Experimental film and video art

Len Lye on youtube

Len Lye at the BFI

Jpeatt, I've just watched Tscherkassky's Cinemascope Trilogy (unfortunately not on film, though I DEFINITELY see why you recommend seeing it that way) - totally mindblowing. That was what I had in mind when I started this thread. I'm going to be grabbing everything I can by him - anything else you can recommend along those lines?

As far as I'm aware, the bulk of Tscherkassky's darkroom work is available on the Index DVD 'Films From A Dark Room', with the exception of the more recent film 'Instructions For A Light and Dark Machine'. I don't know about any of his work beyond these films - I'm actually not sure there is much, but I'd like to see it. Really, there's nothing else quite like those films. The technique he's used is the same as the one Man Ray used in 'Retourn a Raison' to get the images of nails & thumbtacks directly onto the film, so there's innumerable other films done in a similar way, but none are as technically adept as that Tscherkassky stuff. There's a lot of good work from the London Underground co-op using these techniques, and there's a filmmaker/performer here in Australia called Dirk de Bruyn who does some excellent stuff, but these films are hard to get hold of, to say the least.

All this stuff should really be seen off film if it can be managed , - 'the Flicker', for example, is totally concerned with the mechanics of film projection, - but see it any way you can. I'm actually very spoiled as far as this stuff goes, we have a very dedicated, active group here who organise a lot of screenings, workshops, artist visits, etc.
Just had my first use of a darkroom as part of a workshop yesterday, as a matter of fact - contact printing and optical sound. I could really get into it, it's a lovely hands-on process, in a pleasingly meditative space.

http://www.ubuweb.com/papers/macdonald_avant_intro.html

LEVOX was the best film/cinema experience I've ever witnessed. 45 minutes of semi-improvised multi-projection with 8/16mm film loops, lens treatments and a soundtrack by eRikm. Bewildering, sinister and exhilarating.

Trailer/taster available on youtube.
More about Atelier MTK (in French) here.

After parting ways with eRikm, they're no longer doing LEVOX in that form, but are touring a variation, LA FOXE. It's a similar thing, semi-improv multi-projection with hand-treated film loops, but the soundtrack comes from amplification of the projection equipment itself, changing spools, etc. Really stunning, so if you get a chance to see it, do do do do.

LA FOXE website here
LA FOXE video here

This looks great.
Seems to be associated with Cellule Intervention de Metamkine/ La Cube.
I'll talk some more about expanded cinema later, I'm just heading out to some screenings.

Ubu.com is a great way to get caught up. It is pretty easy to download them and make ipod movies - not the best format but you can see them when you have the time, while traveling or waiting for something.
Some of my favorites:
Joseph Beuys
Douglas Gordon
Vito Aconcci
Herman Nitsch/Gunter Brus/Otto Mühl
Chris Burden
Pippiloti Rist
Carolee Schneemann
Rebbecca Horn (I just saw all of her early films in Hamburg in March)
Lawerence Weiner (you can get his 15min dvd "Wild Blue Yonder" from http://printedmatter.org)
Eija-liisa Ahtila
Mike Kelly (his Day is Done series is great)
There are lots of others but these stand out for me. Sarah Lockhart knows a lot about this if she sees this thread.

Ok, as promised, I'm going to make a post about expanded cinema.

Basically, what I'm talking about here is multi screen/ projector/ non screen based & performative works.

These are even harder to see, unfortunately, than most experimental film, and as often as not will require the film maker's presence. Like I said before, I'm really, really spoiled up here, due to the efforts of other film, whom I'd once mre like to give massive props to.
http://www.otherfilm.org

A few favourites in each of the categories.

Non Screen based works:
Pretty widely regarded as the 'classic' of expanded cinema, Anthony Macall's "Line Describing A Cone". A circle slowly drawn in white on a black background (takes 30 mins) is projected through smoke in a long thin space. Beautiful, perfectly conceived and executed idea. Truly Amazing when you see it the 1st time.

still

in process

Liz Rhodes 'Light Music' is a two projector film, featuring contact printed black bars of varying thickness in both the visual and audio parts of the film strip. This creates rising and falling tones in time with the change in colour density. The two filmstrips are coloured in complementary purplue and yellow and are projected facing each other, through smoke. This one has the effect of witnessing coloured rids pulsing in the air in perfect sync with the sound, and different from any angle.
The filmstrips look like this:


Multiscreen films:

William Raban's "Diagonal" is a brief but striking work in which three screens, overlapping their bottom right/ top left corners make up one animated sequence, where objects move between the screens.

Also by Raban (& Chris Welsby) "River Yar" is a far more subtle film, simply showing time lapse and real time footage of the same landscape shot at different times of the year. About half way through, they swap speeds, in such a meditative film, it's a very dramatic moment.

(Good review of a lot of these films here:
http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/ ... shoot.html )

A couple of the Guy Sherwin films that were presented as part of his recent performance out here warrant metion, although I'll be damned if I can find their names...
One featured three screens, all taken at the same location, but slightly differing shots. Both the shots and projectors were moved slightly during the film,creating the effect of an illlusiory panorama.

The other, although really only one screen, was created with three projectors, all laid on their sides, with one film loop running through all three of them. This loop looked much like a moving Rothko, an impression made even stronger by the gradual palcement of different coloured filters in front of the various projections.

Staying with Guy Sherwin, moving into performative film. His real standout works in this area, 'Man With a Mirror' and 'Painted Landscape', are both very simple ideas but brilliantly executed. I wrote elsewhere about 'Man with a Mirror', but to recap, the filmmaker stands in a projected image of himself in a garden, moving a mirror around, reflecting the light of the garden. Using a mirror which is white on one side, the image in the film is mimiced by the performed, causing some bizarre perceptual effects, seemingly at times folding into nothing. Very very strange. Must be seen if you get the chance ( as with all this stuff). Painted landscape is prjoected onto a transparent screen which the filmaker paints from behind. An image of himself in the countryside, slowly ripping up a large sheet of paper hung from a clothes line is revealed. In the end, the screen is cut and the artist emerges through the rip.

Arthur & Corrine Cantrill's 'Calligraphy Contest for the New Year' also involves cutting a screen, which starts black, is painted white, and then has pieces cut from it to allow the image to fall on the wall several meters behind it. The image itself is a beautiful handmade film in the vein of Brakhage, but with more focus on cut up footage.

The Cantrills are ledgends of Australian cinema, and go WAAAY back. Cantrill's Film Notes is, I believe, the longest running dedicated Experimental Cinema Journal extant. I was very fortunate to see th 1st dedicated retrospective of their expanded cinema works a couple of years ago, and there were many films that involved manipulated, patterned, and three dimensional screens. Really fine stuff. Their single screen works are also worth investigating.

In the area of more frequently performing artists, Cellule d'Intervetion Metamkine are just astonishing live, exquisite use of filters, live treatment, mirrors. I would love to see La Cube. The liks fourier transform posted before seem to be a related group.
http://metamkine.free.fr/
I also saw some shows by Xavier Querrelle, one of the Metamkine projectionists. Using the amplified sound of the projector for the most part, he projected onto a small sheet of tracing paper, suspended in a thin wire frame. the image seems to hang in the air, and despite it's small size, is clear, detailed and almost blindingly bright.

Bruce McClure seems to get about a bit, and have some connection to the 'noise' underground. He works with three projectors with seriously minimal loops to create hallucinogenic pulsating op art acompanied by jet engine roar generated by optical sound and pedals.

I know this has been a long post, and thanks for reading it, but I'm just going to put in a final plug for Other film's Sally Golding/ Abject Leader. Her ongoing film/ sound collaboration with Joel stern, has taken on a decidedly more structuralist bent in the last 6-9 months, and is about to start producing some really strong works. Sally's just been inn New York performing at anthology, as well as doing some shows in Europe.

Ok, I'm done. Peace out.

I saw the McCall flim at SFMOMA, I really enjoyed it, but it took a few times seeing it. They had a nice Piplotti Rist exhibition as well, that had special projection things going on, Multiple screens, projecting on to objects and one was even embedded in the floor.

I saw the McCall flim at SFMOMA, I really enjoyed it, but it took a few times seeing it. They had a nice Piplotti Rist exhibition as well, that had special projection things going on, Multiple screens, projecting on to objects and one was even embedded in the floor.

I was only so enamored of the McCall piece ... though a lot of other museum-goers were, and would sit there in the room with it for significant periods of time. It's a prime example of "stoner media art" along with a lot of abstract projection stuff. The floor piece in that Pipilotti Rist show was great.

As far as media art at the SF MoMA goes, the highlights for me in the past 9 years include Christian Marclay's "Video Quartet," Yoko Ono's fly piece, various Vito Acconci monitor works, and Pierre Hughye's The Third Memory (which combined documentation of the true story that inspired the film Dog Day Afternoon, clips from the film, and re-enactments). They recently had a show of Douglas Gordon's work, and it was pretty disappointing ... really facile. I guess because I'm drawn to works that play with narrative and more "conventional" film, I wanted something more sophisticated. He has obviously influenced countless art school students.

I was only so enamored of the McCall piece ... though a lot of other museum-goers were, and would sit there in the room with it for significant periods of time. It's a prime example of "stoner media art" along with a lot of abstract projection stuff.

I could be getting the wrong end of the stick here, but it sounds like the piece was presented more as an installation here, when really, it should be presented as a film is, the audience gathers, it is screened, and people don't really come and go. To present it otherwise really sells it short, although having the opportunity for many people to see it over the length of an exhibition is commendable.

I ended up really liking that Gordon piece, but I went to it a lot of times, it was not a knock out the first time through but it did really hold up to repeat viewings which is an important test for me. The big Gary Hill show had some nice things as well.
The Rist was great, but the Acconci monitor piece is my favorite in recent years. Acconci has some really great sound and video works on Ubu, the Bristol Project is really nice, great to pass out to.
http://www.ubu.com/sound/acconci.html
&
http://www.ubu.com/film/acconci.html

We should also mention Bruce Conner, who just passed and really had some great films.

Damon, I just returned from the Walker, thought of you. One of the WAC curators brought their considerable Beuys pieces out of storage and organized a room of his stuff in every medium. There is a 1968 video with evocative droney organ music, but no sound credits were available.
Great performance poster of him with a coyote, kindred spirits.

That is awesome. I would love to get back to the Walker, it was closed when I was there but I spent a few hours in the sculpture garden, which is first rate. My favorites where the Serra and the Jenny Holzer Stone Benches.

Beuys is really fantastic. The more you find out about him the more interesting he becomes. It is important that he was German - if he was American he would have just been a hippy!
Back on track, I saw the film of the action with Coyote, "I like America and America likes me" in Hamburg.
Fitz TV is also fantastic:
http://www.ubu.com/film/beuys.html

We should also mention Bruce Conner, who just passed and really had some great films.

Agreed! The "music video" (in quotes, because I think it was done on film, not video) he did for Devo's "Mongoloid" is classic, as well as the film set to the Bob Dylan song with the chorus "Everybody must get stoned." (I forget the title.) Though, comparing Douglas Gordon to him, which was one of the obvious comparisons for some of Dougie's work, is partly what led me to feel that Dougie's work is facile. His use of repetition just doesn't have as much behind it, and it's one of the oldest "tricks in the video art book," dating back to the 60s/70s w/Peter Campos, Nam Jun Paik, et al.

The platypus moment in "A Movie" is another favorite of mine. The platypus shot is totally out of context yet following the logic of the movement of the preceding images - it's something that makes perfect formal sense, but narratively/content-wise is totally absurd.

I was at a show a couple years ago, and Craig Baldwin (who took classes with Bruce Conner at SF State) was screening a collage film of clips he'd assembled for the show, and he had a sequence that ended with something similar to said platypus. And I mentioned it to him, and he gave me this uncomprehending look ... and I said, "You know, that part in Bruce Conner's 'A Movie' with the platypus." His response, "Oh right, that, yes ... well ... "

John Baldessari also made some great video works:
http://www.ubu.com/film/baldessari.html

Mike Kelly is another good video artist. Much of his work is hit and miss for me, but I was lucky enough to catch his big "Day is Done" show at the Gagosian in 2005:
http://www.gagosian.com/exhibitions/24t ... ke-kelley/ (click "view work" for some nice installation shots)
It was an incredible experience, lots of props from the films installed with projections of different parts of the cycle all over the space. A few of the sets are up at the Broad Contemporary art wing at LACMA in Los Angeles.
The Gagosian catalog of the show is one of the finest books I own and You can order the dvd here (I just did):
http://www.mikekelley.com/compound.html
There are a couple nice films here:
http://www.ubu.com/film/kelley.html
The "Day is Done" has more impact altogether.

A fondness for dictionaries and indexes (and literary arcana) provides an alternative to narrative as well as drawing the films close to similar trends in literature (by Georges Perec & Co.). Greenaway eventually draws that aspect of his work out into parody of structuralist or experimental cinema (and its audience) with Vertical Features Remake.

I would just correct you - its not that he was especially fond of indexing,structuralism and the alike formalist approaches in the first place, but it was more of a way of coping with depressing reality everyday job he worked at the Central Office of Information, where he had to befriend the absurd. He had to channel it somehow and gradually he perfected his expression which ultimatelly resulted in masterpieces as "Vertical Features Remake", "Reincarnation of An Ornithologist", "Dear Telephone" or "Water Wrackets". Its almost amazing that all of those four were done by the same man.

Early Greenaway shorts prior to Falls are essential, mindbending stuff with totaly off-the-wall concepts.

I'm emphasizing this especially for those who aren't fond of his later work. As I see it, people into later Greenaway stuff have slight idea with whom they are dealing with - his background, depth, character. I dislike every single film Greenaway made after The Falls as they lack the conceptual wit of the C.O.I. period and are abundant in grandiose, majestic [and irritatingly pompous] baroque aesthetics, over-drammatic plots and clever dialogs without any substance. Early shorts show him as he is, later full-lengths are interesting in first glimpse, but in fact are very tiresome constructs, art-simulations as envisaged by an art critic - not an artist.

Nowadays - I can't get enough of his interviews and absolutelly must get all of his books, but wouldn't give a toss if he would burn all the originals from 1980 onwards or release anything new.

In addition to the other great filmmakers listed above, I've got to mention Paul Clipson from San Francisco. Root Strata has released a string of fantastic DVDRs featuring Clipson in collaboration with Jefre Cantu-Ledesma which I'll be reissuing along with a new, feature-length film on pro-DVD this winter.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rXJnh-eBVKI

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The great conceptual text artist Lawrence Weiner's new porn film "Water in Milk Exists" is on Ubu:
http://www.ubu.com/film/weiner_water.html
Be warned, it is a real porn film. Which is really why I think it works so well. I am huge fan of his work. Get it while you can - these things can disappear.