WEST COAST BEAT
Friday 13 June 2003, at 7pm
London Barbican Screen

VISIONS OF A CITY
Larry Jordan, 1957/78, sepia, sound, 7 min
“The protagonist, poet Michael McClure, emerges from the all-reflection imagery of glass shop and car windows, bottles, mirrors, etc. in scenes which are also accurate portraits of both McClure and the city of San Francisco in 1957. At the same time it is a lyric and mystical film, building to a crescendo of rhythmically intercut shots of McClure’s face, seemingly trapped on the glazed surface of the city. Music by William Moraldo. I don’t think of this as an ‘early film’ anymore, since it never came together until 1978. Now it’s tight.” —Larry Jordan

SAUSALITO
Frank Stauffacher, 1948, b/w, sound, 10 min
“This film is part ‘city symphony’ and part ‘outtakes from an experimental film’. Sausalito is the picturesque waterfront town across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco and has functioned, during times of low rent, as an artists’ colony. It is the kind of place that produces postcard-perfect images from practically any visual perspective: point the camera and the result will be ocean bay, fog, sailboats, waves, seashells, rocky beach, inclined streets, wooden piers, antique shops, dancer’s legs and California shore birds. Stauffacher has combined these elements through a technique of abrupt visual and audio crosscutting and juxtaposition that helps transcend the clichéd material. Along the way he experiments with slow motion, split-screens and superimposition, all of which are lightened by a constant thread of whimsicality and wit.” —Museum of Modern Art, New York 

UNTITLED (ALEPH)
Wallace Berman, 1958/76, colour, silent, 10 min
“Figure moving through darkness suddenly illuminated in a random harsh light … Young, hawk-face intensity, straight ahead stare, super cool, zoot suit type attire topped by brush cut hair straight up, with young woman in tight black dress disappearing suddenly in room behind stage … ‘Who was that?’  ‘That’s Wallace Berman’ came the anonymous reply with an authority that implied all had been said.” —Walter Hopps

THE WHITE ROSE
Bruce Conner, 1967, b/w, sound, 7 min
“Begun in 1958, The Rose was DeFeo’s almost exclusive obsession for seven years. Composed of one ton of mostly white and grey paint that reaches depths of up to eight inches, The Rose is certainly one of the most dense and massive paintings ever made. Nevertheless, the work’s sublimity lies precisely in the fact that, despite this sheer accumulation of matter, it exudes a profound sense of spaciousness and light. Even before it was finished, The Rose had acquired legendary status: Dorothy Miller, curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, desperately wanted the work for her landmark exhibition Sixteen Americans (an exhibition which helped to launch the careers of Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Ellsworth Kelly, Louise Nevelson, and Frank Stella), and Bruce Conner made a film, The White Rose, about the painting’s removal – by forklift – from the artist’s studio in 1965.” —Berkeley Art Museum 

ODDS AND ENDS
Jane Belson, 1958, colour, sound, 5 min
“Live action and animation are combined into a total abstract structure. The accompanying narration [by Henry Jacobs] is a tongue-in-cheek dissertation on poetry and jazz, in which an anonymous, eminent and indefatigable rationalist talks himself into a corner. ‘I don’t know just what to say other than that I have been extremely impressed with the works of other filmmakers and I just got high and put it together’.” —Amos Vogel, Cinema 16, quoting Jane Belson Conger

THE END
Christopher MacLaine, 1963, b/w & colour, sound, 35 min
“What MacLaine did for money, God only knows – begged on the streets, mooched, finally robbed and stole. I use both ‘robbed’ and ‘stole’ because he had both these qualities of a thief. He was always desperate. He sang and read poetry in the bars. He read poetry with jazz when that became popular toward the end of the Beat movement in the late 1950s. He always thought of himself as a poet. His poems, however, were out-spewings of rage and wrathfulness. His conversation was always more poetic than his poems. But the man had an innate and powerful sense of rhythm, and that was the main strength of his poetry. I don’t think he really wrote poetry; but he tried to be a poet in a way very similar to Artaud, and he failed for similar reasons. I do not know if MacLaine ever thought of himself as the ‘Artaud of San Francisco’, but he certainly did have an affinity with him: he courted madness and he finally got it.” —Stan Brakhage, Film at Wit’s End
NB: New prints of all four films by Christopher MacLaine’s will be presented in a Lux touring programme in the autumn

KINO DA!
Henry Hills, 1981, b/w, sound, 4 min

KINO DA! (ah, ke, ke) KINO DA!
The Dead die die dada low king quanto zong
MOVE! (ur, ur)
Grey todays it-a clear to the quick ear, quicker z’heels
The Poe (pay, po, pee, pick-pick), nuf of “D” yet
Call Vertov
(beep, beep)
Eisenstein even
& viterulably cheeness of a ram innerwear
(airs; hen)
Time, Time, Money
d-d-d-
junk rock did travel & falls
(spring)
Fall
Spring is the simplest inflationary dime.
Be in everything Joy, in experimental & (thus)
proletarian & wwea air of airs
at this school of po’try-painting
CUT!

To know
toe
no! no! MONTAGE (nadazha), in any instant
(instant) of the writing of Stein & the facts of that
(tle) kind.
FEEL IT! (the steak)
yes, ache, in trends & whatevers.
Mmmm-pah-ah Cops, man in case (nnn), man
nnn.
(KO) be-a mayu po pony;
.(KO) be-a (what?) o-long kind.

GO! (be what) OM, prose, Pentacost; be what this there the (pause) & (serious pause) the neb with a gram of ire illia-it’s still justs Jah.

Viparko r-rrr re ad adici, yes!
YES!

ssssssssssane!
mmmm keybo z’Kruchchev.

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