoint-esque scene transitions and an occasional splash of Comic Sans, these delightfully odd and mostly-male character studies focus more on the physical form than any narrative arc. Visual highlights included a guy insisting he’ll be a better person while philosophically holding a coffee cup, a nude man painted messily with black streaks roaming around a living room like a feral animal interspersed with trippy fractal patterns, and a ten-minute sequence of a sculpted guy with long blonde hair and clothes much too small for him conducting janitorial work (and no, that’s not a euphemism—or is it?).

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Two interviews with Aura Satz on her work Chromatic Aberration, commissioned for The Gallery at Tyneside Cinema, Newcastle-upon-Tyne. The first above with Northern Stars and the second on the George Eastman Museum (formerly George Eastman House) blog, with excerpt below. 

Ryan Conrath: How did you become interested in color?

Aura Satz: My interest in color followed on from a body of works I made about sound and sound technologies. I have always been fascinated by the inherent vibratory and unsettling qualities of sound that make it unwieldy to write or encode. There is a sense of approximation or loss of authenticity, an inevitable interference of noise and distortion. Looking closely at color made me realize how inherently unstable it is. Colors will inexorably fade, dissolve, and degrade, which makes it impossible to fully systematize or standardize. Color is highly unreliable and subjective on the level of perception; it is difficult to translate effectively into language or describe with any precision. Color has often been accused of being distracting, disruptive, garish, child-like or feminine. In working with forms of notation, transcription and reproduction, I am drawn to those points at which sound or color reveal an intrinsic resistance to codification.

I am also very much committed to revisiting the undervalued (and mostly underpaid) contribution of women to the history of labor and technology. It was through this research that I came across the women who hand-colored and hand-stenciled early color films at the turn of the century. This in turn led me to explore the history of Natalie Kalmus. She was the color consultant for Technicolor (and wife of Technicolor inventor Herbert Kalmus), and worked on most of the classic films we associate with hyper-saturated Technicolor. She also wrote about composing color scores for narrative films, much like a piece of music. Sadly, none of her scores survive, but this concept of a “color score” really appealed to me. Intriguingly, the Bell & Howell color-correction machine used punched paper tape to encode the color sequence, much like the perforated paper familiar from pianolas or the punched cards of early computers. I have made works featuring both of these and found the idea of color data stored in punched tape highly resonant with a musical score, and tangentially connected to earlier inventions such as Rimington or Wilfred’s Color Organs.

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CONTEXT: Jenna Collins, Someone Who Isn’t Me

“I was an editor before concentrating on my own stuff and I am massively into the work of Thelma Schoonmaker and her work with Scorsese. When I began concentrating on my own stuff, which is not in anyway aiming at Hollywood narrative Cinema (although I do have plenty of explosions and dead bodies), I felt that I had to play down the editing, it seemed underhand to manipulate, tease, threaten, persuade and all those other things editing can do. The work of Elizabeth Price, particularly User Group Disco, completely proved what a mistake that was. In it the editing becomes a thing in itself, a form of communication that seems to come from conversational as well as musical impulses. It is also concerned particularly with digital video rather than film where the surface/ground of the image, what it is made of is more unstable or ambiguous, at the very least it doesn't pre-exist the image in the way that a roll of film does, it is created in the render. 

I really enjoyed the introduction of The Sharpest Point, animation at the end of cinema', where Steve Reinke thinks through some of these things (like his work also), and there is actually quite a lot of animation going on in Someone Who Isn't me; the sun, the text, and the image of the ocean which is taken from Google Earth, an image which starts of lens based from the satellite but by the time you get to travelling over the surface of the ocean, or sitting underneath it you are dealing with an algorithm that is being produced by your presence.

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CONTEXT: David Blandy (and Larry Achiampong), Finding Fanon

“The montage sequence from the conspiracy thriller starring Warren Beatty The Parallax View (1974) by Alan J. Pakula. Nice commentary on the sequence here.

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A group of poems by Joanna Margaret Paul which was given to Rachel Shearer as inspiration for her film, which incidentally lends itself to the Experimenta programme title 'I am an open window'.

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CONTEXT: Yu Araki, Angelo Lives

Press release and installation shot of Angelo Lives at The Container, Tokyo. 

“More than all, Angelo Lives demonstrates the artist’s fixation with the way he sees his environment and the connections he forges in his head, the way an artist works (highlighted in the studio scene, watching an artist at work). His associations take us through a tangled web that links religion with voyage and discovery—the plotting of old men in Spanish bar of holy wars, lost ghosts, forgotten religions, cultural histories—in an enigmatic collection of visuals, thoughts, and sounds.”

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If you’re wanting to revisit work by some artists from the Experimenta programme, the BFI Shop has put together a collection of books and home video releases by participants in this year’s festival.