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Bruce Conner A Movie (1958)
'Bruce Conner's avant-garde classic A Movie was a film far ahead of its time and it has rarely been surpassed within the still vibrant field of experimental compilation filmmaking. Conner's use of non-commercial, industrial and educational archival materials inspired multiple generations of makers, including the once ubiquitous post-modern MTV kitsch music video remixes and may have even provided part of the inspiration to Rick Prelinger to create his archive that is now part of the permanent collection at the Library of Congress. Conner's film may also be understood as an example of "database narrative" in which the process of selection and combination is exposed in order to trigger narrative associations via horizontal and vertical montage. The highly mutable potential meaning-making via image-image and sound-image juxtapositions is foregrounded, with special emphasis on the overdetermining impact of music in telegraphing the intended emotional resonance of an edited sequence.'-- Critical Commons Manager
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Peter Mays The Star Curtain Tantra (1965-1969)
'A trance film originally released in 1966 as THE STAR CURTAIN, about the settling and relaxation of the senses after a climax. "Sentences" of cosmic imagry were added in 1969 to form the vision glimpsed in the trance. Dialectic opposition of picture and sound. TANTRA played at the San Francisco Film Festival of 1970.'-- collaged
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Wallace Berman Aleph (1966)
'Aleph is an artist’s meditation on life, death, mysticism, politics, and pop culture. In an eight-minute loop of film, Wallace Berman uses Hebrew letters to frame a hypnotic, rapid-fire montage that captures the go-go energy of the 1960s. Aleph includes stills of collages created using a Verifax machine, Eastman Kodak’s precursor to the photocopier. These collages depict a hand-held radio that seems to broadcast or receive popular and esoteric icons. Signs, symbols, and diverse mass-media images (e.g., Flash Gordon, John F. Kennedy, Mick Jagger) flow like a deck of tarot cards, infinitely shuffled in order that the viewer may construct his or her own set of personal interpretations. The transistor radio, the most ubiquitous portable form of mass communication in the 1960s, exemplifies the democratic potential of electronic culture and serves as a metaphor for Jewish mysticism. The Hebrew term kabbalah translates as “reception” for knowledge, enlightenment, and divinity.'-- The Jewish Museum
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John Baldessari I Am Making Art (1971)
'A good example of Baldessari’s deadpan irreverence is the 1971 black-and-white video entitled I Am Making Art, in which he moves different parts of his body slightly while saying, after each move, ‘I am making art.’ The statement, he says, ‘hovers between assertion and belief.’ On one level, the piece spoofs the work of artists who, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, explored the use of their own bodies and gestures as an art medium. The endless repetition, awkwardness of the movements made by the artist, and the reiteration of the statement ‘I am making art,’ create a synthesis of gestural and linguistic modes which is both innovative (in the same way that the more serious work of his peers is innovative) and absurdly self-evident.'-- Marcia Tucker
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Michael Scroggins What Are You Looking At? (1973)
'What Are You Looking At? was shot on the new ½ inch reel to reel EIAJ Sony Portapak's that made portable videotape recording open to a wide range of people for the first time in history. Access to this artist friendly means of production allowed for a form of long take experimentation that was not constrained by the economics of shooting 16mm sound film. The video opens with a brief moment with Nam June Paik in the CalArts parking lot, Burbank, 1970, and moves on to the core of the piece which revolves around a casual morning’s recording at the Hillside House in Topanga Canyon, 1973, in which the young child, Tucker, directs the gaze of the videographer --and thus the video viewer. The synchronicity of developing events unfolds in a dance of subjective and objective relationships revolving around the question quoted in the title.'-- MS
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Lynda Benglis Female Sensibility (1974)
'Two women, faces framed in tight focus, kiss and caress. Their interaction is silent, muted by Benglis' superimposition of a noisy, distracting soundtrack of appropriated AM radio: bawdy wisecracks of talk-show hosts and male callers, interacting in the gruff terms of normative masculinity; male country-western singers plying women with complaints about bad love and bad coffee; a man preaching on the creation of Adam and Eve. The tape's challenge may, in part, direct itself at the viewer. While one might find it easy to dismiss the gender clichés of the soundtrack, it may be harder to resolve the hermetically-sealed indifference and disconcerting ambiguity (lovers? performers?) of the two women. By turns conscious of the camera and seemingly oblivious to it, their dreamy indifference is a rebuke to the disruptive chatter hovering around them, and perhaps also to the expectations of those who watch.'-- Electronic Arts Intermix
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Adam Beckett Flesh Flows (1974)
'A young artist, a career full of promise, a life of innovation and energy tragically cut short. Such a summary barely begins to describe the bright, fast burn that was rising star Adam Beckett (1950-1979), one of the first graduates of the CalArts Experimental Animation program, and a prolific animator, sketch artist, and effects prodigy. Known for his unique abstract film loops, as well as for his precise, yet organic work with the optical printer, Beckett’s work continues to influence young animators both at his alma mater, where he is frequently mentioned, as well as in the wider animation world.'-- Animation World Network
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Jack Goldstein Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (1975)
'From 1972 to 1978, Goldstein produced a number of short films in which a single action is repeated continuously. For Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Goldstein appropriated the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio’s familiar production logo, which was used to introduce each of their movies. He did not simply re-use the original footage, but rather altered it, stripping away the company name, tinting the background a deep hue of red, and repeating the lion’s thundering roar on a continuous loop, thereby highlighting the artifice involved in commercial filmmaking.'-- MoCA
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Gary Beydler Hand Held Day (1975)
'Over the course of two Kodachrome camera rolls, we simultaneously witness eastward and westward views of the surrounding landscape as the skies, shadows, colors, and light change dramatically. Beydler’s hand, holding the mirror carefully in front of the camera, quivers and vibrates, suggesting the relatively miniscule scale of humanity in the face of a monumental landscape and its dramatic transformations. Yet the use of the mirror also projects an idealized human desire to frame and understand what we see around us, without destroying or changing any of its inherent fascination and beauty.'-- Mark Toscano
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Richard Newton A Glancing Blow (1979)
'An invitation was sent out with date, maps, and times for each location. There was no announcement to the general public. No permissions or special arrangements were requested or granted from city or state authorities. Spectators arrived and gathered at nearby corners. Traffic was moving along at a normal pace. Two cars, a 1963 white Dodge Dart GT, and a 1969 dark blue Dodge Polara station wagon arrived from opposite directions. As the 2 cars approached each other, the drivers moved in close and bumped, banged and scrapped their way along the bodies of the two Dodges. The drivers immediately turned the cars around and repeated the action – 5 sharp glances on the Whittier Blvd. Bridge in Boyle Heights, East Los Angeles, and 6 solid blows where Cañon meets Beverly Drive in Beverly Hills.'-- Ric Martin
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Bruce and Norman Yonemoto Vault (1984)
'In Vault, Bruce and Norman Yonemoto rewrite a traditional narrative of desire: boy meets girl, boy loses girl. Employing the hyperbolic, melodramatic syntax of Hollywood movies and commercial TV, they decode the Freudian symbology and manipulative tactics that underlie media representations of romantic love, and expose the power of this media "reality" to construct personal fictions. Using the psychoanalytic language of advertising, cinematic and television texts to tell the love story of a pole vaulter/concert cellist and a cowboy/Abstract Expressionist painter, they rupture the narrative with psychosexual metaphors and references to pop media and art. Self-conscious strategies such as overtly Freudian symbols, flashback reconstructions of childhood traumas, Wagnerian orchestration and loaded cliches are wielded with deft irony.'-- MoCA
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Larry Cuba Calculated Movements (1985)
'In the pure form of abstraction that Cuba pursues, visual perception is paramount. But because the images are generated via algorithms written in computer language, there is a paradox in trying to use words to describe images for which words do not exist. As Raphael Bassan wrote in a 1981 issue of La Revue du Cinema, "The computer animation establishes a parallel between visual perception and a structure of linguistic or mathematical order: it is concerned with establishing a new organizational field for the aesthetic material. …In the sphere of abstract cinema (lacking a better term), Larry Cuba's research is, in fact, at the origin of a new direction which does not yet have a name…"' -- collaged
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Chick Strand Fake Food Factory (1986)
'Added to the National Film Registry’s 2011 list of culturally significant films, Chick Strand’s glorious short film Fake Fruit Factory guides us through the experience of women crafting papier-mâché fruit and vegetables in a small factory in Mexico. Filmed over the course of a year, the film focuses on close-ups of the production as we hear voices of the women making the objects for domestic and international sale. Through their thoughts and feelings, we gain a unique insight into their experiences through extremely candid conversation about sex, food and work. Utilizing the language barrier to speak frankly about their gringo boss and his Mexican wife, in his presence, the workers' raunchy discussions bring us onto the factory floor and through the production line. A kaleidoscopic blend of music, atmosphere and gossip, Fake Fruit Factory is a beautiful ode to the voice of the worker.'-- Charlotte Cook
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Pat O'Neill Water and Power (1989)
'Years ago, the Owens Valley (260 miles north of Los Angeles) was a flourishing country of farms and ranches. Today it is a dusty, dying and nearly deserted stretch of parched land. Pat O'Neill's Water and Power is not about the Owens Valley, nor even the events surrounding its death at the hands of the Department of Water and Power. Rather, this film is a tremendous iconography of the Southern California whose existence and identity are rooted in the lifeblood artificially feeding it. Profound and poetic, associative and representational, Water and Power creates a sensual impression of transformations: Of a city, a desert, an industry, an image from one state to another. Composed of optically layered images, time-lapse photography, scripted text, and spoken word, it alters natural images in time, axis, definition, color, and, ultimately, perception. O'Neill pushes the aesthetics of Star Wars special effects into uncharted territory to strike a deep poetic chord.'-- Sundance Institute
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Paul McCarthy Painter (1995)
'Painter (1995) is a brilliant interrogation of the senility and late paintings of Willem de Kooning, complete with collectors and dealers puppet-mastering around him. It’s a video deploying, as so many of his videos do, the mise-en-scène of instructional television (from the Galloping Gourmet to Martha Stewart), but one in which the painter mumbles and cries: ‘You can’t do it anymore you can’t do it anymore.’ And later: ‘I can’t do this anymore.’ He means painting, he means art-making, he may mean life. At the end of Painter the artist gets up on a table, pulls down his pants and a collector with a protuberant fake nose sniffs at his bare arse, McCarthy’s own.'-- Dangerous Minds
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Thom Andersen Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003)
'Thom Andersen’s landmark documentary, Los Angeles Plays Itself, explores the tangled relationship between the movies and their fabled hometown – as seen entirely though the films themselves. This video essay is an overwhelming work of film archaeology, delving deeply into the various archetypical and often contradictory ways in which film has represented and defined Los Angeles against the city itself, its rich and complex history, its people and communities. Masterfully edited by Andersen out of hundreds of film excerpts, Los Angeles Plays Itself is constructed in three thematic sections: the city as background, the city as character, and the city as subject. Ultimately Thom Andersen’s gesture is one of militant nostalgia (using his own words), a recuperation of a city’s vanished history.'-- ICA
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Morgan Fisher () (2003)
'( ) is a 2003 silent film directed by Morgan Fisher. The film consists entirely of insert shots extracted from feature films, considering the "status of the insert shot in an ingenious way", according to film expert Susan Oxtoby. Fisher said of his movie, "Inserts are above all instrumental. They have a job to do, and they do it; and they do little, if anything, else. Sometimes inserts are remarkably beautiful, but this beauty is usually hard to see because the only thing that registers is the news, the expository information, that the insert conveys... By chance, I learned that the root of 'parenthesis' is a Greek word that means the act of inserting. And so I was given the title of the film."'-- collaged
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Louis Hock Feral (2004)
'Louis Hock is an experimental filmmaker and School of the Art Institute graduate whose work has been referred to as a "hypnotic study in motion" (Nora Sayre, The New York Times). "Our eyes are virtually goaded out of our heads" (Richard Eder, The New York Times). A recent work, Feral (2004), asks the viewer to contemplate theatricality of our homeland security experience.'-- First Person Cinema
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Allan Sekula Gala (2005)
'I decided to slow the shutter speed just to see into the dark recesses of the music center on opening night. It was a way of going “behind the scenes” or into the wings. I was thinking of it as a silent movie device, a way of looking at the rehearsal for the opening as a big experiment with images thrown onto a challenging surface, a gigantic outdoor cinema screen. They were projecting videos, of Esa-Pekka Salonen conducting, of Ed Harris painting in Pollock (2000), a veritable feast of creative gestures. The only imaginable way to respond to such spectacle was to regress to “primitive” film modes. But all in all, what I’ve made here is an ethnographic film of sorts, with the symphony audience as disoriented voyagers in a potentially hostile environment waiting for their limousines at the corner of First and Grand, fearful of being swept away by an invisible torrent into the Los Angeles River. It’s a view of the Los Angeles elite rather different from what we see at the Academy Awards, for example. The carnival in Venice must have been like this. While one waited for the gondola, everyone was drunk and wearing a mask but at the same time feeling sort of miserable. The frightened West Sider downtown. I think the discomfort of people waiting for their cars is a sign of how hard it is to re-center this city.'-- Allan Sekula
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Fred Worden Possessed (2010)
'Once, when I was about 18 years old, my friend Eddie Moulton and I were taking a short cut across the local hig- school parking lot and we happened to notice that one of the school buses parked there had an open door and we could see the keys sitting on the driver’s seat. It was a Sunday afternoon and no one was around, so just for the illicit thrill of it we got in and drove the bus from one end of the school parking lot to the other. I think if the cops had caught us driving the bus, the charge would have been something like “joy riding.” A similar impulse explains Possessed. I had a strong, slightly illicit, urge to commandeer the original train sequence from the 1931 film Possessed and make it move in such a way as to give the girl (Joan Crawford) what she thought she wanted: a position on the inside. To do that, I had to create my own (all encompassing) vehicle. By my count, the original sequence provides three orders of motion: the motion (and stillness) of the passengers on the train, the motion of the train itself, and finally the motion of the girl (Joan) outside of the train. By injecting my own additional level of motion, I was able to move Joan from her position on the outside looking in (played melodramatically as desire’s longing for the just-out-of-reach) to a position inside, looking around (played as pure vision). But maybe that’s really just my fanciful imagining and, as such, pretty much situates me in Joan’s original position: projecting desire onto a handy passing vehicle. In the end, at least this much is true: we both love staring into this passing train. In fact, we never seem to tire of it.'-- Fred Worden
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p.s. Hey. ** Tosh Berman, Hi, Tosh. I'm with you on your 'identity' trajectory. Quite often I feel like when people tag someone or something as insane, they're merely locating their conservatism. I'm very happy to be able to have your dad's film in my humble abode today, of course. ** Michael_karo, Hi. Ken #1 is a curious guy. Back in the early 00's when I was in the later stages of finishing 'The Sluts' and studying escort sites particularly, he was a very prominent and popular gay escort. There was a lot of debate on the message boards about whether he'd 'had work done' because, back then, he already looked spooky-ish but not yet scary-ish. And, to my sort of surprise, when I was gathering escorts for the post last month, there he was again escorting and hitting up clients, still advertising himself as 19 years old. Being Ken #1 doesn't pay very well, I guess. I haven't listened to Golden Palominos in ages. Nice idea. I really like early Arto Lindsay a lot, DNA, etc., but he lost me when he got into tropicalia. Good stuff, no doubt, but not my thing. I'm so very sorry about all he death around you lately, my friend. Hugs galore. ** James, Hi. I won't look into open coffins and never have. I only included the open coffin pic of the guy because, in a way, that's when he finally became a doll. I'm the opposite of you. I don't want to be cremated. I want to be buried, I don't know why. I guess I like that people I knew and/or admire are somewhere and that, in their new, far away location, they still have the same size and dimensions, and that the ground they occupy indicates that. I don't know that book you mentioned, no. I don't think I've ever read Jessica Mitford. I know the name. Very, very interesting explanation as to why your past occupies your imagination. I'm glad I brought it up. No, I don't think of the Cycle as a collaboration with my past. I employ some of my past as base material, but there's no loyalty to it at all. The George in the books only resembles the real George emotionally and psychologically, with a superficial physical resemblance. And when 'Dennis' appears, I am heavily remade. It's more that I was trying to understand what George did to my imagination. If I hadn't failed so badly at writing a novel about the real George, that would have been a real collaboration with my past. But my past doesn't interest me particularly or hold a lot emotional weight for me, which is probably partly why it was a bad, unfinishable novel, I guess. I don't feel any need to reconcile with my past. I can't even get my head around what that means or what that would entail. Same with the idea of escaping it. It's just there, informative, but like dust, exhaust, I don't know. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, Ben. Oh, nice, about those re-releases. Excited for tomorrow! Yes, there is a serious plan in the works to make a short UK trip in order to partake of Alton Towers and Diggerland. We'll see. Would be fun. ** Bill, Hi, Bill! How's tricks? ** Douglas Payne, Well, hello there, Douglas! Very nice to see you here in this cozy place and not just amidst the crowds at FB. Thanks! I really do need to read moire than the tiny amount of Ligotti I've read one of these days. ** G.r. maierhofer, Hi, Grant. I got your email safe and sound. I'll respond today. Thank you! Also, big awesome, obviously, about the PS thing! And the intro by the great Mr. Kilpatrick! So happy that things are coming up roses on your end, man. ** Steevee, Hi. Yeah, a good documentary on her would be really fascinating. There seem to be so many interesting clues there, her parents being a really big one, and the adopted brother/son, and his supposed memoir, and, if the stories are true, the hoax threats to herself that she perpetrated, etc, etc. I wonder how much we'll end up finding out. I wonder whether, once the heat dies down, she's self-aware and self-reflexive enough to reveal and deconstruct her reasoning. She seems pretty self-defended. Anyway, yeah, it's an incredible, complex story. Thanks for the link to the mid-year best of films list. Very interesting. Have a superb day! ** Keaton, You're wild, man, wild! God love you. If you tried to drown yourself in the Seine, you'd probably die of toxin poisoning before you drowned. Now you're dreaming like I do every rare time that I remember my dreams. High, violent five. ** Misanthrope, Well, McDonalds food is grotesque, yeah. I think the downfall also involves how huge and ubiquitous it is/was. It never inspired fondness, loyalty, a cult. It was just there. People who like eating shit ate there automatically. Same with Microsoft. They were both like the government or something. Apple had this cult thing, and that's why, even though its the biggest company in the world now, it still seems cool and culty to Apple fans. Man, the times I've been forced to use Microsoft, I didn't it was easy whatsoever. I don't get that. Apple stuff is easy. Using Microsoft is like trying to break out of prison. In my experience. ** Sypha, Well, you know, there are those guys ... monks (?) ... who create those incredible, intricate sand mandalas and then destroy them as soon as they're finished. That's interesting. Glad your birthday was nice. Greatest living writer of ghost stories, huh. I'll check him out. That's intriguing. ** Thomas Moronic, I'm glad the post set stuff off. I, of course, would love to hear what. You must be feeling better, which is very good news. ** Right. I thought that, instead a musical gig, I would give you a film gig this time. That's the scoop. See you tomorrow.