FILM TIME / FILM MOTION
Sunday 15 June 2003, at 7pm
London Barbican Screen

THE DIRECTOR AND HIS ACTOR LOOK AT FOOTAGE SHOWING PREPARATIONS FOR AN UNMADE FILM: 2
Morgan Fisher, 1968, colour, sound, 15 min
“Narrative filmmaking was my original interest, and it’s still an interest. I make no apologies for it. It’s always been a part of my work, however obliquely. In fact if there were no narrative filmmaking and no Industry, I don’t think I could do work. I don’t mean this in the obvious sense: that – as would certainly be the case – without the Industry, and industry in general, there would be no film or equipment and hence no independent filmmaking (in that respect we are all at the mercy of industrial capitalism, whose sympathies and motives are directed elsewhere). I just mean that for me the Industry is a point of reference and a source, in both a positive and a negative sense, something to recognise and at the same time react to.” —Morgan Fisher

PASADENA FREEWAY STILLS
Gary Beydler, 1974, colour, silent, 6 min
“The film begins with Beydler placing photographs one by one into a rectangular frame. The prints appear to be the same image: traffic entering a tunnel on the Pasadena freeway. Gradually he inserts and removes the photos more quickly. Then the hand movements are eliminated, and the stills quickly build up speed like a locomotive until the cars are whisking through the tunnel and the audience becomes amazed, by Beydler’s cleverness, and by their own ‘Aha!’ responses as a confusing premise is revealed. Beydler’s involvement with motion and time shows his comprehension of the film medium – its uniqueness and difference from every other art form.” —Sandy Ballatore, Artweek

EUREKA
Ernie Gehr, 1974, b/w, silent, 30 min
“This is a re-filming of a remarkable movie depicting Market Street, San Francisco, around the turn of the century. The original film consisted of one long continuous take recorded from the front of a moving trolley from approximately Seventh Street all the way to the Embarcadero. I extended each frame six to eight times, full-frame, and increased the contrast and the light fluctuations. To some degree, the original film has obviously been transformed, but I hope that this simple muted process allowed enough room for me to make the original work ‘available’ without getting too much in the way. This was very important to me, as I tend to see what I did, in part, as the work of an archaeologist, resurrecting an old film as well as the shadows and forces of another era.” —Ernie Gehr

PANORAMA
Michael Rudnick, 1982, colour, sound, 13 min
“The most literal attempt to honour San Francisco’s history as a source of the American photographic panorama is Michael’s Rudnick’s Panorama, which was shot over the period of a year (Spring 1981 to Spring 1982) from inside and around his fourth-floor apartment in the Russian Hill area. Rudnick filmed in time-lapse, alternating between leftward pans (he built a device to ensure smooth panning) and a non-moving camera: while the alternation is regular, it is not rigorously systematic, though the overall arrangement is chronological. Within the overall rhythms of Panorama, Rudnick presents a range of visual experiences, some of them panoramic in the most conventional sense – time-lapse pans across broad urban vistas – others quite intimate, at least visually.” —adapted from Scott MacDonald, The Garden in the Machine

CASTRO STREET
Bruce Baillie, 1967, b/w & colour, sound, 10 min
“Technically, when I made Castro Street, I went into the field again with my ‘weapon’, my tools. I collected a couple of prisms and a lot of glasses from my mom’s kitchen, various things, and tried them all in the Berkeley backyard one day. I knew I wouldn’t have access to a laboratory that would allow me to combine black-and-white and colour, and I was determined to do it myself. I went after the soft colour on one side of Castro Street where the Standard Oil towers were; the other side was the black-and-white, the railroad switching yards. I was making mattes using high contrast black-and-white film that was used normally for making titles. I kept my mind available so that as much as one can know, I knew about the scene I just shot when I made the next colour shot. What was white would be black in my negative, and that would allow me to matte the reversal colour so that the two layers would not be superimposed but combined.” —Bruce Baillie in Scott MacDonald, A Critical Cinema

A FILM OF THEIR 1973 SPRING TOUR COMMISSIONED BY CHRISTIAN WORLD LIBERATION FRONT OF BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA
Owen Land (formerly known as George Landow), 1974, b/w, sound, 11 min
“He manages to set off a uniquely hypnotic experience. The viewer discovers the possibility of looking at the film like a ‘winkie toy’, seeing first one view then flashing to another. Because all footage is sound sync, this screening process hones our responses, until we see more in Land’s 3-frame sequences than we would in hour long doses of ‘normal’ time. Like the study of signs, this study of seconds yields a knowledge of people and truth inaccessible to more common observation.” —B. Ruby Rich

Back to top