TRANSCENDENT POWER: ELECTRONIC ELEVATION AND SYSTEM STIMULATION
Monday 15 October 2001, at 7:30pm
London Barbican Cinema

RAINDANCE
Standish Lawder, USA, 1972, colour, sound, 16 min [Robert Withers]
Plays directly on the mind through programatic simulation of the central nervous system. Individual frames of film are imprinted on the retina of the eye in a rhythm, sequence and intensity that corresponds to Apha-Wave frequencies of the brain. Becomes an experience of meditative liberation beyond the threshold of visual comprehension. Visions turn inward. The film directs our mental processes, controlling how we think as well as what we see. Images fuse with their after-images, colours arise from retinal release of exhausted nerve endings, forms dance across short-circuited synapses of the mind. Made entirely from a scrap of found footage taken from an old animated cartoon representing a sheet of falling rain. The cartoon was called The History of Cinema.

YANTRA
James Whitney, USA, 1950-57, colour, sound, 8 min [Henk Badings]
The repeated accelerating flickers between black and white or solid colour frames photo-kinetically induce an ‘alpha’ meditative state. Into the climax of these generative alternations of spectral opposites, the dots enter and enact movements which are carefully ‘choreographed’ in the sense of purely visual ‘music’. The screen is scrupulously sustained as a flat expository surface, and a reflexive consciousness of the film material process is maintained by the use of flickers, transparent / white backgrounds, scratches, and solarized, step-printed episodes, in which the hand-wrought, irregular textures also recall James’ expertise as a raku potter and the alchemical processes of transmuting elements, in this case the coloured chemicals of the film emulsion by the ‘solar’ fire. (William Moritz)

ENERGIES
James Davis, USA 1957, colour, sound, 10 min [Norman De Marco]
Just as the musician organises rhythms of sound in order to stimulate imagination and produce an emotional response, so I organise visual rhythms of moving forms of colour. Also like the musician, who doesn’t use the sounds of nature but invented sounds, produced by various instruments, I use invented forms of colour which I produce artificially with brightly coloured transparent plastics. I set them in motion, play light upon them, and film what happens. Obviously, I am not trying to present facts or to tell a story. I am trying to stir the creative imagination of my fellow men.

DENSITÉ OPTIQUE 1
Patrice Kirchhofer, France, 1977, colour, sound, 27 min
This film is an abyss. Abyssus abyssum invocat. A film made of other films. It is deja vu. ‘Déjà vu’ is a general impression of the work. A somewhat melancholic ‘déjà vu’. Adolescence also. A slow rhythm, jerked like a wave, the film makes progress underneath the eyes. Under which eyes? Those of the slow anguish of adolescence. Which one doesn’t resolve, sometimes…

THE DIVINE MIRACLE
Daina Krumins, USA, 1973, colour, sound, 5 min [Rhys Chatham]
An intriguing composite of what looks like animation and pageant-like live action is The Divine Miracle, which treads a delicate line between reverence and spoof as it briefly portrays the agony, death and ascension of Christ in the vividly coloured and heavily outlined style of Catholic devotional postcards, while tiny angels (consisting only of heads and wings) circle like slow mosquitoes about the central figure. Ms. Krumins tells me that no animation is involved, that the entire action was filmed in a studio, and that Christ, the angels and the background were combined in the printing. She also says it took her two years to produce it. (Edgar Daniels)

NACHT LICHT
Bart Vegter, Netherlands, 1993, colour, sound, 13 min [Kees van der Knaap]
A computer-film in three parts. The images consist of 8 to 14 independent elements. Each part has its own, formal starting-point. On this formal basis, variations are executed by gradual changes in position, direction, movement, velocity and colour of the elements. After making four animated abstract films ‘by hand’, this is my first film made with a computer. The formal approach that I use generally in making films proved to be very suitable for the way a computer works and can be programmed. This brought me to writing image- generating programs in computer-language, of which Nacht-Licht is the first result as film. The way I make films can be compared to building a “machine” which produces images. This machine consists of the working-principle: the system I choose to generate the images. In this manner series of images are generated, determined by (1) the machine, and (2) the data I put into it.

ALLURES
Jordan Belson, USA, 1961, colour, sound, 7 min
I think of Allures as a combination of molecular structures and astronomical events mixed with subconscious and subjective phenomena – all happening simultaneously. The beginning is almost purely sensual, the end perhaps totally nonmaterial. It seems to move from matter to spirit in some way. Oskar Fischinger had been experimenting with spatial dimensions, but Allures seemed to be outer space rather than earth space. After working with some very sophisticated equipment in the Vortex Concerts, I learned the effectiveness of something as simple as fading in and out very slowly.

LOOKING FOR MUSHROOMS
Bruce Conner, USA, 1961/96, colour, sound, 15 min [Terry Riley]
Looking For Mushrooms unfolds at one and the same time as a hyperactive, realistic recording – a travel diary – and as a freewheeling, almost hallucinatory spectacle. The arc of the film’s structure suggests a shift from the material world shown in great detail to a purely ideational realm of art. What reconciles these seemingly contradictory zones is Conner’s mediating sensibility … In 1995, Conner revised Looking For Mushrooms, [which was] step-printed and slowed down by a factor of five, and given a new score. The film gained a heightened level of visibility through a pacing that restrained the abstracting speed of the original shooting, cutting, and superimposition; and it acquired a potent acoustic counterpoint through the addition of a performance by Terry Riley that highlights the microrhythms of Conner’s masterful camera work and complex montage. (Bruce Jenkins)

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