Date: 18 June 2003 | Season: California Sound/California Image
LOS ANGELES IN THE FORTIES
Wednesday 18 June 2003, at 7pm
London Barbican Screen
Trance and psychodrama, Surrealist montage, symbolism and sexual longing: The beginnings of the modern avant-garde and a new creative film language.
Maya Deren, Meshes of the Afternoon, 1943, b/w, silent, 14 min
Curtis Harrington, Fragment of Seeking, 1946, b/w, sound, 14 min
Kenneth Anger, Fireworks, 1947, b/w, sound, 15 min
Gregory Markopoulos, Psyche, 1947-48, colour, sound, 25 min
“In Los Angeles in 1947, while Kenneth Anger was editing Fireworks, Gregory Markopoulos began to shoot Psyche, the first film of his trilogy Du Sang de la Volupté et de la Mort. […] A few months before he began shooting Psyche, he had assisted Curtis Harrington in making his first film, Fragment of Seeking, where a young man pursues an elusive blonde woman through a maze of corridors reminiscent of Maya Deren’s pursuit of the mirror-faced figure in Meshes of the Afternoon. —P. Adams Sitney, Visionary Film
PROGRAMME NOTES
LOS ANGELES IN THE FORTIES
Wednesday 18 June 2003, at 7pm
London Barbican Screen
MESHES OF THE AFTERNOON
Maya Deren, 1943, b/w, silent, 14 min
“The cinema of Maya Deren delivers us from the studios: it presents our eyes with physical facts which contain profound psychological meaning; it beats out within our hearts a time which alternates, continues, revolves, pounds, or flies away … Poetry, after all, is the feast which life offers those who know how to receive with their eyes and hearts, and understand.” —Le Corbusier
FRAGMENT OF SEEKING
Curtis Harrington, 1946, b/w, sound, 14 min
“A classic West Coast experimental psychodrama second only in importance to Kenneth Anger’s Fireworks as the leading example of Freudian surrealism produced during the experimental film movement of the 1940s. It deals with teenage narcissism and latent homosexuality, with the film artist portraying the protagonist.” —Creative Film Society catalogue
FIREWORKS
Kenneth Anger, 1947, b/w, sound, 15 min
“In Fireworks I released all the explosive pyrotechnics of a dream. Inflammable desires dampened by day under the cold water of consciousness are ignited that night by the libertarian matches of sleep and burst forth in showers of shimmering incandescence. These imaginary displays provide a temporary release. A dissatisfied dreamer awakes, goes out in the night seeking a ‘light’ and is drawn through the needle’s eye. A dream of a dream, he returns to a bed less empty than before.” —Kenneth Anger
PSYCHE
Gregory Markopoulos, 1947-48, colour, sound, 25 min
“Psyche has no parallel among early American avant-garde films. Markopoulos was at once the filmmaker of his generation most attracted to narrative (he has adapted several literary works to film) and one of the most radical filmmakers in the world. He took such extreme liberties with Pierre Loüys’ unfinished novella that one would hardly recognise it as the source of his film. Nevertheless, he took just enough to give his film a cohesion and a tension that make it a continually fascinating work. Three interrelated characteristics define Markopoulos’ style: colour, rhythm, and atemporal construction.” —P. Adams Sitney, Visionary Film
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