The Edge Of Cinema: Experimental Cinema Log #8 - Rumpelstilzchen

RUMPELSTILZCHEN (Jurgen Reble; Germany; 1989)

[14 mins]

At face value, Reble’s work seems to play the same game as Bill Morrison, focusing on the beauty of decay in compiled fragments of found footage. But Reble’s films present a very different perspective on decay. Morrison’s films are nostalgic paeans to the fragile and crumbling meta-archive of film history, where decay signifies nostalgia and loss. Reble’s decay is intentional, borne from experimental manipulation of film stock via chemical processes and natural processes. Film strips are hung on trees and left to the elements for months, even years. In Reble’s films, decay signifies an acceleration of the mortality of film, revealing film stock as a living entity that is engaged with the natural world and undergoes dynamic and natural changes.

There is an intense tactility with Reble’s work. When viewing Rumpelstilzchen, there is a strong, palpable sensation that the film has been handled and mauled. Whether it’s been drowned in a chemical wash, scratched, looped, distorted or bleached, the entire film feels like it has had a pair of hands all over it.

Reble first worked as part of a collective in the early 80’s, called Schmelzdahin. The group appears to have been a think-tank for exploring as many methods as possible to physically alter film stock. Strips of film were attacked with sewing needles, sandpaper, carved and chiselled, and put through a multitude of chemical experiments. The disintegration and alteration of abused stock when projected was also an intrinsic component of their work.

Reble took his research from Schmelzdahin and continued his experimentations on his own. For Reble, the alteration of film stock is an alchemical process, transforming a once-inert section of film into a living organism. He even refers to himself as a “Film Alchemist”.

Rumpelstilzchen is one of his earliest films, along with the much longer Passion, made in the same year. The heart of this abused-footage film is the manipulation of a 1950’s German B-movie about the Rumpelstiltskin fairy-tale. Of course, it’s fortuitously perfect that the film is based on the story of a man who can spin straw into gold. The alchemical process at the centre of the fairy-tale is paralleled by Reble’s own version of cinematic alchemy, and Reble directly ties the fable to the cinematic process by using altered shots of a spinning wheel as a motif through the film and as a reminder of the spinning of the projector wheel.

From the outset we are introduced to a swathe of induced decay and discoloured film. These patches of indecipherable fungal blurs are dotted throughout the film, acting as a kind of punctuation point, or as a kind of rumination. Decay here acts as a meditative aid, a pause for (no) thought.

After this swathe, the other noticeable thing that occurs is a low, slowed-down voice drawling across the audio track. Reble uses audio as intently as the visual to draw out a sense of loops and cycles. Audio occurs in discreet chunks, often looped, back-tracked, and repeated. Both sound and visuals are used together to create a continual hallucinatory sensation of a story and a film being spun into a new shape.

There’s a wonderful sense of mystery to the images, in that it becomes difficult to work out whether all of the footage is from the one source or not. Some shots have a different weight and tone to the manipulated sections from the B-Movie version of Rumpelstiltskin. A man walks in slow motion, his outline often a hazy negative image, and he looks directly at the camera, making it feel as if this is amateur or home footage, perhaps shot by Reble himself. In another early section, a man seems to be doing chin-ups with a bar, which seems out of step with the fairy-tale. Then suddenly, half-way through the film, Reble pulls a hilarious stunt, including a shot of the vampire in Murnau’s Nosferatu, a clear signifier of ‘other sources’ and a screeching interloper from the historical realm of cinema. The audio is silent as the vampire turns slowly, and in a sublime moment of comic editing, we see what he turns to view – a group of ducks. He then slowly turns back and focuses on his prey. In this amusing moment, it is as if the ‘real’ historical stream of film has ruptured the skin of Reble’s alchemical creation, suggesting that Reble’s film has dreamed itself into an entirely new realm that perhaps flows separately but in tandem to the pre-existing realm.

The above may sound far-fetched, yet Reble’s film is an intensely immersive experience, and the sensation that one is viewing a living, breathing organism-as-film is almost hypnotically disconcerting. Reble ends the film with two minutes of a blurry image of a baby, both alluding to a key tenet to the Rumpelstiltskin story (remember the old goblin-creature spins straw into gold in exchange for the miller’s daughters future firstborn child), but also alluding to the birth of a new kind of film. Film entwined with nature. Film as living matter.

The film is viewable here.

The Edge Of Cinema: Experimental Cinema Log #7 - Ten Skies

[Yes, there's been another brief hiatus, having been on a spontaneous roadtrip for the past three weeks. I'm back now, and blogging once more. Yay.]

TEN SKIES (James Benning; USA; 2004)

[100 minutes]

Ten Skies was made in the same year that Benning also made 13 Lakes, forever marking these two films as twinned companions to each other. Certainly these films have the same minimalist meditative resonance – 13 long shots of lakeside scenes, 10 long shots of the sky. However, 13 Lakes has the terrestrial anchor of a horizon line, providing a gravity-bound framework, while Ten Skies feels weightless and light, lost in the heavens.

Composed of ten ten-minute long shots of different skies in Val Verde, California, this is a celestial film that focuses on the texture and shape of clouds, sky, and occasional earthly intrusions of smoke and fire. More pointedly, the film focuses our attention on the meditative act of sky-gazing, a time to lose yourself in your own thoughts. Looking up to the sky can free the skygazer from their earthbound concerns for a moment, allowing their mind to drift in time with the slow-moving clouds, an act that is somewhat akin to losing yourself inside a film.

The choice and arrangement of each sky is clearly not random. The first sky we see makes us aware of how we use our attention, as there is barely any perceptible movement in the clouds and the viewer is constantly scanning the screen looking for signs of change or movement. There is also the expectation of seeing something other than clouds – perhaps a plane, perhaps a bird flitting across the screen. Yet the first sky is perhaps the most static, with changes happening so slowly it is barely noticeable. By the time a bird flies quickly across the screen during the second sky, we’ve grown accustomed to not expecting anything other than clouds to mark the skyscape.

Often, when applying all of one’s attention on one part of the sky in order to gauge any change, other areas change without the viewer noticing. Hard and focussed attention never ensnares the achingly slow dynamics of each sky scene, and over time it becomes easy to relax into the skies, allowing yourself to let your attention drift inside the clouds.

What is most fascinating about this film is the importance of sound. This is not simply a visual diary of the firmament – these skies are tied to an invisible world filled with highway noise, birdsong, buzzing, helicopter whirrs, human voices, and gunshots. The fact that we only ever see the sky and never see the source of the sounds provides a brilliant sense of dislocation and disorientation to the film, and provides a kind of mystery that surpasses mere visual stimulus.

You can view a segment of the film here.

The Edge Of Cinema: Experimental Cinema Log #6 - Necrology

NECROLOGY (Standish Lawder; 1969-1970; USA)

[12 mins]

In a perfect world, Standish Lawder’s Necrology would be shown as broadly and as often as possible, and would be a widely-known and oft-heralded film that transcends its experimental tag. It is not only a succinct summation of the fleeting fragility of capturing images of people, but is also perfect proof that experimental cinema can indeed have a funny bone.

The film is composed of two distinct sections. For the first 8 minutes we see a succession of people, crammed into the screen, gliding upwards towards the heavens. It takes a moment or two to realise that these people are indeed filmed in reverse, and that Lawder filmed an elevator full of people in Grand Central station.

At first, there’s a distinct pleasure in casually watching the faces of these people as they drift upwards. There’s room to imagine that the look on their faces may reveal emotions commensurate with moving upward to an after-life. Some people seem to be very calm, casually chatting with others. Others seem pensive, some weary, some haggard, some impassive, some stoic, some resigned, some bemused. And, in an oddly uplifting way, no one is fearful.

After a few minutes, and after seeing many, many faces pass before our eyes, it sets in that we are only able to focus very briefly on these people. Their faces remain in light for maybe three or four seconds before they disappear into the murky dark. Their lives remain inscrutable, we have no idea who they are and we cannot “be” with them long enough to truly connect, to read their faces, to make up stories about them.

And so the title begins to make sense. A necrology is like an obituary column, a list of people of who have recently died. These images of people are dead images. It may well be the only record of these people on film, and their image is a fleeting record of themselves before they pass into the necropolis of archived film stock.

But, after the mass ascension has ended, Lawder throws a devilish spanner in the works, cranking out a three minute long cast list of the people we’ve just seen. It’s a list full of imagined vocations and amusing states of being – there’s “Deaf Mute Woman”, “Man Whose Wife Doesn’t Understand Him”, “Corvette Owner”, “Fugitive, Interstate”, “Former Disc Jockey”, and “Woman with Canker Sore on Inside Of Left Cheek”, amongst many others. As much as these imagined roles are often hilarious, it adds to the realisation that there is a gap between the image of the person and our understanding of that person. Lawder’s cast list highlights the impossibility of truly knowing who these people are, and forces the viewer into a game of reflection, trying madly to remember who “Tough Girl With Cigarette and White Handbag” was, and trying to work out from memory who “Embezzler (At Large)” might be.

You can view the film here.

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.