ON VENOM AND ETERNITY
Friday 19 October 2012, at 6:30pm
London BFI Southbank NFT 3

TRAITÉ DE BAVE ET D’ÉTERNITÉ (ON VENOM AND ETERNITY)
Isidore Isou, France, 1951, 35mm, b/w, sound, 120 min
Isidore Isou arrived in Paris from Romania in 1945 where he founded the Letterist movement, an art and literary movement that owed inspiration to Dada and Surrealism. Letterism attempted to break down poetry into letters and syllables, and then all arts into their constituent parts, to build up new languages for each art form. Isou wrote, directed, photographed, composed the music for, and acted in Traité de bave et d’éternité (Treaty On Venom And Eternity), the first Letterist film manifesto. Isou proceeds to discuss what is wrong with the cinema and then counter it with what he thinks the cinema should consist of through ‘Discrepant Cinema’ in which the sound and the picture are purposefully unrelated and the images are manipulated or destroyed through bleaching and scratching.

Isou brought Traité de bave et d’éternité uninvited to the Cannes Film Festival (1951) where it both caused a riot and won the audience prize for the avant-garde. Isou’s ‘revolt against cinema’ is a landmark work that prefigured the Letterist and Situationist cinema to come and influenced many experimental filmmakers, including Stan Brakhage. The film’s participants include some of the greatest names in 20th Century French arts and letters: Jean-Louis Barrault, Blaise Cendrars, Daniel Gélin, Colette Marchand, André Maurois, and Jean Cocteau (who also designed the poster promoting the 1952 release on the Champs-Elysees). (Re:Voir)

In the above context of The Lumières and Méliès as ‘the 2 wings’ of Film, I take Isou to be the visceral backbone, complete with electrically ‘scratched’ nervous system synopting – all rhythms tending to that consciousness we know as cathexis or investment. His Traité has certainly been prime inspiration for all of my film-making, since I first saw it, and for many of the U.S. independent film-makers … and I do not mean simply for (how did you put it?) the ‘scratch or blinking films’. The verbal rethoric of Traité is at one with the aesthetic of the moving picture imagery and in its subtle weave of be-seemingly dull photography (which effectually obliterates traditional and slavishly composed photography – whether scratched-over, turned upside-down or not). Traité opened each sensibility (that will be open to it) for new feeling about film, thus for the new feelings each might have uniquely rising in each self appropo [sic] that which is intrinsically Film. I know no other works of cinema which, without intruding its own aesthetic, more frees human sensibility to dance, in the mind’s eye, with cinematic possibilities. (Letter from Stan Brakhage to Frédérique Devaux)

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NATHANIEL DORSKY & JEROME HILER
Saturday 20 October 2012, at 2pm
London BFI Southbank NFT 3

AUGUST AND AFTER
Nathaniel Dorsky, USA, 2012, 16mm, colour, silent, 19 min
Nathaniel Dorsky’s August and After is dedicated to two recently departed friends, legendary filmmaker George Kuchar and actress Carla Liss. The film shows them vibrantly, resiliently alive shortly before their passing and then sets off in search of soothing beauty, yielding searing images awash in colours both belonging to and transcending our natural world. Well into the twilight years of 16mm filmmaking, Dorsky continues to present textures and hues that are indispensible to the art of cinema. We will be poorer without them. (Andréa Picard)
www.nathanieldorsky.net

APRIL
Nathaniel Dorsky, USA, 2012, 16mm, colour, silent, 26 min
In my filmmaking I came upon the idea that if I began to arrange images in a certain way, it could transform the ego instead of confirming it. In other words, if you put two shots together to create a solid concept – this is happening, characters getting out of a car and walking down the street, or someone sitting at a window looking – you construct a series of images in such a way that you nurture ego, but then disrupt it through the montage. When you cut to the next shot, there might be a reemergence of presence, but it wouldn’t be a daisy chain back to the previous image, so it wouldn’t solidify the ego. There might be a way of using montage to realize the wisdom of what cinema has to offer. Cinema has great, great wisdom, and it’s very seldom used as a wisdom medium. In a sense, you can nurture the heart in a montage, going from one thing to the next in a way that touches the heart’s intelligence. You can use the energy of the cinema to transform the viewer by letting the viewer rediscover themselves at each moment in the present. (Nathaniel Dorsky interviewed by Ari Spool)
www.nathanieldorsky.net

WORDS OF MERCURY
Jerome Hiler, USA, 2011, video, colour, silent, 25 min
At the very end of ‘Love’s Labour Lost’, as the cast is frolicking around, a messenger comes in to announce a death which brings a sudden shift to the very end of the play. One of the most comical characters, now newly sober, ends the play with a quick dismissal of the audience: ‘The words of Mercury are harsh after the songs of Apollo. You that way – we this way.’Words of Mercury is, if nothing else, economical. It was shot on reversal film and its layers of superimpositions were all shot in the camera. Half of the many fades in the film were made by submerging the original film in a black liquid. The film is silent. The shooting ratio is low and there are areas which are unedited since taken from the camera. I generally shoot first and ask questions later, but I’m struck at the influences that I see in Words of Mercury because they reach back to the very first times that I saw great 16mm films in the early Sixties: Marie Menken, Gregory Markopolous, Stan Brakhage and my lifetime companion Nathaniel Dorsky. (Jerome Hiler)

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TWO ARCHITECTURE STUDIES
Saturday 20 October 2012, at 4pm
London BFI Southbank NFT 3

ALONG THE LINES
Catalina Niculescu, UK-Romania, 2011, HD video, colour, sound, 16 min
Following up the artist’s recent journey to Romania, Along the Lines initially started as ‘a study into vernacular elements of Romanian modernist architecture’. In the final project (including a series of collages) the premise is present, recognizable, but is not made explicit. The work deliberately strays from the plan of rigorous study and develops into a visual exercise in which the assumed subjectivity of the artist becomes the mode of argument. The interference vernacular/modernist is not stated or articulated directly but built up on a set of formal associations and visual suggestions. The artist’s approach becomes calm and poetic; free from a precise mission the project embraces the accidental, the deviation, it accumulates discordant elements to produce new possibilities though vulnerable and problematic, the pleasure of the argument comes into play, it disperses from concept into the aesthetic. Comprising a set of chapters, Along the Lines retraces the visual journey of the artist to explore architecture through a meticulous focus on details and geometric shapes. Each ‘chapter’ is preceded by a postcard collage: one geometrical figure is cut out of a natural landscape which literally illustrates the connection idealized by modernists between architecture and natural environment, placing in this way the interest for simple forms into the simplicity of nature. Although at the end of the video you find yourself back to the same landscape, the perception changes, the view is the same, yet your experience is different this time. (Anca Rujoiu)

RECONVERSÃO
Thom Andersen, Portugal, 2012, HD video, colour, sound, 65 min
Reconversão portrays 17 buildings and projects by Portuguese architect Eduardo Souto Moura, accompanied usually by his own writings. It is a search for his architecture, without critical commentary. Only the tour guide at Braga Stadium offers generalizations, which fit that work well enough, but it may be the exception not the rule. Souto Moura has the last word: ‘If there is nothing there, I invent a preexistence.’ Technically, Reconversão combines the crudeness of proto-cinema with the hyperrealism of digital cinema, bringing us back to the ideals of Dziga Vertov. Shooting only one or two frames per second and animating the images, in the manner of Muybridge, produces greater resolution, although not necessarily a greater sense of reality, and brings attention to the movements of water and vegetation that generally pass unnoticed. (Thom Andersen)

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MATI DIOP
Saturday 20 October 2012, at 7pm
London BFI Southbank NFT 3

ATLANTIQUES
Mati Diop, France-Senegal, 2009, video, colour, sound, 16 min
Sitting by the campfire, a boy from Dakar named Serigne tells his two friends the story of his sea voyage as a stowaway. Not only he, but everyone in his surroundings seems to be continually obsessed by the idea of trying to cross the sea. His words reverberate like a melancholy poem. A story about boys who are continually travelling: between past, present and future, between life and death, history and myth. (Mati Diop)

BIG IN VIETNAM
Mati Diop, France, 2012, video, colour, sound, 29 min
In the forest near Marseille, the Franco Vietnamese director Henriette Nhung is shooting Dangerous Liaisons with the help of her son Mike. But when the lead actor disappears, everything comes to a halt. The film loses its Valmont, and the director soon after. Behind her, she leaves the entire cast and crew, now passengers aboard a ghost ship with only the young Mike as captain. As she wanders the port city, Henriette discovers a world that reminds her of her former home, Vietnam. Here, she meets a man haunted by a long journey with no return. (Mati Diop)

SNOW CANON
Mati Diop, France, 2011, 35mm, colour, sound, 33 min
The French Alps, February 2011. Vanina likes to hear the chalet’s parquet floor squeaking beneath her bare feet. Vanina likes to coat herself in sunscreen cream in front of the stone fireplace. Vanina likes the tawny fur of her rabbit, Souci. Vanina likes to smell the leather of the white sofa. Vanina likes to spend hours contemplating the sultry glow of the eyes of the veiled women on the postcards in her collection. Vanina likes to chat with Eloïse on the internet. But above all, what Vanina likes is her American babysitter, Mary Jane. (Mati Diop)

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RITES OF PASSAGE
Saturday 20 October 2012, at 9pm
London BFI Southbank NFT 3

GREAT BLOOD SACRIFICE
Steve Reinke, USA, 2010, video, colour, sound, 4 min
A walk with shaky hand held camera through the landscape of the high desert of New Mexico, down the cliffs to a water reservoir accompanied by Reinke’s voice over. (Argos Arts)
www.myrectumisnotagrave.com

MANQUE DE PREUVES (LACK OF EVIDENCE)
Hayoun Kwon, South Korea-France, 2011, video, colour, sound, 10 min
In Nigeria, to be a twin can be a blessing or a curse. The father of O is the village chief, a witch doctor who believes in the curse of twins. One day, this witch doctor tried to kill his two sons during a ritual ceremony: O managed to escape but saw his brother being murdered. Having fled across his country, he succeeded, by chance, in leaving Nigeria and going into exile in France. In this context, he applied for asylum but his application was refused because he could not produce any proof. (Hayoun Kwon)

BIRDS
Gabriel Abrantes, Portugal-Haiti, 2012, video, colour, sound, 17 min
Three Haitian girls wander through the ripe vegetation and colonial ruins of tropical Jakmel. After listening to an old man’s perverse folk tales they make their way to the town square and see a local staging of a comic masterpiece from ancient Greece; Aristophanes’ Birds. The film’s mysterious intertwining of disparate cultural forms serves as an ode to the potentials of cultural creolization. (Gabriel Abrantes)
mutualrespectproductions.blogspot.co.uk

PONCE DE LEÓN
Ben Russell & Jim Drain, USA, 2012, video, colour, sound, 26 min
‘I could do wonders if I didn’t have a body. But the body grabs me, it slows me, it enslaves me.’
Our Ponce de León discovered the fountain of youth and drank of immortality in the waning moments of his life. In an instant, he became old forever – an 80-year old Spaniard who would continue to walk the earth for century after century after century, watching as coral foundations gave way to mangrove swamps, as swamps were drained and buildings were erected, as buildings decayed and swamps returned. Our Ponce de León is an immortal for whom time poses the greatest dilemma – it is a constant, a given, and his personal battle lies in trying to either arrest time entirely or to make the hands on his clock move ever faster. For Ponce de León, time is a problem of body, and only by escaping his container can he escape time itself. (Ben Russell)
www.dimeshow.com

RIVER RITES
Ben Russell, USA-Suriname, 2011, video, colour, sound, 12 min
A trance dance and water implosion, a kino-line drawn between secular possession and religious phenomena. Filmed in one shot at a sacred site on the Upper Suriname River, the minor secrets of a Saramaccan animist everyday are revealed as time itself is undone. Rites are the new trypps; embodiment is our eternal everything. (Ben Russell)
www.dimeshow.com

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PETER KUBELKA PRESENTS MONUMENT FILM
Sunday 21 October 2012, at 2pm
London BFI Southbank NFT 1

I am announcing a new film ANTIPHON (2012) which is part of a new work MONUMENT FILM (2012).

ANTIPHON is constituted by the same four basic elements of cinema
– light and darkness, sound and silence – as my film ARNULF RAINER, but it has the opposite form. Negative becomes positive, positive becomes negative, silence becomes sound, sound becomes silence.

MONUMENT FILM appears in TWO forms:

I

Projection in a dark and silent space:
1) ARNULF RAINER
2) ANTIPHON
3) ARNULF RAINER and ANTIPHON projected at the same time, side by side. The appearance is continuous light alternating in space between two projectors, and continuous sound alternating between two speakers.
4) ARNULF RAINER and ANTIPHON projected at the same time on one screen with one speaker. The appearance theoretically is continuous projection of WHITE light and continuous sound, but there is a slight alternation between the two machines, articulating the materiality of classic cinema.

II

Installation in a bright rectangular space defined by three white walls:
The films are cut, each in 128 equally long strips, which hang on nails and are arranged in a rectangular, metric form.
1) Left wall: ARNULF RAINER
2) Right wall: ANTIPHON exactly opposite
3) Centre wall: ARNULF RAINER and ANTIPHON placed one over the other. The appearance is theoretically a BLACK rectangle but the antiphony is articulated by the two strips of film. (Peter Kubelka)

The Monument Film installation is on display in the BFI Southbank Atrium for the duration of the Festival.

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WHERE THE MAGIC HAPPENS
Sunday 21 October 2012, at 7pm
London BFI Southbank NFT 3

TEN MINUTIAE
Peter Miller, Germany, 2012, 16mm, b/w, silent, 5 min
Minutiae are ‘little things’. Here are ten. These little things comprise an exhibition exalting the cinema. (Peter Miller)
www.petermiller.info

I AM MICRO
Shumona Goel & Shai Heredia, India, 2011, 35mm, b/w, sound, 15 min
I Am Micro is an experimental film portrait of an anonymous filmmaker struggling to make films against innumerable odds. A stream of consciousness voiceover describes the film artist as a fragile, amorphous being, working in isolation, within a competitive film industry built by businessmen. The film was shot on black and white 16mm at National Instruments Limited, a now defunct factory in Calcutta which once produced cameras. I Am Micro combines lyrical tracking shots of obsolete machinery and dismembered cameras, with behind the scenes footage of an independent film production in Bombay. (Shumona Goel & Shai Heredia)

RITA LARSON’S BOY
Kevin Jerome Everson, USA, 2012, video, b/w, sound, 11 min
Rita Larson’s Boy portrays ten actors auditioning for the role of Rollo Larson in the 1970s TV sitcom Sanford and Son (the American remake of Steptoe and Son). It is one of three films included in the Tombigbee Chronicles Number Two. The series of films is based on famous people and objects from Columbus, Mississippi, hometown of Everson’s parents (the Tombigbee is the river the runs though the city). The actor Nathaniel Taylor, raised in Columbus, portrayed Rollo Larson – Rita Larson’s boy. (Kevin Everson)

TRUE-LIFE ADVENTURE
Erin Espelie, USA, 2012, video, colour, sound, 4 min
When nature writes the screenplays, she doesn’t abide by crescendos but makes up each adventure as she goes along. A rivulet of time encased in a sliver of space reveals an abundance of life, an expression of persistence, and a vision of a world expanding beyond the limits of human attempts to contain or conclude. (Erin Espelie)

DARK GARDEN
Nick Collins, UK, 2011, 16mm, b/w, silent, 9 min
Dark Garden is a short film that captures the ghostly images of the artist’s garden in wintertime, a silent world of ghostly apparitions. Skeletal and silvery plants and their supports are conjured out of the black of the screen as a series of filmic epiphanies. (Cinecity)

WITHIN
Robert Todd, USA, 2012, 16mm, colour, sound, 9 min
Within is a film that sustains a complex condition: keeping the inner world alive as the camera looks ‘out’ upon the world. The film, edited mainly in-camera, dives into an interior that drifts increasingly internally, seeking a sort of cave-like milieu that dissolves into abstraction (forms seen in the dark, lacking firm definition, confusing both scales and distances), and then employs real-time complications to bring this internally-directed way of feeling space along with us as it moves into the outside world, or is it an imagined outer world? The film is a further complication of the perspectival explorations present in my film Undergrowth: rather than looking either at a figure or what some imaginary figure might be looking ‘at’, Within lives in a state that seems to resist perspectival definition, hovering somewhere between what is ‘out there’ and an internally defined image space that sees along with it. The film exists in a space that is at once shallow and deep, layered and reflective, barely there and yet very much alive. It is twilight. (Robert Todd)
www.roberttoddfilms.com

BY PAIN AND RHYME AND ARABESQUES OF FORAGING
David Gatten, USA, 2012, video, colour, silent, 8 min
Fourteen years of foraging, repeated attempts at rhyming, painful process of pruning. A love letter of sorts to Robert Boyle, FRS of The Invisible College and the Royal Society of London for the Improvement of Natural Knowledge, in a visual embodiment of an obscure poetic form known as an ‘exploded Petrarchan sonnet.’ Lines by Jorie Graham in ‘Of Forced Sightes and Trusty Ferefulness’, after Sir Thomas Wyatt, informed both the impulse for the journey itself and destination I ultimately sought. (David Gatten)
www.davidgattenfilm.com

THE CREATION AS WE SAW IT
Ben Rivers, UK-Vanuatu, 2012, video, b/w, sound, 14 min
Three mythical stories from the island nation of Vanuatu, South Pacific, concerning the origin of humans, why pigs walk on all fours, and why a volcano sits where it does. (Ben Rivers)
www.benrivers.com

Erin Espelie will present a free screening and talk in the Attenborough Auditorium of the Natural History Museum’s Darwin Centre on Monday 22 October 2012, at 2:30pm.

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FLY INTO THE MYSTERY
Sunday 21 October 2012, at 9pm
London BFI Southbank NFT 3

A LAX RIDDLE UNIT
Laida Lertxundi, Spain-USA, 2011, 16mm, colour, sound, 6 min
A Lax Riddle Unit shows a series of gentle transformations. Each of the film’s turns reveals a surprise: a woman suddenly appearing in bed, and, from behind an album cover, her shy smile. With the film’s elements of Los Angeles landscape, houseplants, and James Carr’s plaintive ‘Love Attack’, continually rearranged like the letters of the title, which is an anagram for Lertxundi’s own name, there is the sense of kaleidoscopic rotation, breathtaking views made with the slightest of movements: changing light, cuts, and slowly revolving camera pans. (Genevieve Yue)

AGATHA
Beatrice Gibson, UK, 2012, video, colour, sound, 14 min
The side of the frame flares out so you know it’s a dream. It becomes apparent that, although similar, there are profound differences between this planet and our own. The most startling is the lack of verbal language. The narrator, our guide to this world, tells us how communication happens, based on interactions with Gladys and Agatha, two beings that confound as they draw the observer in. The names are created for our benefit, and one must wonder if any observations can be trusted, are they all too written, too read from dialogue that isn’t there? What may be certain is the loosening that happens with regard to interpretation. If words cease to have importance then how can the experiences on this planet be readily expressed? Instead of syntax and meaning we are left with rhythm and colour. Based on a dream had by the radical British composer Cornelius Cardew. (Images Festival)
www.dliub.org

WELL THEN THERE NOW
Lewis Klahr, USA, 2011, video, colour, sound, 11 min
An unfaithful interpretation of John Zorn’s early 80’s film script ‘A Treatment For A Film in 15 Scenes’. I consider Well Then There Now a ‘list’ film since Zorn’s text is really a shot list. An exploration of the singularity of the image but, a playful one. Script and Music by John Zorn; Additional Text Lifts from Philippe Soupalt and Alain Robbe Grillet; Voiceover by Slater Klahr.
(Lewis Klahr)

THE PLANT
Mary Helena Clark, USA, 2012, video, colour, sound, 8 min
A film filled with clues and stray transmissions built on the bad geometry of point-of-view shots. (Mary Helena Clark)

ARBOR
Janie Geiser, USA, 2012, video, b/w, sound, 7 min
From a set of photographs found in a thrift store, Geiser creates a liminal space between representation and abstraction, figure and landscape, fiction and memory. Arbor suggests the fragility and ephemerality of memory and its artifacts through subtle manipulations of the photographs: reframings, layerings, inversions, and through the introduction of three dimensional elements, including flowers and thread. The photographs’ subjects are elusive; they rarely engage the camera; they are glimpsed, rather than seen. They look elsewhere, and wait for something inevitable. Gathering on a hillside, lounging on the grass beyond now-lost trees, the inhabitants of Arbor cycle through their one remembered afternoon, gradually succumbing to time or dissolving into landscape, reserving for themselves what we can’t know – and becoming shadows in their own stories. (Janie Geiser)
www.janiegeiser.com

THE TIGER’S MIND
Beatrice Gibson, UK, 2012, video, colour, sound, 22 min
The Tiger’s Mind is an abstract crime thriller set against the backdrop of a brutalist villa. Six characters, The Tiger, The Mind, The Tree, Wind, The Circle and a girl called Amy (the set, the music, the sounds, the special effects, the narrator and the author respectively) battle one another for control of the film as it unfolds on screen. The film explores the relationships between these characters as they emerge and unfold: grappling, wrestling, and dreaming with one another. The Tiger’s Mind is based on an experimental narrative score of the same name, written in 1967 by the radical British composer Cornelius Cardew. Departing from the character-based and improvisatory nature of the score and working with a fixed group of artists for over a year-long period (Alex Waterman as the Tree, Jesse Ash as the Wind, John Tilbury as the Mind, Celine Condorelli as the Tiger, Will Holder as Amy and Beatrice Gibson as the Circle) the film deployed the score as a production structure inviting the participants to develop its varying components: soundtrack, set, special effects, music and text. The resulting piece presents a portrait of its own making in fictional form, extending narrative and character to the production process itself. Tiger’s sets, Mind’s music, Wind’s effects, Tree’s foley, Amy’s narration and Circle’s authorship all knock up against each other in a battle for primacy. (Beatrice Gibson)
www.dliub.org

Laida Lertxundi will screen her work alongside films by Morgan Fisher, Hollis Frampton
and Bruce Baillie at the ICA Artists’ Film Club on Tuesday 23 October 2012, at 7pm.

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INTIMATE VISION: FILMS BY CHICK STRAND 1
Thursday 15 November 2012, at 8pm
Barcelona Xcèntric CCCB

CARTOON LE MOUSSE
Chick Strand, USA, 1979, 15 min
In her collage films, Strand uses the magic of editing to conjure surreal humour from the connections between disparate fragments.

MOSORI MONIKA
Chick Strand, USA, 1970, 20 min
The impact of American missionaries on the Warao Indians in Venezuela is considered from the viewpoints of women from each side.

ANGEL BLUE SWEET WINGS
Chick Strand, USA, 1966, 3 min
A multi-layered cine-poem apropos life and vision.

LOOSE ENDS
Chick Strand, USA, 1979, 25 min
Found footage is used to convey the effect of information overload, finding wit and pathos in the complicated synthesis of personal experience and media assault.

ARTIFICIAL PARADISE
Chick Strand, USA, 1986, 13 min
‘The anthropologist’s most human desire: the ultimate contact with the informant. The denial of intellectualism and the acceptance of the romantic heart, and a soul without innocence.’ (CS)

KRISTALLNACHT
Chick Strand, USA, 1979, 7 min
‘Dedicated to the memory of Anne Frank, and the tenacity of the human spirit.’ (CS)

Chick Strand: I had a Degree in Anthropology and I was going to San Francisco State University to get my MFA and then my PhD and I thought, “Oh man, I’m 30 fucking years old and now I’ve got two kids … I don’t want to listen to these old farts ever again!” So I came down to Los Angeles to go to film school at UCLA.

UCLA is where I met Pat O’Neill, he was a student in the Art Department and I was in the Film Department, but we came together over photography because I thought that if I took photography then I’d learn more about film – the physics of it, how you do it, how you can manipulate it. We were down the dark rooms with a wonderful teacher there called Robert Heineken, he was pretty well known, who somehow had got a 16mm contact printer. Pat O’Neill was the only one using it, and he showed me what he knew and then I was using it. It was quite wonderful. We had to develop our films in regular trays and stuff like that. I was pretty good. Pretty hard to keep our butts out of the soup there but it was really rather fun.

MW: And so was this how you made Kulu Se Mama and those early abstract films?

CS: It was. Kulu Se Mama was an independent course that I did using special effects, my first attempt really. I was interested first of all in photography and Bob Heineken turned us onto solarisation. There was a photographer named Edmund Teske who was really involved in that. I think maybe Pat had made 7362 by then and maybe we talked about it. So I was pretty much playing with solarisation and was sort of entranced by the natural colour that came out. Rather than putting colour in I was really entranced by these bronzes and coppers. I found out too that if you made the soup thick, just sort of let it sit there and gel, then you could get these marvellous greens and I thought, “Oh, that’s what I want to do,” … but then I got into the ethnographic thing and got sent to Venezuela, to the jungles of the Orinoco. So what was a girl to do but just do an ethnographic film?

I went there with the idea in mind that Mosori Monika was going to be an ethnographic film, using that methodology more or less. I never believed that an ethnographic film would ever take the place of the written word, but that it would sort of introduce people who’d watch the films and then studied the culture to actual seeing the people move around, you know? I was so sick of the black and white photographs of guys with spears and all that stuff … But you cannot be objective, totally objective, I couldn’t help myself juxtaposing what was actually being said by an Indian woman – translated – over a picture, over an image …

Even though I shoot documentary style, it isn’t, because I don’t set out to do that and I don’t weigh it out in any certain way, although I’m so nosey – “Tell me about your life?” – but I couldn’t understand this Warao Indian woman I was filming one bit. There was a guy who spoke Spanish and English that was part of the trio of us that went down to Venezuela, totally paid for by UCLA, then he had a translator that spoke Spanish and the Indian language, and then there was the Indian woman. I said, “Tell me about your life,” and then he left her talking for about 20 minutes. I’d say, “Jorge, is she telling about the life?” and he asked and the guy says, “Yeah, yeah!” I had no idea what she was talking about, no idea at all, but we translated it immediately so I could somehow get some images that went along with it. Of course it’s a lie because if she’s talking about when she was young you can’t really show it, you have to be symbolic about it in a way.

Margaret Mead hated it. The Flaherty Seminar was going on and she was still alive, and it was just at that time when I was seeing ethnographic films a lot. That was very interesting because one of the things that sort of influenced me to be a little more humane about what I was doing, a little more digging in, was her film called Trance and Dance in Bali, where the guys are flaying themselves. You never got the feeling of what it was like to be one of those guys, never, it was just like going to the zoo … It was absolutely wonderful that these people went out there with cameras and filmed all this stuff and tried to preserve the cultures, at least on paper and then film, it was really remarkable. In a sense, that film and many others like Nanook of the North influenced me with ethnography and all my work.

Then I went to Mexico and I was so entranced with the colour and the feeling we got there, and how mysterious it was, like true-life surrealism. You’d go into a church and they’ve got Jesus in a glass case, bleeding all over, and on the walls they’ve got relics that are supposed to be the skin of saints or something like that. Or you sit in your patio and down the street you hear the donkey braying and ducks quacking and then you go out the door and up the street there’s some guy playing a flute and drum. It’s crazy and it really is wonderful. Mexico to me was a very magic place.

MW: Artificial Paradise is one of your Mexican films.

CS: For some complicated reason, I met this young man who was a groom at a horse ranch outside of town and I really fell in love with him, like when you get crushes on people but you never follow through or anything. It was just this young guy, couldn’t speak English, totally uneducated, so I taught him how to drive a car and how to read. He was quite beautiful to me. I thought that every movement was sort of his art, and the way he saw things and the poetry he’d write, the songs he’d sing. Not only that but he was completely captivated, not by me so much as just the adventures we could have together. “Come on …”, in my lousy Spanish, “I want to film you in the lake because of these pink flowers here.” So we’d go in the water and then I realised, “God, it’s smelly, it’s probably where the sewer came out!” but he didn’t say anything. He had this big crush on my friend Lee and I just had to make a romantic film about it, it had to be about Sappho thinking of men instead of women. That’s the way it was really, the boy across the river whose skin is like peaches but I cannot swim. Of course in the end she swims – have your cake and eat it too! I really love movement close in. We never see it because we’re never that close. Instead of special effects and all that stuff, I could just use the camera itself, and move with the camera and let everything unfold. That’s what Artificial Paradise is about, aside from this romance that wasn’t a romance. I always thought of films as poems, they’re poetic, but anyway that’s old-fashioned!

MW: At a certain point you were making the Mexican films and found footage films like Loose Ends in parallel. What was your interest in making collage films?

CS: The footage was available, and certainly after Bruce Conner’s example I thought, “Oh, that’s a possibility.” I used to make cut-out collages with stuff from magazines, but when I saw A Movie, that really blew me away. While I was teaching I somehow got my hands on a whole bunch of old black and white footage from the educational department, and maybe I stole a little bit of footage from Dream of Wild Horses and stuff like that, and I just did it. The thing that I love about found footage is you have to make something out of nothing in a sense. You have all these disparate pieces that can be connected or re-connected or woven and re-woven and you make the choices and it becomes a very personal thing.

The secretary of my department, her father had all this stuff that showed his children during the war. And there were educational films in the Occidental College Library which I just absconded with, I mean they didn’t want them anymore, it was quite wonderful. Then of course there was the L.A. Public Library and, you know, I just would have dupes made. I had a student whose father owned a big special effects place. I could take my black and white footage there and he would wet gate print it and make a master so that a lot of the scratches would be gone. I can’t believe I did that, but I’d do it again! When I started, I’d shoot my own stuff but still I sort of see it as a collage because I don’t know what I’m shooting, I had no idea, and most the time I don’t have control over the people because they give me a present of themselves. “Give me the gift of yourself, tell me your life story!”

These excerpts are from an interview with Chick Strand conducted on 15 March 2008 for the forthcoming book “Critical Mass: An Oral History of Avant-Garde Film, The New American Cinema and Beyond”. Initial research for this project was funded by the British Academy.

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INTIMATE VISION: FILMS BY CHICK STRAND 2
Friday 16 November 2012, at 8pm
Barcelona Xcèntric CCCB

Mark Webber: Could you tell me about the making of Soft Fiction?

Chick Strand: I had a friend named Beverley Houston who, with Marsha Kinder, wrote books about films and were film historians at USC. We’d all been to an art show down on Wiltshire Boulevard and as we were leaving, we were sort of lingering on the staircase with our hands on the banister, just sort of gossiping, and Beverley told me this story about the time she went to the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena. She said there was a piece that was a banister, a three dimensional banister … I don’t know who it was by, I don’t think it was George Segal, it was by somebody else. She was stoned at the Norton Simon Museum, and she began to wonder what it would be like to be that banister and have people touch you. Then she moved on to the David statue and also wondered what it would be like to be that and feel everything, rather than be the person that feels. It was such a bizarre story to me that I thought, “I gotta put this in a film,” so I filmed her telling the story with a borrowed a lipsync camera. For a while my friends would say, “What you working on Chick?” And I’d tell them, and they’d say, “I have a story, I have a story …”

There was a story about the girl and her grandfather … she would never say ‘abused’, but she was molested, I guess, by her grandfather. In the film, she finally says that he was ‘teaching’ her, in a way. It was before all this crazy stuff over here, like the guy who’s 18 and screws a 16-year-old girlfriend and gets put in prison as a sex offender, but it’s really not right that the grandfather did that. She was my student and I would make my students write journals. I’d say, “You can lie. If you don’t want to tell me, you can lie.” Anyway, she wrote this story in her journal and I asked her if she would repeat the story, and not only that but would she come naked? Could I film her in a kitchen naked making breakfast while the story’s going on?

With the rest of them it was the same kind of thing … There was the woman who fucked all the cowboys. None of that went over in the 1970s at all! People in the audience would say, “How could you do that, how could you make guys think we want to fuck all the cowboys?” And I said, “And how many erotic daydreams do you have about guys fucking you?” It was sort of over the top at the time but now it’s pretty ordinary I suppose. I’m talking about honesty or whether these stories are real.

There’s another woman that talks about a heroin addiction and the guy she was going with was just a killer, meaning he was so good looking … only a lot of people took it that meant he was a serial killer. I don’t know to this day whether that was real or not. I don’t want to know, because that’s part of what film is, you know, you get what is given and that’s the interesting thing.

MW: What kind of reactions would you get from people at the time?

CS: Well, nobody said too much about the grandfather story because that was really intimate. I guess she had accepted it. The whole idea of the film, finally when I got to those stories, was that these women are not victims. They can say, “Fuck you!” at the end of their experience, which is, I think, the goal. They’ve not been victimised, they go beyond it in a way. But the audiences didn’t like the screwing of the cowboys, and not only that but going to the horse stall, which was better than the dorm room, and blowing this other guy! You know, in our wildest dreams we’d love to do it once or twice, this anonymous orgy kind of thing, I suppose. She didn’t want to be shown in the film, so I found this other woman to read it. She’d never seen it before I gave it to her to read on camera. So she’s commenting about it, “Oh, she’s saying this … of course, blah, blah, blah.” Feminist ladies didn’t like that much at all. They didn’t say much about the heroin addiction either. I mean, Johanna’s so sure of herself, you know? “And I quit and I never did it again.” But by then she’d had these two young teenage boys … so we’ve always left it at that. And nobody said much about Hedy Sontag, who was Susan Sontag’s cousin, and who was the little girl in Poland sitting on the Nazi’s lap.

MW: What was the male response to the film?

CS: After I shot it I would say I wanted to make one about men, which I did want to do for a long time, but I never did. I would get some interesting stories, like from a Vietnam Veteran, another one of my students, who just described bodies being turned inside out … this close to death, close to craziness experience. Another was going to be Pat O’Neill, who had a near death experience when he had an aneurysm. Then there’s the young beautiful guys that are sort of wild that I wanted to use for the musical interludes, an idea I got from Mexican films – only five minutes of story and then there’s a song. Why not? But I never did do it.

These excerpts are from an interview with Chick Strand was conducted on 15 March 2008 for the forthcoming book “Critical Mass: An Oral History of Avant-Garde Film, The New American Cinema and Beyond”. Initial research for this project was funded by the British Academy.

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