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Tim Cawkwell

~ currently publishing my poetry and verse. Blog entries on film and painting going back to 2014. My main website is www.timcawkwell.co.uk

Tim Cawkwell

Category Archives: avant garde

FILM PORTRAITURE 4: Bob Fleischner Dying

23 Wednesday Jan 2019

Posted by Tim Cawkwell in artists' film, avant garde, film portraiture, painting and photography, Uncategorized

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Bacon, Bob Fleischner, Eternalisms, Ken Jacobs, Rembrandt, Velazquez

A photograph offers us the ‘brutality of fact’, in Francis Bacon’s phrase. A photograph of a face, unembellished, without make-up, face on, is known as a mugshot, and is commonly associated with the prison portrait, quite as much brutal as factual. Mugshots do differentiate faces, but also lump people into an undifferentiated mass of the irredeemable.

Image result for mugshot

A painted portrait by contrast, while it often seeks to record the facts of a person’s appearance, does much more: it can humanise or personalise the subject, granting them a human identity; it seeks to give them if not eternity then permanence of a kind in paint, which is a material that can be so lasting. For technical reasons, a photograph on the other hand risks being unable to match that permanence even if by lighting, film stock, backgrounds, and a mastery of the technical possibilities of the camera, a photograph can have its own way of giving the subject a human personality that the viewer can respond to.

Ken Jacobs, the distinguished avant-garde film-maker, with a superlative catalogue of film experimentation and achievement to his credit – one of New York’s finest, you could say  (and still with us) – photographed his friend Bob Fleischner in 1989. In 2009 he used this material to make one of his 3-D Eternalisms, as he calls them, Bob Fleischner Dying. It is 2 minutes 42 seconds long, in colour, HD video, silent naturally. By good fortune, rather than languish in some corner unseen it is available on the internet [see below], or five excerpts are, but since each is 32 or 33 seconds along, a total of just over 2½ minutes, we have the whole piece available.

What makes it special? How is it done? Two still images of Fleischner taken from slightly different angles are stitched together in a rapid sequence some 30 seconds long. This is a lot of still images. Watching it you want to know, “this is crazy, how is it done?” It makes you gasp at the illusionism involved, it reinvents animation. You think it is just still photographs, but the whole is far too alive for that since the nose wobbles and the head bounces, and the screen dances. This is movies reinvented.

The face shown is full on, the skin wrinkled, the hair greying at the temples, dark sockets for eyes. A mugshot? In fact the very opposite, not the brutality of fact but the poignancy of fact. Fleischner had been cameraman on Jacobs’ Blonde Cobra made in the early 1960s, and in 1989 was dying. Not only that but he was doing so at the same time as Jack Smith, the delirious star of Blonde Cobra, and maudit film-maker of the film maudit par excellence, Flaming Creatures. Jacobs wrote of his film portrait: “Bob allows his sick and fading image to be caught in stereo photography,” and in an interview he referred to the “close witnessing of Bob’s death” and the fact that it so disturbed him. [For these quotes see the Electronic Arts Intermix site:  www.eai.org/titles/bob-fleischner-dying and ‘A Critical Cinema 3: interviews with independent film-makers by Scott MacDonald.]

The film therefore is nothing other than an elegy for his friend: “the man of mystery, so banal in some ways, so unexpectedly ‘on’ when the situation demanded.” You do not need to know all this background to appreciate the film except perhaps that Fleischner had been Jacobs’ companion-in-arms while he was alive. Yet the important point about the film is the way it shares with portraiture in painting a common denominator through the ages. Its subject is human mortality, the way portraiture preserves humans that are now vanished, about the decay of flesh (Rembrandt, below left), about the skull beneath the skin (Velázquez, below centre) and about capturing not so much a likeness as a texture of flesh and bone (Francis Bacon, below right).

Image result for Rembrandt      Image result for Velazquez pope        Related image

Jacobs’ film seeks to join this illustrious company in extending the parameters of film to “come onto the nervous system” in the way Francis Bacon wanted to do in his portraits. He gives a much more precise and illuminating description of what he was doing than I have been able to do above, in describing his ‘Nervous System Performances’: “Using short film sequences projected as a series of stills, the Nervous System operates on the temporal and spatial differences between two near-identical film-frames that are often only one frame apart from one another in filmic sequence.” Latterly his particular preoccupation has been with seeing in 3-D. He writes [www.kenjacobsgallery.com/ two-eyed-paintings/], “The Nervous Magic Lantern came about after working twenty-five years with two stop-motion projectors side by side that held near-identical film-frames for long periods of time and overlapped their separate images on the screen via a spinning shutter.”

There is one other dimension that needs mentioning, that of memory. The photographs were taken in 1989, but it is only twenty years later that Jacobs makes Bob Fleischner Dying, as if it needed that length of time to gestate. First that allowed Jacobs to discover how to make it, as if the science needed to catch up with the art, which it did in twenty  years. But second, the film illustrates a commonplace human experience: coming to terms with the death of a friend can take time. On his own admission Fleischner’s dying had disturbed Jacobs. In recording the moment, in getting inside it, almost in getting under its skin, Jacobs perhaps finds an accommodation of a kind with the experience that had eluded him for twenty years. In a way it constitutes a resurrection for Fleischner.

To watch the film search ‘Ken Jacobs with Eternalisms’ on Vimeo and next search ‘Bob Fleischner Dying’

Other entries in this series:

  • Film portraiture: David Jones – 15 April 2018
  • Film portraiture 2: Tacita Dean – 3 May 2018
  • Film portraiture 3: The Hitch-hiker – 20 Nov 2018

 

http://www.timcawkwell.co.uk

Cage’s Sonatas and Interludes and what they can teach film-makers

15 Friday Jun 2018

Posted by Tim Cawkwell in artists' film, avant garde, Brakhage, Uncategorized

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Brakhage, gamelan, Goldberg Variations, John Cage, Sonatas and Interludes, Takemitsu, Tiberghien, Vimeo

Short films on Vimeo – there’s a lot of them out there. Some are even good, and you can ‘like’ them, and choose to follow the filmmaker. But, to make a generalisation, very few of these film-makers have thought enough about ‘form’.

Form can be imposed at two points: the editing bench springs first to mind, which is where Eisenstein, the author of the celebrated ‘Film Form’, placed a particular emphasis. But it can also be imposed in the camera, at the moment the film is being shot. This is Stan Brakhage’s major contribution to film aesthetics: even if he did not discover it, yet in view of the magnitude of his corpus, it is where the idea was most explored.

Now compare music. The same challenge exists: how do you impose form on a sequence of sounds? Western music answers this differently, since it has some eight or nine centuries of history behind it (assuming, arbitrarily I concede, a starting-point of Gregorian chant). Those centuries have been used to explore expressiveness of effect, but also to explore expressiveness of means. Composers have asked themselves questions about how to juxtapose notes, sequences of notes, sections of music – as it were, words, sentences and paragraphs.

Film is 120 years old, but has it concerned itself with these formal questions? Not nearly enough, because film is assumed to be made from representing persons, objects, dramas. It is not: it is made from frames and shots and sequences.

Music is made in the head, in itself, of itself. Film can be made in the head, but for the most part it is made from what is in front of the camera. It may be made ‘in itself’ but it is assumed mostly to be made ‘of something else’.

This train of thought is prompted by hearing the pianist, Cédric Tiberghien, perform John Cage’s ‘Sonatas and Interludes’ at Snape in Suffolk on 12 June. This is music made in Cage’s head, seemingly outside the Western tradition since he took his inspiration from Eastern philosophy and the sound of Eastern music. He wanted to break the listener out of the expectation which he or she brings to the music, in order to enlarge their understanding of the world. However, Cage did not jettison Western music. For a start he used the pianoforte – and then radically amended its sound world by the idea of the ‘prepared piano’.

Cage prepared piano - June 2018

This ropey image shows the piano prepared by the insertion of screws, nuts, bolts etc. between the strings to alter their timbre and make the piano sound more percussive, a process which Tiberghien said took him five hours. As we peered into it before the concert began, someone said, “Isn’t that fabulous?” – before she had even heard the noise the piano would make. Then someone commented, “Look at those screws. It’s hard to get that kind these days.” When I took this photo, someone asked, “Did you get a photo? People will never guess what it’s of.”

Secondly, the title ‘Sonatas and Interludes’ looks to Western compositional tradition, an AABB structure going back to 17th/18th-century sonata form, at least for thirteen of the sixteen sonatas. It is in the interludes particularly that Cage breaks away from this (which is why they are interludes). And the overall structure is a formal one: sonatas 1 to 4/interlude 1/sonatas 5 to 8/interludes 2 and 3/sonatas 9 to 12/interlude 4/sonatas 13 to 16. Listening to it brought to mind Bach’s ‘Goldberg Variations’, whose ‘thirty variations reiterate the harmonic implications of the same bass in thirty different forms’, so that when at the end the opening melody is brought back, we hear it differently. It feels cyclical.

I think cyclicality is a part of the Sonatas and Interludes. I read that it starts and ends in G major, although in my musical ignorance I could not hear that, except subconsciously perhaps since when the piece came to a close you could feel a sense of a journey completed.

So, is hearing the Goldberg Variations a cerebral exercise, and hearing the Sonatas and Interludes an ‘emotive’ one? No, since they are both cerebral, and both emotive. At Snape, in a darkened auditorium (where I could not read my notes to give me an intellectual way into the piece), I listened transfixed to the sounds, the clusters of sound, and each of the twenty pieces, and experienced a direct communication across the darkness from the pianist’s hands to my brain processing what my ears were hearing. This was underlined by the softness of the sounds as a result of the dampening and detuning provided by the piano being ‘prepared’. The result is much more piano than forte.

This served Cage’s purpose well. Drawing on ideas he had read in the work of the Indian sage Coomaraswamy, he wanted to convey eight ‘emotions’ (humorous, angry, fearful etc.) that led the novice to a ninth state, that of tranquillity. I could not hear any of the eight emotions, except perhaps anger, but you get a strong feeling of tranquillity being the core of the piece, its purpose and its effect. Again, Cage (I think) rejects the Western idea of ‘programme music’ for an ‘atmosphere’.

Sonatas and Interludes therefore looks both east and west, an idea confirmed by Cage’s very helpful comment that the bell-like sounds are from Europe and the drum-like sounds – metallic, wooden, dampened, detuned maybe – are from Asia. This is what makes it such a major work, straddling a divide between east and west, a bold attempt at global synthesis, suitable it may be considered for a country that had just fought a major war on two fronts, Europe and the Pacific – and had won. The USA was opening itself to the world, in effect was de-isolating itself.

Cage is therefore very much of his time, and it is also true that his originality allowed him to be fascinated and seduced by an Asian sound world, notably the gamelan orchestras of Indonesia. After Cage came the Japanese Toru Takemitsu, a master of ‘Japanese sound’ influenced by French musical impressionism, Debussy, Messiaen and others. And his rain music evoking rain-drops on water, patterning it to the eye, and resonating it in the ear, is very close to the sound world of the Sonatas and Interludes.

So, it was a wonderful concert. But as someone interested in film, I was envious: why cannot our film-makers do something like this? Take Brakhage’s Text of Light (1974, 67 minutes). This is an abstract film composed entirely of light patterns, but any sense of form eludes me. You can admire its textures and their variety, and the idea that “All that is, is light”, but where do you enter this work, where do you leave it? In defence, Brakhage might invoke the idea applied to Sonatas and Interludes, that Cage is “following a system, but he has no idea where he is going” (see James Pritchett in ‘Six Views of the Sonatas and Interludes’ at  http://rosewhitemusic.com/piano/writings/six-views-sonatas-interludes/), but this is admirable only up to a point, for where is the system being followed?

So, going back to Vimeo. Too many of the films I have been looking at feel too experimental, too random. There may be virtue in jettisoning Western ideas of order, tradition, proportion, a classical architecture as it were, but as I watched and admired these films I longed for those ideas to be brought back. But because film has not got all those centuries behind it, it lacks the grounding which Cage had in launching his experiments.

http://www.timcawkwell.co.uk

FILM PORTRAITS 2: TACITA DEAN

03 Thursday May 2018

Posted by Tim Cawkwell in artists' film, avant garde, documentaries, painting and photography, silent cinema

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Hockney, Merce Cunningham, Merz, National Portrait Gallery, Tacita Dean, Twombly, Warner

The National Portrait Gallery in London has an exhibition of film portraits by Tacita Dean. It runs until 28 May 2018.

The first one you see is the trademark profile of David Hockney with his trademark circular glasses, and an even more recognizable trademark – a cigarette smoked without inhibition or self-consciousness. Love him, love his cigarette. There are a few edits of this sixteen-minute film so that we also get some idea of his studio in Los Angeles where he was preparing a selection of painted portraits for an exhibition in London. The screen hangs in the middle of a dark spatial cube with the film projected from a corner and the beam angled at 90 degrees by a mirror onto a backlit screen. This effect was terrific.

Sixteen minutes. When did I last spend sixteen minutes at one time looking at a painted portrait? The answer is that I never have. To see this exhibition you need to give at least an hour and a half to watching all the films one after the other – assuming of course that is what you do, which is not what I saw the trickle of visitors doing.

So what is the right length for a film portrait? Too long and the experience just becomes tedious; too short and it fails to become immersive. In the latter case why not have a series of photos? For example Mario Merz (2002), one of Dean’s first portraits, is 8½ minutes long. We start by being teased by a shot of Merz’s face in shadow, but in due course our wish to see the face properly is granted, and at the end we see him shuffling in his garden, poignantly enough since the film was made a year before he died. His prop was a pine cone because he was fascinated by the Fibonacci Series (Google it). Would it have been the same if we had seen four photographs: face in shadow, face in sunlight, garden, pine cone? At least the film draws us into spending time in his presence provided we are patient, whereas a few photographs would be viewed in a minute or so, and leave a different impression. A photograph gives a likeness; a film portrait can give a likeness but also an atmosphere.

Another relatively early work is Michael Hamburger (2007) made in the author’s Suffolk cottage, a film that comes closest to a conventional film portrait, except that its capturing of the atmosphere of the house and garden as much as of Hamburger himself breaks out from these conventions. Hamburger was a poet and translator, but the film particularly focuses on his interest in the different varieties of apples he grows and the orchard belonging to the house. So weather is important in the film and it ends with a shot of a rainbow over the house, a sacralizing event.

There are disappointments. Providence (2017) is shot on anamorphic film (which produces a wide-screen ratio of 1 (height) to 2.35 (width), effective enough in the case of Michael Hamburger) so that Dean can juxtapose the actor David Warner in profile, filmed in the UK, with hummingbirds filmed in Los Angeles. If you wonder about this juxtaposition (and there is no obligation to do so – just accept it) you have to be told in the caption that Warner loves hummingbirds. This is at the same time banal (who would not love watching hummingbirds?) and annoying (why do you have to read a caption to learn this? Could this information not be incorporated in the film in some way?). I had my own private disappointment with the film, which is not Dean’s fault. I have still a vivid memory of Warner as Henry VI in The Wars of the Roses at Stratford in the early sixties, and as Hamlet at Stratford in 1965, playing him as a disaffected student and thus chiming with the mood of the times. Seeing this low-key film of him somehow felt flat: I wanted him to launch into Shakespeare. Still, there is an interest in seeing an actor onscreen trying not to act. Was Warner deliberately trying to avoid performance? This is an interesting point about all film portraiture. Perhaps even with painted portraiture it could be said that Titian’s subjects (for example) could all be said to be performing. Photographic portraiture on the other hand is just as good when it captures the subject off-guard, a technique that Degas and Lautrec, for example, tried to make use of in the nineteenth century.

Nor could I be bothered with Manhattan Mouse Museum showing Claes Oldenburg arranging objects in his studio. My indifference may have had more to do with observation fatigue on my part as much as a lack of interest in the subject, which I concede might be very revealing to Oldenburg fans.

That fatigue was partially caused by trying to take an interest in the 29-minute film portrait of Cy Twombly (Edwin Parker, 2011), made in Twombly’s studio in Lexington, Virginia but being hardly familiar with his painting I somehow could not rouse any great enthusiasm. The film certainly had a characteristic gentleness and respect for its subject and the glimpses of his studio made him feel elusive, which is probably the point. Similarly elusive was the visit he makes with two friends to a restaurant in Lexington which was a desultory affair reinforced by their inaudibility as they made conversation. Dean also shows in the exhibition fifty or so underwhelming photographs taken in Twombly’s studio, especially disappointing.

The best in fact came last. A large space, which I measured as roughly 35m long by 13m wide is given over to a six-screen installation of a film portrait of Merce Cunningham (Merce Cunningham performs Stillness, 2008). Here is a rough sketch of these six screens and the projectors to show how the spectator could wander around the space:

Tac Dean installation of Merce C portrait

The film loop is relatively short because it is of Cunningham ‘listening’ to the composer John Cage’s piece ‘4 minutes 33 seconds’, a silent composition except that it is not silent because it makes you listen to ambient sound, which in this case is coming up from the New York street below, emphatically ambient you might say. With the six soundtracks going in one space, plus the sound of six projectors, the effect is positively raucous. Between them these six projected films of Cunningham make up something of a hologram, a definite virtual presence in a way the other portraits are not, and by far the most immersive work of all.

In the end I realized I was fatigued by watching all these elderly men, since of the eight works shown only GDGDA (2011) is of the relatively young female artist Julie Mehretu.

I should not be telling Dean nor the NPG about their business but I did want more variety of portraiture: more people, not just celebrated elderly male artists. And I wanted shorter, sharper, wittier films. I was disappointed too by the number of technicians involved for each film. For example, I counted eight for the Hockney film portrait plus a number of laboratories involved, which made the film seem overdetermined. Surely these film portraits can be made with someone operating the camera, someone doing the sound, and Dean making it all happen in the way she wants?

 

http://www.timcawkwell.co.uk

SEEING INTO DEEP SPACE: BRAKHAGE AND SAM FRANCIS

05 Monday Jun 2017

Posted by Tim Cawkwell in avant garde, Brakhage, metaphysical film, painting and photography

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Brakhage, galaxy photographs, Jackson Pollock, Sam Francis

Sam Francis, Untitled 1987 - detail       Sam Francis: Untitled (1987) – detail

Sam Francis, Tokyo 1974 - detail       Sam Francis: Tokyo (1974) – detail

Panels fm the walls of hvn

Stan Brakhage: Panels for the walls of heaven (2002)

Seeing paintings by the abstract expressionist Sam Francis (1923-1994) at a London gallery in May put me in mind of the late abstract films of his contemporary Stan Brakhage (1933-2003). There are intriguing links between the two artists. Francis is emphatically a Jackson Pollock disciple, fascinated with the techniques of flicking paint across the canvas or sheet of paper; less Pollockian in technique but Pollockian in spirit is his tactic of letting small pools of colour bleed into one another. Brakhage, to my mind, is another Pollock disciple in that Pollock’s crowded, all-consuming canvases of the 1950s, more than anything else at the time, encouraged Brakhage to use film as a mark-making process, frame by frame, that overwhelmed the spectator’s retina. In time he embraced abstraction pure and simple.

Second, you feel that Francis wants to express some macrocosmic view of the world, especially in those paintings with an ‘empty centre’ that offer a window onto infinity. He wants to emulate in paint the expressiveness of magnificent colour photographs of far-off galaxies.

Galaxy image 1

Galaxy image 2

Brakhage had similar preoccupations in his cosmic view of the world whether in the microcosm of Mothlight or the solar flares of the macrocosm in Dog Star Man, both from the 1960s. By the time of his pure abstract films of the 1990s, he pursues a fascination with light through stained glass (Chartres Series), and with the way the dull opacity of the film strip is made luminous by light passing through it. Francis too revelled in the pleasures of colour being made luminous when applied to a white background.

Both liked the colour blue:

Sam Francis, Chari Leiva

Sam Francis: Chari Leiva

Three Homerics 3

Stan Brakhage: Three Homerics (1993)

However – I should not get carried away. The way a Francis painting is perceived is in a different category  from the way a Brakhage film is perceived. You see a painting as a whole in a frozen moment even if you then choose to examine different areas of the picture. A film on the other hand is seen in time, as a sequence of parts, or if the film is made frame by frame, rather as a sequence of ‘atoms’ , and it is only when it is finished that you have a sense of the whole. The effects are very different: Francis has to be fixedly contemplated; with Brakhage you have to climb aboard the eyeball express.

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David Larcher’s ‘Mare’s Tail’ (1969)

17 Tuesday Jan 2017

Posted by Tim Cawkwell in avant garde, Brakhage, British cinema, spiritual cinema, underground film

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Brakhage, Edinburgh Film Festival, Larcher, LFMC

“A symphony should contain the whole world” was Gustav Mahler’s comment on his music. A film that aspires to the condition of music can do the same. Such is Mare’s Tail.

If the whole world is to be contained, you need length, so Mare’s Tail is 2½ hours long. In music, the risk would be tedium from the fact that the symphonic form is too conventional, too predictable, and too tedious, so that immense creative imagination is needed to break out of those constrictions. Mahler had it hence the power of his symphonies. In film, there are no such rules, at least not yet, so the risk for a film as long as Mare’s Tail is tedium on different grounds because the spectator has no idea where the film is going. David Larcher avoids this by threading into it, almost beneath our awareness, a beginning, a middle and an end. The film opens with a blank screen accompanied by a rising drone for some ten minutes. It reminded me straightaway of the droning E flat that opens Wagner’s ‘Ring’ cycle, and while further parallels should not be pressed, both works signal their epic intentions by this means. The middle of the film is taken up with a trajectory of some kind, from creation, to birth, to sex, to life, to death. And there is an end of a teasing kind. Finally after much shaking of the eyeballs, a written ‘FIN’ appears on the screen. This surely signals the end (although the use of French may be meant to throw us off the scent), only for our eyeballs to receive further jolts by the interspersing of white leader with fragments recalling earlier sequences in the film.

Larcher’s challenge was to glue the whole thing together. His principal way of doing this is by the style of the film. The images are clearly visible, but not in any way we are familiar with, since he uses negative footage, re-filming, stop-motion projection, optical printing, stretched images and other means to de-familiarise the way we watch films. The same strategy is used on the soundtrack, where we can hear words spoken and we can hear snatches of music, but they come to us through a fog filter of some kind so they are muffled and distorted. We know words are being spoken but we can barely hear what. We hear music, but identification is stymied. I thought I heard Bob Dylan’s ‘It’s all over now, baby blue’, but I am far from sure. There were suggestions of classical Indian music. The most identifiable piece was the tune from Beethoven’s Ode to Joy in his Ninth Symphony (another piece of music that contains the whole world), but it is played on unfamiliar instruments to give it a jolly, tinny, and quite anti-Beethovenian tone.

The right adjective for it all is an antiquated one from the 1960s – ‘trippy’. It invites us into a vision of the world where we feel free of anxiety. The humans that appear are beautiful people of their time, the animals, especially the frigate birds, are expressive of the wonders of the created order, and when he films a fly struggling on its back, or a fish gasping out its life in the water, or even the mass slaughter of turtles, these death throes feel free of pain. One brief sequence, filmed on the underground, shows a woman dropping down on the floor and playing dead or catastrophically ill; a young man then gets up, looks quizzically at her, crosses himself, and steps out of the carriage onto the platform. Even this death is treated as a tease. Also of its time is Larcher’s embrace of abstraction alongside the traces of the figurative and the autobiographical. By its length, the film disrupts time, and by its abstract particles, its dance of spheres and many other images that resist identification, it combines the microcosm with the macrocosm, and in doing so achieves a disruption of space.

The film was premièred at the Edinburgh Film Festival in 1969, Larcher having worked on it for several years, all through the summer of love of 1967, the explosion of flower power, the elaboration of the ‘far out’ culture. “Oh in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven.” It must have been a temptation to place a rock soundtrack on the finished film, but even if Larcher was tempted, he quite refused it. The whole film dances on the edge of the abyss of Self Indulgence, but somehow Larcher never falls in. Avoiding the facile solution of a rock soundtrack is one of the ways he does so.

Where do his images come from? In a way, they seem to have spilled out of him in a quite unmediated way, and for a British film Mare’s Tail is most unusually linked to the visionary quality of the pre-structuralist American avant-garde, when it was still called underground cinema. Had Larcher seen any of the films of Stan Brakhage? The birth sequences instantly bring to mind Brakhage’s Window Water Baby Moving (1959) and Thigh Line Lyre Triangular (1961), and the whole enterprise feels inspired by Dog Star Man (1961-4), Brakhage’s own epic vision of creation and his world within it. But this is quite speculative, and it is quite within the bounds of possibility that Larcher was making these images without any inspiration from Brakhage. What does link the film to the Americans is the ambition of his project. The 1970s work at the London Film-Makers’ Co-op, of which Larcher was a member, only rarely sought to match the scale of the American avant-garde, which itself took its cue from that of the Abstract Expressionist painters of the 1950s.

What does make it British is the fact it is in black-and-white. Surely this economy was forced on him, but Larcher makes the most of it both by his technical understanding of the medium of film, and also by the fact that when colour is used, it jolts the spectator, as if the annoying suspense of waiting for colour is resolved by the relief and the pleasure of its arrival. Like many good film-makers, including commercial ones, Larcher is focused on stringing good sequences together, always trying things out. You sense that there is never total mastery, but his technique never lets him down either, as if total mastery would banish the experimental, ‘open-field’ quality which he wants to convey.

So, is the film formless? Yes, but it is immersive and keeps drawing us in. Watching it, you can fall asleep certainly, and when you wake up you are re-engaged. It needs to be seen projected on a screen in a black space in order that we are properly underwater. In the end, its depiction of the whole of creation has an omniscient, life-affirming quality.

But I am still to discover why it is called Mare’s Tail. So what?

[Mare’s Tail was screened at the Close Up cinema in London on Sunday 15 January 2016.]

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London Film-Makers’ Co-operative: the first ten years

10 Tuesday Jan 2017

Posted by Tim Cawkwell in avant garde, British cinema, cinema and culture

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LFMC, London Film Makers' Coop, Lux, Mark Webber

I’ve done a review of ‘SHOOT SHOOT SHOOT: the first decade of the London Film-Makers’ Co-operative 1966-76′ edited by Mark Webber and published by Lux at the end of 2016. Read it here.

shoot-shoot-shoot

The London Film-Makers’ Cooperative (LFMC) was the counter-cultural distribution centre for underground/avant-garde/experimental/artists’ films that morphed into a place where films could be developed and printed outside commercial operations. It was collectivist in spirit, as enshrined in its various constitutions, and as borne out in practice.

It is a vivid part of vivid times, and this book offers some signposts to how its contribution to film culture may be assessed. Well worth reading.

1971 revisited

19 Monday Dec 2016

Posted by Tim Cawkwell in avant garde, Brakhage, Creation, metaphysical film, spiritual cinema

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Baillie, Belson, Brakhage

sftc-1

In 1971 I made an 8mm film called Sketches for the Creation, drawing on my understanding of the films of Stan Brakhage, Jordan Belson and Bruce Baillie for its inspiration. I was 23 at the time.

This year I had it digitized and have produced a new digital version, slightly reduced in length and with some brushstrokes of sound (nothing coercive, naturally). It is 12 minutes long.

If you are interested in seeing it go to: https://vimeo.com/194487765

http://www.timcawkwell.co.uk

Image

Down in the crypt . . .

20 Tuesday Sep 2016

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Apichatpong, Tate Modern, The Tanks, Uncle Boonmee, Weerasethakul

Last Wednesday I descended to The Tanks at Tate Modern in London, the crypt-like space made from where oil was stored in the days the building was a power station, Tate Modern’s past life so to speak.

2016-09-14-17-37-37

Here there is an installation worth catching of nine screens of the work of the Thai film-maker and installation artist, Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Go for the experience first of all, which is immersive: you can lie on the floor and lose yourself in time and the darkness, and soak up several screens that are separated in space at the same time. With the focus film, Primitive, one screen was on top of the other; while I have seen screens side-by-side, I have not seen this before. But putting aside the novelty, go for the images. AW has a thing about fire. You can see some young men playing flaming football, i.e. as they kick it about the ball is on fire. You can see artificial lightning flashes. These are intriguing because I thought at first they were ground-to-air fireworks, but as I looked I concluded they were activated by an electrical flash transmitted from above the camera frame, and therefore offscreen, to a lightning conductor in the ground. The ambiguity about how it was done is suspenseful, and anyway, the result is spectacular. Most extraordinary was the moment in Primitive when a figure in a white garment moves through a deep twilight landscape, and suddenly the garment bursts into flames, giving a vision of an animated flame-sculpture moving in the darkness.

I tend to be wary of modern film-making, because the technology has caused film-makers to jettison the chemistry that comes from between shots, from juxtapositions of forms and meanings, in favour of letting the camera run, and of running the risk of losing the visual excitement that editing can give. But here AW creates spectacular thrills for the camera to film, which are beautifully presented in this cavernous space.

Here is a list of the films on screen (all 2009):

  • I’m Still Breathing (11 min)
  • Nabua (9 min)
  • Primitive (30 min)
  • Nabua Song (4 min)
  • An Evening Shoot (4 min)
  • Making of the Spaceship (28 min)
  • A Dedicated Machine (1 min 35 secs)
  • Phantoms of Nabua (11 min)
  • A Letter to Uncle Boonmee

If you go, give yourself time.

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Posted by Tim Cawkwell | Filed under avant garde, cinema and culture, documentaries

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Stan Brakhage – the works

08 Thursday Sep 2016

Posted by Tim Cawkwell in avant garde, Brakhage, spiritual cinema

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Émilie Vergé, Brakhage, Paris Experimental

Émilie Vergé (ed.)

STAN BRAKHAGE: FILMS (1952-2003)           Catalogue raisonné

446pp. Paris Expérimental [www.paris-experimental.asso.fr], 65 euros, ISBN 978 2 912539 49 6

‘Catalogue raisonné’? ‘Filmography’ is the usual word to connote a film-maker’s list of films with dates and collaborators. So, why apply the idea of the catalogue raisonné, normally used of painters, to the work of the film-maker Stan Brakhage? The answer is that Brakhage was such an unusual film-maker. When he died in 2003, at the age of 70, he had more than 350 films to his name, the longest 260 minutes, the shortest 31 seconds. Up to now it has not been easy to get to grips with the totality of his work, only a portion being available on DVD. Paris Expérimental is to be congratulated on this bi-lingual catalogue that at a stroke allows an overview of all five decades of Brakhage’s career. The idea of a catalogue is apt in another way too: Brakhage was a visual artist like a painter and not a film director who collaborated with others.

This is the opening paragraph of my review of this new book cataloguing Brakhage’s large output of films. For the full review, go to: http://bit.ly/brakhage_cr

cat-raisonne

Little Dog for Roger by Malcolm

14 Tuesday Jun 2016

Posted by Tim Cawkwell in avant garde

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Le Grice, LFMC, Lirrle dog for roger

In 1968, the year of revolution, Malcolm Le Grice (below left) made a little film, Little Dog for Roger, which 50 years on can be seen to have had a lot of significance. First of all it went back to the beginning of cinema – acetate, film frame, sprockets – and secondly the construction of a home-made processor (Malcolm’s sketch below right) led him to the acquisition of a Debrie step printer for installation in the London Film Makers Co-operative. Out of that practical step arose the British structural-materialist film.

DSCN6515        MLG developer

2016 is the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the LFMC, and in May Malcolm Le Grice had a retrospective of his work on the BFI Southbank.

To mark both these events I have done an essay on Little Dog for Roger. Go to: http://www.timcawkwell.co.uk/little-dog-for-roger

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