The Edge Of Cinema: Experimental Cinema Log #5 - Light is Calling

[After a month's hiatus, the continuing series focussing on snapshots of experimental cinema starts up again. Apologies for the time it took to get this up and running again, it's been a busy month].

LIGHT IS CALLING (Bill Morrison; USA; 2004)

[8 mins]

Light is Calling was released two years after Decasia, Morrison’s masterwork of recombined decaying film stock, and it can be considered as a capsule-sized appendage to the older film. Unlike the collation of assorted nitrate fragments that shape Decasia, Light is Calling is a decaying narrative composed entirely from the decaying stock of one film, James Young's The Bells, made in 1926.

Morrison sculpted not one but two films from a decaying copy of The Bells, having also made The Mesmerist a year earlier. Both of these films hone the issues of cinematic mortality that Decasia alluded to by zeroing in on one finite, singular decaying source and offering a positive and creative solution to the future decline of legible cinema by carving two narratives from the one text. Both films wear the hallmarks of the metaphors that circulate around archiving – mortality, the need to ameliorate instability and fragility, the hope of regeneration, the past's relation to the present.

Whereas The Mesmerist is a testament to the power of recombining previously used footage to create a new narrative, Light Is Calling is a furious, disorienting, swirling sea of bubbles, boils, fissures, and pockmarks. The Mesmerist has a sheen of decay that adds texture to the narrative, whereas Light Is Calling takes mortality to an extreme. There is so much obliteration of the image in this eight-minute film that it seems to suggest an imagining of cinema as already dead. The decay creates constant mist swirls, suggesting a haunted film, attempting to project itself from the archival grave. The title alone suggests as much – Light is Calling, as if the light of cinema is calling from its distant past.

What is fascinating about Light is Calling is how the decay becomes the central component not just of the film’s form but also of its narrative content. The decay helps to reinvent and revive the old film, concocting an entirely new narrative, and perhaps heralding the beginning of future decay-narratives. It becomes a character, a monstrous entity that pushes the story forward.

Through a miasmatic haze of constantly churning decay, a simple story occurs in fragmentary glimpses. A woman is trapped inside a morass of celluloidal mist, being constantly buffeted and pummeled by this sea of nitrate-decay. It is as if she is trying to survive the death of the film, like a drowning swimmer waving in the surf. Meanwhile, a group of cavalrymen search ceaselessly, travelling forested paths attempting both to find the woman and to find a way out of the decaying film. The leader of the cavalrymen finds the woman, and in a remarkable moment reaches into the boiling haze and pulls the woman out. They ride off together, decay-mist still surrounding and attacking them, to find a new life for themselves outside of their world of nitrate.

Thus, Light is Calling gauges a feeling of triumph rather than melancholy for the plight of decaying film. Rather than the doomed legacy that beholds the future of decaying nitrate film, Light is Calling shows it to be filled with potential for renewed, vigorous experimental beginnings, and thus this film is a clarion call for nitrate’s victorious survival in new forms.

The film can be viewed here.

KUCHAR, BELSON, BREER – quick notes on a tribute

A few days ago I managed to catch an evening of films paying tribute to three experimental filmmakers who died last year – George Kuchar, Jordan Belson, and Robert Breer. This was a rare opportunity to see work by these three on the big screen, so the event was a must-see.

The evening started with a handful of films by Kuchar, starting with his most well-known film Hold Me While I’m Naked. Watching a series of Kuchar films is a little bit like listening to too much Wagner, black metal, or noise music in one sitting – in a small dose it’s fine, but too much and after some time your head begins to feel as if it’s dehydrating. Thus, after 70 minutes worth of constant intense orchestral music to back the lurid and comic faux-melodrama and by the end your head is kind of sore.

If anything, watching Kuchar is an opportunity to enter into the world of cheap shitty New York apartments from the 1960’s. In almost every film we get to see a grimy, mouldy, cramped bathroom, and focussing on the small details such as the horrid, dank atmosphere of these bathrooms becomes a small pleasure in its own right. This is unadorned filmmaking, dressed up through its overuse of melodrama to appear completely adorned. The most fascinating moments were observing the pockmarks and acne in close-ups on the face of the lead male character in Eclipse of the Sun Virgin, or the huge balls of dust gathered at the edges of the room in The Mongreloid.

The meditative unfolding of colour, patterns, and rhythm of Belson’s films come as an immediate antidote to the audio-visual bombast of Kuchar’s work. Belson’s films exude billowing calm. Of the five films presented, I’d only seen one before, Allures, as part of a compendium of 5 films released on DVD by the Center of Visual Music. Although a small-screen viewing of this was spellbinding, nothing prepares you for the journey experienced via the big screen.

The overarching effect of viewing Belson’s films is clearly stated in the titles – Cosmos, Meditation, Chakra, Cycles. The screen is filled with swathes and washes of gently-roiling coloured mist, smoke, water, and spiralling circles, and it feels as if the eye is being taught how to slow down. The effect is one of total immersion, a kind of submission to the constant drifting movement of colours and circular patterns. But this is not just a soporific experience – the films still have pace and energy, shapes constantly morphing from one state to the next, always in flux, never in stasis. The ‘real world’ even manages to break through into these films (a brief shot of a diver in Meditation; a naked figure, parachutists, and even what appears to be a cityscape in Cycles), but these fleeting images become a part of the seamless meditative fabric that Belson weaves.

Constant motion is also the heart of Breer’s films, although the pace is far more frenetic. Collaged scraps and scribbled drawings are constantly twisting and hopping in fits across the screen, appearing and being replaced by a new manic sketch in the blink of an eye. Yet, despite the pile-up of animated debris that Breer pumps out at a rapid rate, this is also an incredibly immersive experience, producing a different kind of meditation. If Belson is akin to meditating via the sound gently-chiming singing bowls, then Breer is like meditating via white noise.

The most fascinating part of watching this small program of Breer’s output (16 films over 80 minutes), is mapping the chronological progression of his filmmaking. His earlier films from the 1950’s seem more likely to use cut-ups of newspapers and magazines, and the pace is rapid, buzzing, nonrepetitive. Later films introduce rhythmic cycles (like the start of 69, with a simple geometric drawing rotating through the screen, over and over), and become more like diary films, with the soundtrack composed of recordings supposedly from Breer’s domestic environment. Throughout, the insistent theme pulsing through Breer’s films is pure unadulterated spontaneity, stringing together improvised doodles and creating an animated cinema of pure ‘now’.

101 FILMS: A JOURNEY FROM 1991-2011

[Been quiet the past couple of weeks, due to dealing with a busy transitional phase in life, shifting vocational focus. I aim to get back on board with some regular posting this week, with the desire to get another experimental cinema post up and running in the next couple of days]

This is my 101st post. Obviously I’ve just realised this recently, as I would have been celebrating a 100th post as opposed to the 101st, but hey a post is a post is a post, as Gertrude Stein would never have said if she had been a blogger.

I can probably mark my first truly earnest year of cinema-passion as 1991, because that was the first year I recall heading off to the local international film festival by myself, poring through the festival booklet and trying to see as much as I could. So, seeing how the years 1991 to 2011 present a tidyish twenty year stretch, I've decided to celebrate my 101st post by presenting a list of 101 films that represent a journey of little epiphanies – moments that mark some kind of development in my understanding and appreciation of cinema.

Let's get this clear. It's not a 'best of' list. And these are not necessarily my favourite films of each director represented in the list (only one film per director, by the way - no reason why, we just need rules sometimes).

It's simply a journey, charting little boundary-pushing explosions of surprise.

It maps first encounters with directors I grew to love. It reflects films that allowed me to finally obtain a clearer understanding of a director’s work, made me think "ahh, now I get it", giving me the werewithal to re-appraise previous work. It charts films that lit me up, that had my head buzzing after leaving the cinema. It highlights films that sparked a whole new line of enquiry, a new understanding of the language of cinema, a new path of cinematic discovery.

Right, enough preamble. Here’s the list.

1.      LA BELLE NOISEUSE (Jacques Rivette; France; 1991)
2.      RAISE THE RED LANTERN (Zhang Yimou; Hong Kong; 1991) 
3.      VAN GOGH (Maurice Pialat; France; 1991)
4.      THE QUINCE TREE SUN (Victor Erice; Spain; 1991) 
5.      NIGHT ON EARTH (Jim Jarmusch; USA; 1991)
6.      NAKED LUNCH (David Cronenberg; USA; 1991) 
7.      THE LEADER, HIS DRIVER, AND HIS DRIVER’S WIFE (Nick Broomfield; UK; 1991)
8.      CAREFUL (Guy Maddin; Canada; 1992) 
9.      THE PLAYER (Robert Altman; USA; 1992)
10.   GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS (James Foley; USA; 1992)
11.   RESERVOIR DOGS (Quentin Tarantino; USA; 1992)
12.   TIME INDEFINITE (Ross McElwee; USA; 1993) 
13.   CALENDAR (Atom Egoyan; Canada/ Germany/ Armenia; 1993)
14.   SONATINE (Takeshi Kitano; Japan; 1993) 
15.   NAKED (Mike Leigh; UK; 1993)
16.   THREE COLOURS; BLUE, WHITE, RED (France/ Poland/ Switzerland; 1993-1994) 
17.   SATANTANGO (Bela Tarr; Hungary-Germany-Switzerland; 1994)
18.   THE KINGDOM (Lars von Trier; Denmark; 1994) 
19.   CARO DIARIO (Nanni Moretti; Italy/ France; 1994)
20.   LONDON (Patrick Keiller; UK; 1994) 
21.   HOOP DREAMS (Steve James; USA; 1994)
22.   BEFORE THE RAIN (Milcho Manchevski; UK/ France/ Macedonia; 1994) 
23.   LA HAINE (Mathieu Kassovitz; France; 1995)
24.   FARGO (Joel and Ethan Coen; USA; 1995) 
25.   HEAT (Michael Mann; USA; 1995)
26.   A MOMENT OF INNOCENCE (Mohsen Makhmalbaf; Iran/ France/ Switzerland; 1995) 
27.   UNDERGROUND (Emir Kusturica; France/ Germany/ Hungary; 1995)
28.   LONE STAR (John Sayles; USA; 1995) 
29.   CRUMB (Terry Zwigoff; USA; 1995)
30.   IRMA VEP (Olivier Assayas; France; 1996) 
31.   DRIFTING CLOUDS (Aki Kaurismaki; Finland; 1996)
32.   WACO: THE RULES OF ENGAGEMENT (William Gazecki; USA; 1997) 
33.   FAST, CHEAP, AND OUT OF CONTROL (Errol Morris; USA; 1997)
34.   PUBLIC HOUSING (Frederick Wiseman; USA; 1997) 
35.   BOOGIE NIGHTS (Paul Thomas Anderson; USA; 1997)
36.   FUNNY GAMES (Michael Haneke; Austria; 1997) 
37.   A TASTE OF CHERRY (Abbas Kiarostami; Iran; 1997)
38.   MOTHER AND SON (Aleksandr Sokurov; Russia/ Germany; 1997) 
39.   THE INTERVIEW (Harun Farocki; Germany; 1997)
40.   HAPPINESS (Todd Solondz; USA; 1998) 
41.   42 UP (Michael Apted; UK; 1998)
42.   THE THIN RED LINE (Terrence Malick; USA; 1998) 
43.   FESTEN (Thomas Vinterberg; Denmark; 1998)
44.   BEAU TRAVAIL (Claire Denis; France; 1998) 
45.   I STAND ALONE (Gaspar Noe; France; 1998)
46.   RING (Hideo Nakata; Japan; 1998) 
47.   AFTER LIFE (Hirokazu Kore-eda; Japan; 1998)
48.   HISTOIRE(S) DU CINEMA (Jean-Luc Godard; France; 1998) 
49.   ETERNITY AND A DAY (Theo Angelopoulos; Greece/ France/ Italy/ Germany; 1998)
50.   ALONE, LIFE WASTES ANDY HARDY (Martin Arnold; Austria; 1998) 
51.   PONY GLASS (Lewis Klahr; USA; 1998)
52.   FILM IST. (1-12) (Gustav Deutsch; Austria; 1998/2002) 
53.   ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER (Pedro Almodovar; Spain; 1999)
54.   ROSETTA (Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne; Belgium/ France; 1999) 
55.   RATCATCHER (Lynne Ramsay; UK/ France; 1999)
56.   L’HUMANITE (Bruno Dumont; France; 1999) 
57.   OUTER SPACE (Peter Tscherkassky; Austria; 1999)
58.   SONGS FROM THE SECOND FLOOR (Roy Andersson; Sweden/ France/ Denmark/ Norway/ Germany; 2000) 
59.   EUREKA (Shinji Aoyama; Japan; 2000)
60.   THE CIRCLE (Jafar Panahi; Iran; 2000) 
61.   IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE (Wong Kar-Wai; Hong Kong/ France; 2000)
62.   YI YI (Edward Yang; Taiwan/ Japan; 2000)  
63.   THE GLEANERS AND I (Agnes Varda; France; 2000)
64.   NINE QUEENS (Fabian Bielinsky; Argentina; 2000) 
65.   PLATFORM (Jia Zhangke; Hong Kong/ Japan/ France/ Netherlands/ Switzerland; 2000)
66.   MULHOLLAND DRIVE (David Lynch; USA; 2001) 
67.   BLOODY SUNDAY (Paul Greengrass; UK/ Ireland; 2001)
68.   TIME OUT (Laurent Cantet; France; 2001) 
69.   PULSE (Kiyoshi Kurosawa; Japan; 2001)
70.   A MA SOEUR! (Catherine Breillat; France/ Italy; 2001) 
71.   THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS (Wes Anderson; USA; 2001)
72.   FEMME FATALE (Brian De Palma; France; 2002) 
73.   THE CENTURY OF THE SELF (Adam Curtis; UK; 2002)
74.   DISTANT (Nuri Bilge Ceylan; Turkey/ Netherlands; 2002) 
75.   TO BE AND TO HAVE (Nicolas Philibert; France; 2002)
76.   DECASIA (Bill Morrison; USA; 2002)  
77.   BUS 174 (Felipe Larceda & Jose Padilha; Brazil; 2002)
78.   GOODBYE, DRAGON INN (Tsai Ming-liang; Taiwan; 2003) 
79.   ELEPHANT (Gus van Sant; USA; 2003)
80.   THE BEST OF YOUTH (Marco Tullio Giordana; Italy; 2003) 
81.   MEMORIES OF MURDER (Bong Joon-ho; South Korea; 2003)
82.   KINGS AND QUEEN (Arnaud Desplechin; France; 2004) 
83.   OLDBOY (Park Chan-wook; South Korea; 2004)
84.   LOS MUERTOS (Lisandro Alonso; Argentina/ France/ Netherlands/ Switzerland; 2004) 
85.   THE HOLY GIRL (Lucrecia Martel; Argentina/ Spain/ Netherlands/ Italy/ Switzerland; 2004)
86.   GRIZZLY MAN (Werner Herzog; USA; 2005) 
87.   WORKINGMAN’S DEATH (Michael Glawogger; Austria/ Germany; 2005)
88.   SYNDROMES AND A CENTURY (Apichatpong Weerasethakul; Thailand/ France/ Netherlands/ Austria; 2006) 
89.   12.08 EAST OF BUCHAREST (Corneliu Porumboiu; Romania/ France; 2006)
90.   COLOSSAL YOUTH (Pedro Costa; Portugal/ France/ Switzerland; 2006) 
91.   SILENT LIGHT (Carlos Reygadas; Mexico/ France/ Netherlands; 2007)
92.   AT SEA (Peter Hutton; USA; 2007) 
93.   IN THE CITY OF SYLVIA (Jose Luis Guerin; Spain/ France; 2007)
94.   MODERN LIFE (Raymond Depardon; France; 2008) 
95.   MAN ON WIRE (James Marsh; UK; 2008)
96.   LET THE RIGHT ONE IN (Tomas Alfredson; Sweden/ Norway; 2008) 
97.   DOGTOOTH (Giorgos Lanthimos; Greece; 2009)
98.   DISORDER (Weikai Huang; China; 2009) 
99.   EXIT THROUGH THE GIFT SHOP (Banksy; UK; 2010)
100.  NOSTALGIA FOR THE LIGHT (Patricio Guzman; Chile/ France/ Germany; 2010) 
101.  LE QUATTRO VOLTE (Michelangelo Frammartino; Italy/ France/ Switzerland; 2010)

The Edge Of Cinema: Experimental Cinema Log #4 - Lapis

LAPIS (James Whitney; USA; 1966)

[9 mins]

James Whitney’s body of work is notably small, having opted to devote more time to pottery than filmmaking from the late 1960’s til his death in 1982, yet his films Yantra and Lapis sit comfortably high in the ranks of well-regarded abstract cinema. While Yantra took ten years to complete, it’s intricate patterns being drawn entirely by hand on small filing cards, Lapis was completed in three years, the process being aided through the assistance of a mechanical analogue computer built by Whitney’s brother, John.

Yet Lapis doesn’t completely feel like a ‘computer film’ – the constant rhythmic movement of soft, tiny coloured particles give the impression of breathing, of life. The opening sequence provides the best example of this life-energy; the film gently fades into a white frame, not stark but soft, like the white of clouds. Within this pillowy texture, tiny grey dots begin to emerge, forming a circle on the outer edges of the frame, constantly shimmering. The circle deepens, as more grey particles swarm and shimmy towards the centre of the frame. Soon most of the frame is consumed with gently vibrating grey dots, forming the first of many mandala-like patterns through the film.

According to Gene Youngblood in Expanded Cinema, this sequence was achieved via a mixture of hand-painted and mechanical means. Youngblood states, “Whitney hand-painted glass plates with fields of dot-patterns that began sparsely and collected into high concentration toward the centre. These were placed on rotating tables beneath a vertically-mounted camera. The tables spun on their own axes while simultaneously revolving around another axis, and at the same time moving horizontally across camera range.”

What this reveals is an intense level of determination and effort that exudes through the film. This is not a hastily-arranged proto-screensaver – the constant movement of spiralling circles is created through fervent concentration, and this vitality pulsates through the film, inducing a reflective state in the viewer.

The title, Lapis, appears to have been carefully chosen to tap into this meditative mode – it refers to lapis philosophorum, or the philosopher’s stone, a core component of alchemy that assists in attaining enlightenment, immortality, perfection, and meditative bliss. The philosopher’s stone is created through an alchemical process that involves many colour changes and concludes in multiplication, which is perfectly embodied in the constantly evolving colour cycles in Lapis, and a concluding sequence where the mandala-circle rends itself into two separate circular entities.  Whitney’s Lapis is thus an alchemical journey, symbolising the processes of life and universe and the desire to attain the highest forms of knowledge.

The film ripples with upheaval and dispersion, then reformation and unity, always constantly flowing from one state to the next. The opening sequence described earlier ends when the grey mandala is replaced with brown, yellow, and red concentric pattern that breathes and shimmers until it breaks apart, leaving a shower of dots to gently float into formation, creating the word “lapis.” This word explodes, and soon the dots form the same pulsing mandala we saw before. The colour switches to blue, the circles describe tightly-defined arcs and then the dots begin to grow, blur, and disperse once again. The film has a constant ebb and flow that alludes to the microcosmic atomic aspect of life and the macrocosmic infinities of the universe.

The centre is the key, it magnetically attracts the viewer’s attention. All movement appear to emanate from the flowing centre. It’s a reminder of the eye, of the sun, of the birth canal, of the nipple. And the constant changes of colour and patterns, while retaining a core concentric flow, attribute a sense of there being many possible centres, many possible universes.

The last minute of the film involves a remarkable sequence, where the white screen with a pulsing grey circle returns, and is then reversed to a sharp black screen with a bright white circle, providing a kind of contrast of positive/ negative forces. This white circle begins to strobe and warp, pulling and tearing itself into pained ovals before finally breaking apart into two separate worlds. It’s as if we are witnessing a version of the Big Bang. Then the grey particles return once more, move quickly in towards the centre and out and number of times, disappearing one last time to leave a white screen, which fades to black. Thus it ends where it started, the transformations returning us to pure white then infinite black. Life, death, creation, and transformation all exist in this one small sequence. The alchemical journey of Lapis is also a manifestation of cinema-as-alchemy - the transformation of ideas into a greater whole, coming to life and then ending, but ready to come to life again at a moments notice.

Lapis can be viewed here.

The Edge Of Cinema: Experimental Cinema Log #3 - The Kiss

THE KISS (Rafael Montanez Ortiz; USA; 1985)

[6 mins]

Sometimes films and filmmakers slip in between the cracks in the annals of experimental cinema. In the historical arc of found footage filmmaking, the work of Raphael Montanez Ortiz very rarely gets discussed, yet he has produced a body of work that is extremely rich both in size of filmography and intensity of content. It seems a steady growth of appreciation of his work is just beginning to emanate, even though his first forays into found footage filmmaking occurred contemporaneously with Bruce Conner in the late 1950’s.
Ortiz’s filmmaking career occurs in two distinct periods –the first during the years 1956-1958, and the second from 1985 to 1996. In between these periods he produced a wide array of performance art events, installations, and paintings, creating a multi-mediated manifesto based on destruction. The films from the first period were created under the auspices of ritual performance, with Ortiz chanting and punching holes into strips of film, then re-playing it, or placing segments of cut-up film into a medicine bag, shaking and ‘cleansing’ the film, then splicing the film into a new sequence based on its procurement from the bag. His second period involved corrupting short segments from a laser-disc copy of a film, usually Hollywood films, and manipulating these segments through a computer, advancing or reversing the film at varying speeds to create stuttering rhythmic cinema seizures.

The Kiss occurs at the beginning of Ortiz’s productive second phase, and is a remarkable reminder of Martin Arnold’s Pièce Touchée, although Ortiz made his film four years before Arnold. Like Arnold’s film, this is a pulsating intervention into an old black-and-white Hollywood film, with a section of film originally only a few seconds long being drawn out into a vibrating interchange between a man and a woman that lasts many minutes. Whereas Arnold’s magnificent film works on the sensation of reconvening space, creating a circular choppy rhythm that gently nudges the characters into a flowing staccato dance, Ortiz’s hypnotic film is a relentless barrage of opposing forces, as if time is attempting to move forward and back in the same instance. The result is a film rife with violence and passion, where a kiss becomes a brutal attack and the opening of a door becomes a furious infinity-loop that seems to rupture very surface of the film.

The film starts with the man in a corridor, clearly about to enter a room. Immediately the head of the woman enters from the left-hand side of the frame, superimposed on the man, shuddering repeatedly and appearing to chase the man. Time is disrupted here, for she seems to chases him into opening a door in front of her, creating a hiccup in chronology and instigating a repeated sense of attraction and repulsion. Her pulsing hand movements appear to both push the door shut and pull it open, which is mirrored later when her hand reaches to the man’s chest, both to embrace him and to repel him at the same time. The film emits a physical blizzard of tension and ambiguity, where opposing emotions occupy the same nervous-tic gesture. And as the film fades out rather than cuts abruptly to an end, there’s a sense that this stammering world continues into an infinite void.

Perhaps the most compelling aspect of Ortiz’s film is its palpability – the incessant throbbing movement alludes to intervening hands and tools shaking and hammering into the fabric of the film, creating a visual manifestation of the pliability of images.

You can view the film by clicking here.

The Edge Of Cinema: Experimental Cinema Log #2 - Sidewinder's Delta

SIDEWINDER’S DELTA (Pat O’Neill; USA; 1976)

[20 mins]

This film is nestled within a rich vein of work that O’Neill pumped out throughout the 1970’s. A master of the optical printer, O’Neill’s overarching aesthetic, via re-photographing, re-colouring and shading images, has been to overlay images to create an unusually palpable version of dream logic. It’s not so much that we’re presented with a series of un-related images, as would usually befit the ‘dreamlike imagery’ tag – it’s more that we see a series of discrete aesthetic events, without any obvious relationship.

In Sidewinder’s Delta, the film starts with a flow of bubbling swathes of colour –pastel hues of blue, green, yellow, and white. Redolent of the movement of a river, or the curvaceous rippling of a snake, this start to the film is an embodiment of its title. But as these washes of colour are superseded by a layer of broken blackness, this event ceases, and is replaced by grass-like scratches drawn over a grey-blue image that is never fully seen. After two minutes of jerky angular greenish scratches, this event abruptly stops and is replaced with a shot of palm-trees overlaid on to an image of a hand, giving the hand the appearance of a mobile mountain. And then this is replaced with shots of coloured squares lying on a desert floor, a patch of grass, and a flower-rich meadow. As these squares move in the wind, the colours change. And so it goes, the film moving from time-lapse footage of the desert, to a hand-trowel jutting out of the desert like a monument, to fruit being manipulated by tuning forks to the tune of static-filled, between-channels radio, to a pendulum swinging around a house set in a barren landscape, to a cactus changing colour in harmony with colour changes from an adjacent light bulb, and so on.

As the late great writer on experimental cinema, Paul Arthur, has pointed out, O’Neill is constantly engaging in the texture and tectonics of the surface of the image. In Lines of Sight, Paul Arthur refers to “the notion of “surface” as a site of intense transactions, a realm where themes of regulation and disruption, the everyday and the fantastic, are intertwined in comic and menacing articulations.” Sidewinder’s Delta is replete with these surfaces, always combining quotidian objects and transforming them into something more fantastic. There are frames within frames (the paper squares in natural environments) and a tactility to the layering of images (stones, cacti, desert dirt, grass).

O’Neill is based in Los Angeles, and Sidewinder’s Delta is a paean of sorts to the environs that have become part of the mythical landscapes of his homebase. The desert landscape becomes a commonly-used backdrop through the entire film, and O’Neill appears to be pre-occupied with both acknowledging these iconic spaces as well as transforming them into abstract vistas. In fact, it seems that Sidewinder’s Delta was initially intended as an ‘indirect Western’, “a meditation on the myth of wilderness” (to quote Paul Arthur again).

O’Neill presents these fragments of odd aesthetic events with a great deal of playfulness, and humour is a crucial component to this film. It is the incongruous and inventive use of sound that often adds an extra layer to the already-multi-layered images. A serene time-lapse image of a desert is soundtracked with the sound of someone blowing into a mic, emulating the sound of wind. A block-shaped building layered on top of a hilly landscape is serenaded by the swamp-pop song “Breakin’ Up is Hard to Do”. It soon becomes clear that the song has an echoey resonance, as if played from a haunted ballroom, and as the scene progresses, sounds that appear to be squeaky doors and then gun-shots can be heard. Somehow O’Neill simultaneously conjures up amusement, nostalgia (swamp-pop was already a bygone musical genre by 1976, and the images and sounds also conjure up Westerns and radio culture), melancholy, and a slightly sinister tone, with unexplained creaks and blasts occurring while a large pendulum marks time across the frame. It is the ability to sustain all of these associations via the welding of seemingly incongruous objects and landscapes that makes O’Neill’s film a complex yet mesmeric experience.

"1001 FILMS" COUNTDOWN; #61 - ALI ZAOUA, PRINCE OF THE STREETS

ALI ZAOUA, PRINCE OF THE STREETS (Nabil Ayouch; Morocco/ Tunisia/ France/ Belgium; 2000)

[deleted after the 4th edition]

The “1001 Movies” guide states that this film, about three street children who are trying to bury a dead friend in a manner befitting his fantasy of being a sailor, is “powerful” due to the “deft juggling of [the] character’s harsh lives with both humour and unabashed sentimentality.” In fact, it seems the director, Nabil Ayouch, “wants to break your heart, is determined to do so, and succeeds.”

Hmmm.

If heart-break is to occur, it would not be due to a harsh depiction of pre-teen homelessness in Morocco. It’s not completely sanitised, there’s still a layer of grime involved – sniffing glue to fend off hunger, suggestions of child prostitution and rape – but it’s easy to forget the dire world these characters are supposed to inhabit. Somehow, poverty and the struggle to survive seem to melt away from the story, leaving a more romantic residue based around the bonds of friendship forged between these boys. And perhaps that is where this heart-break is supposed to come from – the resilience and tenacity of friendship, all tied up neatly at the end of the film when the three boys all sing together in memory of their deceased comrade.

But why such a near-dirtless, ‘unabashed sentimental’ vision of homelessness in Casablanca? Was the potential for truly harsh ‘realities’ subdued because of funding from European sources, thus shaping a ‘cleaner’ story for fear of losing important financial backing? Compared to the bleakness and violence of Pixote, a Brazilian street-child film made 19 years earlier, this film has a remarkably saccharine flavour. It’s well-lit and brightly coloured, replete with big primary-coloured childlike animations of Ali’s dreams to cunningly tug at susceptible hearts. It’s interesting that animation was chosen as the vehicle for depicting a street child’s dream of escape – it provides a simplistic short-cut to convey the yearning for other places. Ayouch here has chosen to opt for a more pedestrian path to depicting the inner world of fantasies, blatantly painting these dreams of escape directly into the film, rather than relying on a potentially more complex approach where the desire to escape remains an inner world. Animation appears to be the only solution Ayouch could come up with to show the dreams of the deceased Ali entering into the minds of his friends. 

In the same year, and not too far geographically, Pedro Costa was making In Vanda’s Room in Portugal. This film is a near-total interior film, compared with the bright streets of Casablanca, and the sense of poverty strikes a markedly different chord. However, for some odd reason, I can’t help wondering what Ali Zaoua might have been like if it had been shot with a rhythm and visual style similar to Costa’s. Hmmm.