OHM TAPING: TAPE COMPOSITIONS & MUSIQUE CONCRETE
Thursday 18 October 2001, at 7:30pm
London Barbican Cinema

THRESHOLD
Malcolm Le Grice, UK, 1972, colour, sound, 10 min
Le Grice no longer simply uses the optical printer as a reflexive mechanism, but utilises the possibilities of colour-shift and permutation of imagery as the film progresses from simplicity to complexity. The initial use of pure red and green filters gives way to a broad variety of colours and the introduction of strips of coloured celluloid which are drawn through the printer and begins to build an image which becomes graphically and spatially complex – if still abstract – and which evokes the paintings of, say, Clifford Still or Morris Louis. With the film’s culmination in representational, photographic imagery, one would anticipate a culminating ‘richness’ of image; yet the insistent evidence of splice bars and the loop and repetition of the short piece of found footage and the conflicting superimposition of filtered loops all reiterate the work which is necessary to decipher that cinematic image. (Deke Dusinberre)

THE MALTESE CROSS MOVEMENT
Keewatin Dewdney, Canada, 1967, colour, sound, 8 min [The Beach Boys]
The film reflects Dewdney’s conviction that, “the projector, not the camera, is the filmmaker’s true medium”. The form and content of the film are shown to derive directly from the mechanical operation of the projector – specifically the animation of the disk and the cross illustrates graphically (no pun intended) the projector’s essential parts and movements. It also alludes to a dialectic of continuous-discontinuous movements that pervades the apparatus, from its central mechanical operation to the spectator’s perception of the film’s images … His soundtrack demonstrates that what we hear is also built out of continuous-discontinuous ‘sub-sets’. The film is organised around the principle that it can only complete itself when enough separate and discontinuous sounds have been stored up to provide the male voice on the soundtrack with the sounds needed to repeat a little girl’s poem; “The cross revolves at sunset / The moon returns at dawn / If you die tonight / Tomorrow you’re gone.” (William C. Wees)

VIET FLAKES
Carolee Schneemann, USA, 1965, b/w, sound, 9 min [James Tenney]
Composed from an obsessive collection of Vietnam atrocity images I collected from foreign magazines and newspapers over a five-year period. Magnifying glasses from the ‘five and dime’ were taped onto a borrowed 16mm Bolex in order to physically ‘travel’ within the photographs – producing a rough animation. Images in and out of focus, broken rhythms and pans, the abstracted shapes and motions, speeding perceptual contradictions. For instance, a pointillism of falling black specks in focus becomes bombs dropping through the sky; and impressionistic swirl of tones translates as faces of US soldiers leading barefoot villagers from a gas-filled tunnel; a “Rembrandt ink drawing” focuses in as a tank dragging a roped body… James Tenney’s sound collage intercuts three-second fragments of Vietnamese religious chants and secular songs with fragments of Bach and 1960s ‘Top of the Charts’.

XFILM
John Schofill, USA, 1966-68, colour, sound, 14 min [William Moraldo]
Through precise manipulation of individual frames and groups of frames, Schofill creates an overwhelming sense of momentum practically unequalled in synaesthetic cinema. There is almost a visceral, tactile impact to these images, which plunge across the field of vision like a dynamo. (Gene Youngblood)

I … DREAMING
Stan Brakhage, USA, 1988, colour, sound, 7 min [Joel Haertling]
A setting-to-film of a ‘collage’ of Stephen Foster phrases by composer Joel Haertling. The recurring musical themes and melancholia of Foster refer to ‘loss of love’ in the popular ‘torch song’ mode; but the film envisions a re-awakening of such senses-of-love as children know, and it posits (along a line of words scratched over picture) the psychology of waiting.

BEATLES ELECTRONIQUES
Jud Yalkut & Nam Jun Paik, USA, 1966-69, colour, sound, 3 min [Kenneth Werner]
Shot in black and white from a live broadcast of the Beatles while Paik electromagnetically improvised distortions on the receiver, and also from videotapes material produced during a series of experiments with filming off the monitor of a Sony videotape recorder. The film is three minutes long and is accompanied by an electronic soundtrack by composer Ken Werner, called “Four Loops”, derived from four electronically altered loops of Beatles sound material. The result is an eerie portrait of the Beatles not as pop stars, but rather as entities that exist solely in the world of electronic media. (Gene Youngblood)

ICE
JJ Murphy, USA, 1972, colour, sound, 7 min
To make Ice Murphy projected Franklin Miller’s film Whose Circumference is Nowhere onto one side of a block of ice and recorded what one could see through the ice from the opposite side, in a single continuous take. The soundtrack is a tape recorder recording under water. The result is a transformation of Miller’s film into an abstract experience of a very different kind. (Scott MacDonald)

MASAJE
Ivan Zulueta, Spain, 1972, b/w, sound, 3 min
Using the technique of direct photography off the TV screen, he composes three minutes “in which we see, speeded up, the complete television programming on a day of union and military parades. There was a subliminal Franco, and we didn’t even submit it to the censors…” The soundtrack alternates effects, noises and sounds of all kinds. The result is a really frenetic visual ‘massage’ that exposes the viewer’s eye to fleeting movie images, ads and news reports in rapid-fire succession. (Carlos F. Heredero)

MARVO MOVIE
Jeff Keen, 1967, UK, colour, sound, 5 min [Bob Cobbing]
Movie wizard initiates shatter brain experiment Eeeow! – the fastest movie firm alive – at 24 or 16fps even the mind trembles – splice up sequence two – flix unlimited, an inside yr very head the images explode – last years models new houses and such terrific death scenes while the time and space operator attacks the brain via the optic nerve – will the operation succeed – will the white saint reach in time the staircase now alive with blood – only time will tell says the movie master – meanwhile deep inside the space museum… (Ray Durgnat)

FIST FIGHT
Robert Breer, Fist Fight, USA, 1964, colour, sound 9 min [Karlheinz Stockhausen]
The film articulates separated by sections of blackness. In each burst a technique or series of images may dominate or provide a matrix, but all the elements (photographs, cartoons, abstractions) occur in each cluster. The serial structure is reinforced by the soundtrack. The filmmaker had completed the silent editing for a premiere presentation as part of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s event “Originale”, in New York in 1964. The soundtrack was initially recorded during the performances of the event, including the film’s projection. Breer then composed bursts of audience noise, music, and nearly quiet backgrounds in relationship to the images. (P. Adams Sitney)

KAKSI KANAA
Eino Ruutsalo, Finland 1963, colour, sound, 4 min [Erkki Kurenniemi]
According to Ruutsalo himself, Kaksi kanaa (1963) was composed spontaneously out of throwaway footage. It features a hysterical cavalcade of female nudity, oppressed screen tests, crackers, a floating feather plus an overdose of paint and colour. The soundtrack is a refined electro-acoustical tape collage made by composer Otto Donner. This score, mostly played on Erkki Kurenniemi’s home-built electronic instruments, is a forgotten peak moment of Finnish film music. Kaksi Kanaa is cinematic action painting, and in its condensed expression perhaps Ruutsalo’s most original and permanent masterpiece. (Mika Taanila)

TURN TURN TURN
Jud Yalkut, USA, 1965-66, colour, sound, 10 min [The Byrds]
A film of the eye-shattering, flashing, rotating light sculptures programmed by USCO to turn turn turn the popular song into a rich electronic fugue on the word NOW: Let’s take the OW out of NOW, let’s take the NO out of NOW. (Film Quarterly)

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