Chris Marker, still from La Jetée, 28 min., France, French and German, Black and White, Mono.
Chris Marker, still from La Jetée, 28 min., France, French and German, Black and White, Mono.
Chris Marker, still from La Jetée, 28 min., France, French and German, Black and White, Mono.
Chris Marker, still from La Jetée, 28 min., France, French and German, Black and White, Mono.
Peter Greenaway, still from Vertical Features Remake, 1978, 45 mins, Color, UK, English, 16mm.
Hollis Frampton, still from Nostalgia (Hapax Legomena I), 1971, 31 min., U.S., black and white, silent.
Sharon Lockhart, still from NO, 2003, Japan/US, 34 min, color.
Michael Snow, still from Wavelength, 1967 (not on the program). |
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Nelson-Atkins
Museum of Art
4525 Oak Street
Kansas City
816-751-1278
Atkins Auditorium
Electromediascope Winter 2009: Time and Event
in the Still and Moving Image
7 p.m. February 13, 20 and 27
February 13, 2009-
February 27, 2009
All cinematic sequences involve rapidly flashing still photographs that are magically transformed into an illusion of organic movement. The observer’s mind and body respond to and make sense of these moving pictures as with other visual patterns, movements and multi-sensory associations that the body already knows.
A person viewing a photograph or painting controls the timing and duration of the event while moving around within the image in a way that is different from the experience of time and representational events that occur in most films.
The films presented in this program employ diverse and unconventional strategies for organizing and experiencing still images as cinematic events.
7 p.m., February 13
Peter Greenaway, Vertical Features Remake, 1978, 45 mins, Color, UK, English, 16mm. Peter Greenaway shows an innovative use of sound to image in his mocking parody, an examination by a group of rival academics to remake an incomplete and largely missing film allegedly made by Tulse Luper. The film in question is called Vertical Lists, or Vertical Features, which shows vertical objects like posts, poles, tree trunks etc in a domestic landscape. Each remake uses a differing structure of counting and musical technique to count the 121 (11x11) vertical objects that Tulse Luper allegedly planned for the project.
Hollis Frampton, Zorns Lemma, 1970, 60 minutes, 16mm, color, sound. A film on structure and logic, this is an amazing experimental film from American avant-garde filmmaker Hollis Frampton. It begins with a dark screen and a woman narrating from The Bay State Primer, an early American grammar textbook that teaches the letters of the alphabet by using them in sentences derived from the Bible, then the rest of the film is mostly silent. It presents us with a recurring structure that perpetually moves throughout a 24-letter alphabet via various signs in New York with words that propel the film along. Gradually other images are added to the loop, some of them themselves slowly developing as we arrive at them the next time around. It concludes with a man, woman and dog crossing a snowy field, while several narrators each narrate one word at a time read from an 11th century treatise, "On Light, or the Ingression of Forms", by Robert Grosseteste. Ambiguous, metaphorical and fascinating. A veritable masterpiece of structural filmmaking.
7 p.m., February 20
Chris Marker, La Jetée, 28 min., France, French and German, Black and White, Mono. Constructed almost entirely from still photos, it tells the story of a post-nuclear war experiment in time travel. The survivors of a destroyed Paris in the aftermath of World War III live underground in the Palais de Chaillot galleries. They research time travel, hoping to send someone back before the devastating war to recover food, medicine, or energy for the present, "to summon the past and future to the aid of the present." The traveler is a male prisoner; his vague but obsessive childhood memory of witnessing a woman (Hélène Chatelain) during a violent incident on the boarding platform ("The Jetty") at Orly Airport is the key to his journey back in time.
He is thrown back to the past again and again. He repeatedly meets and speaks to the woman who was present at the terminal. After his successful passages to the past, the experimenters attempt to send him into the deep future. In a brief meeting with the technologically advanced people of the future, he is given a power unit sufficient to regenerate his own destroyed society. On his return, he is cast aside by his jailers to die. Before he can be executed, he is contacted by the people of the future, who offer to help him escape to their time, but he asks to be returned to the time of his childhood. He is returned, only to find the violent incident he partially witnessed as a child was his own death as an adult.
Michael Snow, Breakfast (Table Top Dolly), 1976, 15 min., Canada, Color, Silent. Breakfast (Table Top Dolly) is a comic parody of the earlier, experimental, highly-respected Snow film, Wavelength, 1967. In Breakfast the camera destroys the contents of a cluttered tabletop by tracking forward. Ultimately, Snow should be most celebrated for La Région Centrale, a five-day shoot up a mountain in north Quebec in which Snow explored the cosmic relationship of time and space. Of his work he simply says: "I've just been making works that I'd like to see, hoping that others might find them interesting too. I guess that if someone's experience has been mainly narrative film, my films and videos are different enough that some of them might 'unnerve' someone."
Hollis Frampton, Nostalgia (Hapax Legomena I), 1971, 31 min., U.S., black and white, silent. The film is composed of still black and white photographs taken by Frampton during his early artistic explorations which are slowly burned on the element of a hot plate, while the soundtrack offers personal comments on the content of the images, read by fellow artist Michael Snow. Each comment/story is heard in succession before the related photograph appears onscreen, thus causing the viewer to actively engage with the "past" and "present" moments as presented within the film. After Zorns Lemma, he made the Hapax Legomena films, a series of seven films of which (nostalgia) is the best-known. Several of these films explored the relation between sound and cinema, an area often disregarded in American avant-garde film, by demonstrating a disjointed relationship between the two. Poetic Justice explores a "cinema of the mind", wherein the film takes place in the viewers' imagination(s) as they read title cards. An extremely rare artist book edition of Poetic Justice was printed by the Visual Studies Workshop.
Sharon Lockhart, NO, 2003, Japan/US, 34 min, color. NO displays the work of a Japanese husband and wife farmer. The static, unchanging frame of Lockhart's camera captures the meticulous and methodical execution of a mundane daily activity. The farmers pile hay, working from background to foreground, then slowly move backwards spreading the hay across the otherwise empty field. What Lockhart has captured on film resembles the construction of a landscape painting in real, linear time. Lockhart suggests a comparison between these farmers' work and the practice of NO-no Ikebana, a radical form of Ikebana flower arranging.
7 p.m., February 27
James Benning, Ten Skies, 2004, USA, 101 min, 16mm. Ten Skies consists of ten different shots, each ten minutes long. Each of the shots consists of a straight-on shot of the sky, each sky having very different visual characteristics. The audio consists of the natural sounds heard at each of the locations, providing interesting clues as to where the camera is.
Benning says, "Ten Skies is a companion film to 13 Lakes. It too looks at light; here, directly at its source — the sun. All ten skies were filmed from my backyard in Southern California: skies formed from weather systems, mountain land currents, wildfires, pollution, and the wind; skies as a function of landscape; the sound giving clues about the land below. Each sky is a detail selected from the whole; sometimes filled with drama, sometimes a metaphor for peace. I'm really interested in the ways the sky changes in reaction to the landscape below — how the clouds look above the mountains, over flat lands, above a forest fire, which was kind of creating its own weather system. There's this one shot where these two white clouds are in the frame and then this black cloud from behind comes up and covers the whole frame — it makes a wipe! The whole thing is very dramatic, and it's just cloud movement. All the shots end up with a dynamic quality. I never saw that before, I never had the courage. It took me fifty years to look at the sky like that! I call it 'found paintings'. I think of my landscape works now as anti-war artworks – they' re about the antithesis of war, the kind of beauty we're destroying. The 'Ten Skies' works came about because I'm thinking about what the opposite of war is." |
