Jonas Mekas presents Birth of a Nation

JONAS MEKAS PRESENTS BIRTH OF A NATION
Sunday 5 October 2000, at 9pm
London Lux Center

One hundred and sixty portraits or rather appearances, sketches and glimpses of avant-garde, independent filmmakers and film activists between 1955 and 1996. Why Birth of a Nation? Because the film independents is a nation in itself. We are surrounded by commercial cinema Nation same way as the indigenous people of the United States or of any other country are surrounded by the Ruling Powers. We are the invisible, but essential nation of cinema. We are the cinema.

BIRTH OF A NATION
Jonas Mekas, USA, 1997, 16mm, colour, sound, 85 min
Music by Wagner and Hermann Nitsch. Voice by Jean Houston.

List of filmmakers and related friends and film activists who appear in the film, in order of appearance:

P. Adams Sitney, Peter Kubelka, Ken Kelman, Hollis Melton, Ken Jacobs, Larry Jordan, Florence Jacobs, Harry Smith, Henri Langlois, Annette Michelson, Gerald O’Grady, Hollis Frampton, Sidney Peterson, James Broughton, Joel Singer, Stephen Dwoskin, Dore O., Wener Nekes, Kenneth Anger, Andrew Noren, Jacques Ledoux, Ed Emshwiller, Saul Levine, Larry Gottheim, Pascale Dauman, Ray Wisniewski, Taylor Mead, Michael Snow, Ricky Leacock, Stan Brakhage, Jane Brakhage, Barry Gerson, Willard Van Dyke, John Whitney, Pola Chapelle, Morris Engel, Stan Vander­beek, Amy Greenfield, Bruce Baillie, Chantal Akerman, Sally Dixon, Will Hindle, Michael Stuart, Robert Creeley, Friede Bartlett, Scott Bartlett, Jud Yalkut, Adolfas Mekas, Callie Angell, Charles Levine, Bhob Stewart, Nelly Kaplan, Claudia Weil, Annabel Nicholson, Birgit Hein, Piero Heliczer, Peter Gidal, Kurt Kren, Wilhelm Hein, Malcolm Le Grice, Carmen Vigil, Bill Brand, Regina Cornwell, Akiko limura, Taka limura, David Crosswaite, Gill Eatherley, Amy Taubin, Tom Chomont, Peter Weibel, Carla Liss, Robert Huot, Guy Fihman, Claudine Eizykman, David Curtis, Barbara Rubin, Kenji Kanesaka, Anna Karina, Leo Dratfield, Gregory Markopoulos, Robert Beavers, Robert Kramer, Pamela Badyk, Cecille Starr, Jerome Hill, Donald Richie, Fred Halsted, David Wise, Sheldon Renan, James Blue, Ernie Gehr, Richard Foreman, Robert Polidori, Leni Riefenstahl, Amalie Roth­schild, Lillian Kiesler, Shigeko Kubota, Jerry Tartaglia, Dan Talbot, Louis Marcorelles, Michel Auder, Dwight MacDonald, Viva, Leslie Trumbull, Kit Carson, Paul Shrader, Shirley Clarke, Bosley Crowther, Dimitri Devyatkin, Ulrich Gregor, Sheldon Rochlin, La Monte Young, Robert Gardner, Vlada Petric, John du Cane, William Raban, Tony Conrad, George Maciunas, Alberto Cavalcanti, Jim McBride, Peter Bogdanovich, Gideon Bachmann, Christiane Rochefort, Jerry Jofen, Rosa von Praunheim, Hans Richter, Roberto Rossellini, Lionel Rogosin, Robert Haller, Storm De Hirsch, Marcel Hanoun, Jerome Hiler, Bruce Conner, Myrel Glick, Paul Sharits, Barbara Schwartz, Lewis Jacobs, lan Barna, Carolee Schneemann, Anthony McCall, Diego Cortez, Leslie Trumbell, Adolfo Arieta, Louis Brigante, Coleen Fitzgibbon, Stewart Sherman, Charles Chaplin, Len Lye, Jacques Tati, Allen Ginsberg, Valie Export, Hermann Nitsch, Andy Warhol, Jack Smith, Analena Wibom, Robert Breer and Raimund Abraham.

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Ken Jacobs’ Nervous System: 4

KEN JACOBS’ NERVOUS SYSTEM
Oxford Phoenix Picture House Cinema
Tuesday 7 November 2000, at 7pm

CRYSTAL PALACE
Ken Jacobs, USA, 1997, Nervous Magic Lantern, b/w, sound, c.25 min
Impossible movements … impossible spaces … issue forth from a single, somewhat unusual slide projector (of British manufacture) employed in an unexpected way. Cinema without film or electronics. And, as with The Nervous System (utilising pairs of projectors), depth phenomena is produced that can be seen as such without special viewing spectacles, and even by a single eye. (Ken Jacobs)

COUPLING
Ken Jacobs, USA, 1996, Nervous System, b/w, sound, c.60 min
Lumiere Brothers 1896 / Ken Jacobs 1996
A wide Paris street lined with small shops. Horse carriages and passers-by move freely about (there seem to be no designated traffic lanes). A wedding procession mounts church steps, advancing towards the camera. Their ascent remains stately throughout, if also spatially delirious. In keeping with the mystery of the nuptial sacrament, the bride in white – creature of light, of white movie screen – is allowed only a hint of facial features. Her older brother escorts her, the groom follows. The brother is Charles Molsson, the Lumiere machinist that built their first camera and hand wound the projector at The Grand Café, place of their first public screening. It is more than likely that this is the first wedding movie. (Ken Jacobs)

This performance was made possible thanks to the support of the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford. Thanks to Kerry Brougher of MoMA and all at British Screen and Picture House Cinemas.

Ken Jacobs’ Nervous System: 5

KEN JACOBS’ NERVOUS SYSTEM
Manchester Cornerhouse
Thursday 9 November 2000, at 7:30pm

ONTIC ANTICS STARRING LAUREL AND HARDY
Ken Jacobs, USA, 1998, Nervous System, b/w, sound, c.60 min
“With his Nervous System film performances, Jacobs wrings changes out of startled frames and makes the infinitesimal matter. Ontic Antics with Laurel and Hardy – the simple shift of a vowel or the advance of a film frame creates a world of definition and character. Basking in that shade of difference he plumbs the frame with surgical decisiveness and amatory delicacy. Welcome to microtonal cinema. Taking Laurel and Hardy’s Berth Marks as point of departure, Jacobs supersedes slapstick, moving into the deeper dimensions of the human comedy. Psychological imbroglios, time-space predicaments, the unruliness of uncooperative gravity, the unlimited expressiveness of the limited body hallucinated into Rorschach-ing deliveries.” (Mark McElhatten)
Hardy walked a thin line between playing heavy and playing fatty. Laurel adopted a retarded squint, with suggestions of idiot savant. Their characters were at sea, clinging to each other as industrial capitalism was breaking up and sinking. Beautiful losers, they kept it funny, buoying our spirits. Laurel and Hardy … forever. (Ken Jacobs)

BERTH MARKS
Lewis R. Foster, USA, 1929, 16mm, b/w, sound, 18 min
Oliver Hardy goes to meet his partner Stan Laurel at the train station. They have a vaudeville act, which involves a bass fiddle, and are on their way to their next performance. They just barely make the train and are led to their berth, wreaking havoc amongst the other passengers in their wake. With much difficulty, they undress in their berth. As soon as they’re ready for bed, they arrive at Pottsville, their destination, and have to hurry off. Once the train has left the station, they discover that they have left their bass fiddle on board. But the situations aren’t important, it’s what the boys do with them – the way Ollie wanders around the station in search of Stan, just missing him several times, and the various contortions the pair try to get into their upper berth – that give the film its fun. Especially nice is the interchange between the boys and the conductor. When Ollie describes himself and Stan to the trainman as a “big-time vaudeville act”, the old man dryly replies, “Well, I bet you’re good !” (Janiss Garza, All Movie Guide)

DISORIENT EXPRESS
Ken Jacobs, USA, 1996, 35mm, b/w, silent, 30 min
1906 – Original cinematographer unknown. 1996 – New arrangement by Ken Jacobs. Shots shown as found in “A Trip Down Mount Tamalpais”, the Paper Print Collection, Library of Congress. Optically copied by Sam Bush, Western Cine Lab., Denver, from l6mm to 35mm letterbox format to allow double-image mirroring in 1:85 ratio projection.
The same string of shots, in their entirety, is repeated in various placement and directional permutations. But this film is not a lately arrived example of ‘‘Structural Cinema”, where methods of ordering film materials often came to take on paramount value. (The viewer at some point grasped the method and that could be pretty much it.) I’m for order only to the extent it provides possibilities of fresh experience. For instance, kaleidoscopic symmetry in Disorient Express is not an end in itself. The radiant patterning that affirms the screen plane serves also to provide visual events of an entirely other magnitude. Flat transmutes repeatedly to massive depth illusion; yet that which appears so forcefully, convincingly in depth is patently unreal – an irrational space. The obvious filmic flips and turns (method is always evident) of the scenic trip provide perceptual challenges to our understanding of reality, and we are often unable to see things as we know they are.
With light-source shifted from heaven-sent to infernal, we see a landscape that could never be, except via cinema. A very early recording of a train trip through mountainous terrain, enthusiasm of the adventurous passengers on boisterous display, lends itself to us for a ride into each our own Rorschach wilderness. This careening trip also demands some hanging on, some output of viewer energy. The rightness of the closure (as I see it) was made possible by copying the film, for the last pass, in reverse motion.
Disorient Express takes you someplace else. A spin lasting 30 minutes, you really need to tap into your own reserves of energy. Hang on, please, this is not formalist cinema; order interests me only to the extent that it can provide experience. Watch the flat screen give way to some kind of 3D thrust, look for impossible depth inversions, for jewelled splendour, for CATscans of the brain. I’m banking on this film reviving a yen for expanded consciousness. (Ken Jacobs)

Ken Jacobs’ Nervous System: 6

KEN JACOBS’ NERVOUS SYSTEM
Nottingham Broadway Media Centre
Friday 10 November 2000, at 7pm

CRYSTAL PALACE
Ken Jacobs, USA, 1997, Nervous Magic Lantern, b/w, sound, c.25 min
Impossible movements … impossible spaces … issue forth from a single, somewhat unusual slide projector (of British manufacture) employed in an unexpected way. Cinema without film or electronics. And, as with The Nervous System (utilising pairs of projectors), depth phenomena is produced that can be seen as such without special viewing spectacles, and even by a single eye. (Ken Jacobs)

DISORIENT EXPRESS
Ken Jacobs, USA, 1996, 35mm, b/w, silent, 30 min
1906 – Original cinematographer unknown. 1996 – New arrangement by Ken Jacobs. Shots shown as found in “A Trip Down Mount Tamalpais”, the Paper Print Collection, Library of Congress. Optically copied by Sam Bush, Western Cine Lab., Denver, from 16mm to 35mm letterbox format to allow double-image mirroring in 1:85 ratio projection.
The same string of shots, in their entirety, is repeated in various placement and directional permutations. But this film is not a lately arrived example of ‘‘Structural Cinema”, where methods of ordering film materials often came to take on paramount value. (The viewer at some point grasped the method and that could be pretty much it.) I’m for order only to the extent it provides possibilities of fresh experience. For instance, kaleidoscopic symmetry in Disorient Express is not an end in itself. The radiant patterning that affirms the screen plane serves also to provide visual events of an entirely other magnitude. Flat transmutes repeatedly to massive depth illusion; yet that which appears so forcefully, convincingly in depth is patently unreal – an irrational space. The obvious filmic flips and turns (method is always evident) of the scenic trip provide perceptual challenges to our understanding of reality, and we are often unable to see things as we know they are.
With light-source shifted from heaven-sent to infernal, we see a landscape that could never be, except via cinema. A very early recording of a train trip through mountainous terrain, enthusiasm of the adventurous passengers on boisterous display, lends itself to us for a ride into each our own Rorschach wilderness. This careening trip also demands some hanging on, some output of viewer energy. The rightness of the closure (as I see it) was made possible by copying the film, for the last pass, in reverse motion.
Disorient Express takes you someplace else. A spin lasting 30 minutes, you really need to tap into your own reserves of energy. Hang on, please, this is not formalist cinema; order interests me only to the extent that it can provide experience. Watch the flat screen give way to some kind of 3D thrust, look for impossible depth inversions, for jewelled splendour, for CATscans of the brain. I’m banking on this film reviving a yen for expanded consciousness. (Ken Jacobs)

PHONOGRAPH
Ken Jacobs, USA, 1990, audiotape, 15 min
One-take unedited audiotape. 15 minutes of loud black surround sound. (Ken Jacobs)
“Most ferocious sound I’ve ever heard”. (John Zorn)

SLOWSCAN
Ralph Hocking, USA, 1981, videotape, b/w, silent, 4 min (excerpt)
This is an ingenuous and astonishing work made by s happily reclusive artist who has created many marvels in photography and video, often featuring his wife Sherry (often undressed), but who makes no effort to exhibit. A champion of the possibilities of “low res” video, he remains free of addiction to the technically latest and the most. For me, his brusque and unfussy video art remains the latest and the most. It’s an honour to present even this small example. (Ken Jacobs)

JACOB’S LADDER
James Otis, USA, 16mm, b/w, silent, 4 min
Jacob’s Ladder is a black and white spiralling, swirling computer-generated abstract animation. It combines its technological origin and its imagery (reminiscent of natural processes and objects – fractals, polyps, branching plants, crystal growth) seamlessly and beautifully.” (Patrick Friel)

UN PETIT TRAIN DE PLAISIR
Ken Jacobs, USA, 1999, Nervous System, b/w, sound, c.25 min
25 minutes to traverse, by train, (perpendicular view of) a single open Paris street. Remember the smooth rubber “spaldeen” (Spaulding), high bouncer that – sometimes in a stickball game on the once streets of Brooklyn – would split evenly along its circling seam? And then as pink twin hemispheres made possible further fun. What had been the secret interior was revealed to be so much cleaner and fleshy smooth than the exterior. Suggestively libidinal before one knew what was what. There was no point attempting to fling a half-ball; irresistible was the impulse to invert it ! Pop, inside out. The optical implausibilities of Un Petit Train de Plaisir inverts mentalities like pink half-spaldeens. (Ken Jacobs)

This performance was made possible by the generosity and co-operation of Frank Abbott and Nottingham Trent University. Thanks also Caroline Hennigan and Laraine Porter at the Broadway.

Take it to the Limit: The Noise of Cinema

TAKE IT TO THE LIMIT: THE NOISE OF CINEMA
Saturday 25 October 2000, at 9pm
Sheffield Showroom

Experimental and easy music played by DJ’s Mark Webber and Gregory Kurcewicz plus informal screenings of film with experimental music and noise soundtracks.

Takahiko Iimura, Shutter, 1971, USA, b/w, sound, 25 min
Guy Sherwin, Soundtrack, 1977, UK, b/w, sound, 9 min
John Latham, Speak, 1968-69, UK, colour, sound, 11 min
Peter Gidal, Focus, 1971, UK, b/w, sound, 10 min
Stan Brakhage, Desistfilm, 1954, USA, b/w, sound, 7 min
Paul Sharits, Ray Gun Virus, 1966, USA, colour, sound, 14 min
Kenneth Anger, Invocation of My Demon Brother, 1969, USA, colour, sound, 12 min
Ernie Gehr, Reverberation, 1969, USA, b/w, sound-on-tape, 23 min (16fps)
Standish Lawder, Raindance, 1970, USA, colour, sound, 16 min
Bruce Conner, Crossroads, USA, 1976, USA, b/w, sound, 36 min

Part of the Soundtracking festival at Sheffield Showroom.

The Shadow of the Factory

THE SHADOW OF THE FACTORY
Sunday 26 October 2000, at 9pm
Sheffield Showroom

Programme of short films featuring Andy Warhol, the Velvet Underground and others from the silver Factory and New York arts community.

Jack Smith, Scotch Tape, 1959-62, USA, colour, sound, 2 min
Jack Smith’s first film, shot in a rubbish dumb, music assembled by Tony Conrad

Piero Heliczer, The Soap Opera, c.1964, USA, b/w, silent, 13 min
Evocative document of the Lower East Side artists includes Angus MacLise, Tony Conrad, La Monte Young, Marian Zazeela, John Cale and others

Jonas Mekas, Award Presentation To Andy Warhol, 1964, USA, b/w, sound, 12 min
Jonas Mekas presents the Film Culture award to Warhol and his Factory gang

Andrew Meyer, Match Girl, 1966, USA, b/w & colour, sound, 26 min
Shot in the Factory and including some original Warhol Screen Tests

Keewatin Dewdney, Malanga, 1967, Canada, b/w, sound, 3 min
Stroboscopic cuts between Malanga reading poetry and dancing to the Velvet Underground

Ron Nameth, Warhol’s E.P.I., 1967, USA, colour, sound, 22 min
Kinetic film of the Exploding Plastic Inevitable concerts, with Velvet Underground soundtrack

Stephen Shore & Gerard Malanga, Frozen Warnings, 1990, USA, b/w, sound, 4 min (videotape)
Promotional video for the reissue of the Nico “Marble Index” CD

Part of the Soundtracking festival at Sheffield Showroom.

Genius and Junkie: Burroughs in Britain

GENIUS AND JUNKIE: BURROUGHS IN BRITAIN
Wednesday 14 March 2001, at 6:30pm
London Tate Britain Clore Auditorium

Cult author Iain Sinclair, film curator Mark Webber and Tim Marlow (BBC broadcaster and editor of tate: the art magazine) come together to revel in and debate the impact of the great American Beat novelist William Burroughs on the underground arts scene in London.

Focusing on the 1960s and 1970s, when Burroughs lived for a number of years in the city, this exciting event will include screenings of two films Burroughs made in collaboration with the British film-maker Antony Balch, The Cut-Ups (1963) and Towers Open Fire (1967).

Antony Balch, Towers Open Fire, 1963, 16mm, b/w, sound, 10 min
Antony Balch, The Cut-Ups, 1967, 16mm, b/w, sound, 19 min

Like Seeing New York for the First Time 1

LIKE SEEING NEW YORK FOR THE FIRST TIME
Sunday 15 April 2001, at 3pm
London Tate Modern

LIKE SEEING NEW YORK FOR THE FIRST TIME: 1
Six Extraordinary Films of Manhattan in the 60s & 70s

Two programmes of films selected by Mark Webber for the Tate Modern exhibition “Century City: Art and Culture in the Modern Metropolis” (1 February – 29 April 2001), presenting six unique views of New York in the 60s and 70s.

NEW YORK PORTRAIT: CHAPTER 1
Peter Hutton, USA, 1978-79, b/w, silent, 16 min

Hutton’s black and white haikus are an exquisite distillation of the cinematic eye. The limitations imposed – no colour, no sound, no movement (except from a vehicle not directly propelled by the filmmaker), no direct cuts since the images are born and die in black – ironically entail an ultimate freedom of the imagination. If pleasure can disturb, Hutton’s ploys emerge in full focus. These materialising then evaporating images don’t ignite, but conjure strains of fleeting panoramas of detached bemusement. More than mere photography, Hutton’s contained-within-the-frame juxtapositions are filmic explorations of the benign and the tragic. (Warren Sonbert)

Hutton’s most impressive work, the filmmaker’s style takes on an assertive edge that marks his maturity. The landscape has a majesty that serves to reflect the meditative interiority of the artist independent of any human presence. New York is framed in the dark nights of a lonely winter. The pulse of street life finds no role in New York Portrait; the dense metropolitan population and imposing urban locale disappear before Hutton’s concern for the primal force of a universal presence. With an eye for the ordinary, Hutton can point his camera toward the clouds finding flocks of birds, or turn back to the simple objects around his apartment struggling to elicit a personal intuition from their presence. Hutton finds a harmonious, if at times melancholy, rapport with the natural elements that retain their grace in spite of the city’s artificial environment. The city becomes a ghost town that the filmmaker transforms into a vehicle reflecting his personal mood. The last shot looks across a Brooklyn beach toward the skyline of Coney Island’s amusement park. The quiet park evokes the once frantic city smothered by winter. Nature continues its eternal cycles impervious to the presence of man, the aspirations of society, or the decay of the metropolis. (Leger Grindon, Millennium Film Journal, 1979)

STILL
Ernie Gehr, USA, 1969-71, colour, sound, 53 min

In Still, Gehr’s picture of place feels most like home. From the perspective of a ground-floor window, we look out at a bit of Lexington Avenue just south of 31st Street in Manhattan, the one-way traffic and the people going by, crossing the street, entering and leaving a luncheonette – nothing out of the ordinary – except for the superimpositions, the ghostly presences, of other people, other cars and buses and trucks inhabiting the same place. These are not supernatural but material ghosts, conjured without mystification or fuss by double exposures done in the camera. And yet this technique works wondrously to evoke the mysterious interplay of different times in the life of a place, times of the day and of the year, pieces of personal and social history that have here come to pass. This is a film about place in time, and in time we sense that this is a place happily haunted by its ghosts. One admirer, the dramatist Richard Foreman, called Still an inti­mation of paradise. It is paradise found in the yellow of cabs and the green of a tree across the street, in the way that things are seen to fit, body and ghost, into the fabric of the world. It is paradise found in the kind of detachment that is most deeply involving. Still begins in silence and in winter. The tree is bare, the light is low, and the wintry white of a parked car stands at the centre of the screen. Then suddenly the tree is in bloom and the light is bright, the long shadows of winter are gone and the sounds of the city are heard. Wintry white gives way to the double-exposed spring yellow of two superimposed pairs of parked taxicabs. If the fluorescent-lit interior of an institutional corridor is “an unlikely vantage point to view the dawn,” as Sitney remarks in his book on Gehr, “a stretch of Lexington Avenue in the 30s is almost as unlikely a spot to hail the coming of spring.” But we work with what we’ve got, and from the view out the window Gehr composes an urban salute to spring as stirring as any bucolic one. (Gilberto Perez, Yale Review, October 1999)

REAL ITALIAN PIZZA
David Rimmer, Canada, 1971, colour, sound, 10 min

Taken between September 1970 and May 1971, with the unmoving camera apparently bolted to the window ledge, this film, a ten-minute eternity, chronicles what takes place within view of the lens. The backdrop is a typical New York pizza stand, the actors are selected New Yorkers who happened to be there during the half year, the plot is the somewhat sinister aimlessness of life itself. (Donald Ritchie, Museum of Modern Art, New York)

David Rimmer has quietly placed his camera in the blind spot everyone walks past. A fire engine, lights flashing, stops for the firemen to dash in to get some pizza to take to the fire … You haven’t been to New York ’til you’ve seen Real Italian Pizza. (Gerry Gilbert, BC Monthly)

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Like Seeing New York for the First Time 2

LIKE SEEING NEW YORK FOR THE FIRST TIME
Sunday 22 April 2001, at 3pm
London Tate Modern

LIKE SEEING NEW YORK FOR THE FIRST TIME: 2
Six Extraordinary Films of Manhattan in the 60s & 70s

Two programmes of films selected by Mark Webber for the Tate Modern exhibition “Century City: Art and Culture in the Modern Metropolis” (1 February – 29 April 2001), presenting six unique views of New York in the 60s and 70s.

SOFT RAIN
Ken Jacobs, USA, 1968, colour, silent, 12 min

View from above is of a partially snow-covered low flat rooftop receding between the brick walls of two much taller downtown N.Y. loft buildings. A slightly tilted rectangular shape left of the centre of the composition is the section of rain-wet Reade Street, visible to us over the low rooftop. Distant trucks, cars, persons carrying packages, umbrellas sluggishly pass across this little stage-like area. A fine rain-mist is confused, visually, with the colour emulsion grain. A large black rectangle following up and filling to space above the stage area is seen as both an unlikely abyss extending in deep space behind the stage or more properly, as a two dimensional plane suspended far forward of the entire snow/rain scene. Though it clearly if slightly overlaps the two receding loft building walls, the mind, while knowing better, insists on presuming it to be overlapped by them. (At one point the black plane even trembles.) So this mental tugging takes place throughout. The contradiction of 2D reality versus 3D implication is amusingly and mysteriously explicit. Filmed at 24fps but projected at 16fps the street activity is perceptively slowed down. It’s become a somewhat heavy labouring. The loop repetition (the series hopefully will intrigue you to further run-throughs) automatically imparts a steadily growing rhythmic sense of the street activities. Anticipation for familiar movement-complexes builds, and as all smaller complexities join up in our knowledge of the whole the purely accidental counter-passings of people and vehicles becomes satisfyingly cogent, seems rhythmically structured and of a piece. Becomes choreography. (Ken Jacobs, New York Film-makers’ Cooperative Catalogue #5, 1971)

ZORNS LEMMA
Hollis Frampton, USA, 1970, colour, sound, 60 min

Zorns Lemma has three parts. The first part is only a few minutes long and consists of black leader with a voice-over reading of a simple poem from The Bay State Primer used to teach children the alphabet. Each of the rhymed couplets in the film features a letter of the alphabet, not always at the beginning of the line, but as the initial letter of the subject of each couplet. For example, for “D” we have “A dog will bite a thief at night”. For “Y”: “Youth forward slips, death soonest nips”. The second and longest part of Zorns Lemma is comprised of a gradually evolving forty-five minute series of one-second shots. It begins with twenty-four twenty-four frame close-ups of metallic letters of the alphabet against a black background, followed by twenty-four frames of black. The alphabet has been abbreviated by omitting the letters “J” and “U”. Then follows twenty-four twenty-four frame shots of words filmed from signs, windows, graffiti, and so forth, mostly from lower Manhattan. For three more cycles, this series repeats, always in alphabetical order with one word for each letter of the abbreviated alphabet, except for “I”, which in the second cycle is replaced with a word beginning with “J”. Throughout the film, either “I” or “J” will be represented in any one cycle, and the use of an I word or a J word will alternate periodically. Similarly, “U” and “V” will only be represented one at a time, though instead of alternating, U words will abruptly and permanently replace V words later in the film. In the fifth cycle, a series of replacements begins when a shot of a fire is found in the place of the expected X word. Irregularly (every one through ten cycles) another image replaces the shots of the words until every letter has been replaced. At this point, part two ends. The third and final part of Zorns Lemma serves as a kind of retroactive explanatory articulation. It consists of what seems to be a single long take of a man, a woman and a dog crossing a snowy field, though actually there are three dissolves used to cover the breaks between camera rolls. On the sound track over this “shot” is a portion of Robert Grosseteste’s “On Light: Or the Ingression of Forms” read by six alternating female voices at the arbitrary rate of one word per second. This medieval mystical text, though somewhat difficult to follow because of its choppy presentation, reprises some of the basic themes of the film. It is about the nature of light, whose role in the cinematic process is almost too obvious to miss, and whose centrality has been asserted by filmmakers and film critics from Josef von Sternberg to Tony Conrad. More importantly, though, it asserts that a small set of mathematical ratios is fundamental to the composition of the universe. This comes close to summarising Zorns Lemma itself, where Frampton has composed as many elements as he could in multiples of twenty-four. From the number of frames per second of sound film projection, to the number of frames each image in the second part of the film is projected, to the (adjusted) number of letters in the alphabet, the entire film seems to be guided by the same set of numerical relations. […] The alphabetical schema is not only familiar to every literate person who can speak English, but is highly overlearned and therefore easily accessible from memory. The relationship between units of part two of Zorns Lemma is simple progression. And, since simple progression is the only relationship between these units, the storage and organization demands on the viewer are minimal. (James Peterson, Dreams Of Chaos, Visions of Order, Wayne State University Press, 1994)

NECROLOGY
Standish Lawder, USA, 1970, b/w, sound, 12 min

In Necrology, a twelve minute film, in one continuous shot he films the faces of a 5:00pm crowd descending via the Pan Am building escalators. In old-fashioned black and white, these faces stare into the empty space, in the 5:00pm tiredness and mechanical impersonality, like faces from the grave. It’s hard to believe that these faces belong to people today. The film is one of the strangest and grimmest comments upon the contemporary society that cinema has produced. (Jonas Mekas, Village Voice Movie Journal, May 1970)

The credits listed at the end of the film are woefully incomplete. The following is a complete breakdown of the relevant statistics regarding Necrology.
Total performers: 325 (190 male, 135 female)
Credited performers: 76 (53 male, 23 female)
Uncredited performers: 250  (138 male, 112 female)
Frames of darkness between escalator and cast: 329 (28.5 black, 300.5 grey)
In examining these statistics, certain patterns come immediately to mind, patterns which raise serious questions about Lawder’s integrity. Most obvious is the implied sexism of the credits. Only 17.04% of the women in the film are credited, whereas fully 27.75% of the men receive credits. Furthermore, all but two of the women’s credits reflect sexual stereotyping, and of these two, one is pejorative (“fat teenager”), and in the other instance, the woman is identified as working for men, as social director for a YMCA. There are other disturbing structural patterns as well. If this is an unmanipulative film, how does it happen that there are so many round numbers (250, 300) and threes ? Consider the following: fifty-three men credited, twenty-three women credited, thirty more men than women credited, three more uncredited men than total women, etc. Most disturbing is the fact that before the credits there are three more frames of darkness than total performers in the film. Why the discrepancy ? Two of the extra frames can be accounted for. One may be the hand which reaches into the frame at one point; one could conceivably be Audrey who is thanked in the credits; last frame, however, is totally inexplicable, though it corresponds to the one frame which is half black and half grey. We must assume that this is a totally frivolous structural symbol, since Lawder provides no resolution to the mystery. Some people might argue that viewers would not generally notice such details. Perhaps this is true on a conscious level, but who can deny the powerful subconscious impact of such disturbing discrepancies ? (Nick Barbaro)

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Floating Through Time: The Films of Larry Jordan

FLOATING THROUGH TIME: THE FILMS OF LARRY JORDAN
4 & 5 May 2001
Oberhausen Lichtburg Filmpalast

Cinematic Duplicity: The Twin Worlds of Larry Jordan

Whether concerned with reality or the unconscious world, each work by Larry Jordan is a small wonder, a unique excursion both outwards and within. Although best known for his fragile animations, he has continued to work with live photography throughout his life. In his animations, images are liberated of their intrinsic meanings allowing the viewer to derive their own interpretation as the filmmaker travels along his inner journey. By contrast, Jordan’s live action cinematography frequently captures a direct sense of place, retaining a connection to the world at large. Presenting raw, untreated footage, he documents the essence of his world. All of his work conveys a sense of exploration and self-discovery, an aspiration to higher things. Images may be inspired by dream visions, or arise from a state of complete openness. Often working in an extemporised manner, by embracing chance and fortune, Jordan is free to wander through an infinite range of possibilities.

“Animation is, I guess you’d say, my interior world, and the live films are pretty much my interface with the real world. I may use some quick cutting, but I don’t use a lot of optical printing or manipulation of the image. I like to see the raw image from the real world, that excites me on the screen more than a manipulated image. Even in animation, I like to see flat-out what’s there in front of the camera, and see if the bold un-art-ised image can’t be the strongest thing. I used to feel I had to get out of there and work with people in the world, to keep that connection going. I couldn’t just stay in the studio and do animation all the time, so I’d go out to try to capture ‘spirit of place’. The world is miraculous, but people working in film don’t feel that’s enough, I guess, not exciting enough to an audience. I’ve tried to find ways of putting the real world, the way it really is, into the live films at some level.”

Jordan’s interest in film began while studying literature at Harvard. He attended the university’s film series, seeing Cocteau, Clair and Eisenstein, as his high school friend Stan Brakhage was beginning his own serious investigation of the medium. Jordan realised that his interest was more with the image than the word, and on returning to Denver he began working the tradition of the avant-garde trance film. Moving to San Francisco, he became involved in a creative group that included Robert Duncan, Jess Collins, Philip Lamantia, Kenneth Rexroth and Michael McClure. Inspired by this artistic milieu of poets and artists working outside the mainstream, Jordan shot Visions of A City, a portrait of a place and that of a friend, combining trance vision with a sense of alienation.

“The city is hard and impersonal, hence, the reflected image. The man emerges out of this, is there for a little while, and then is absorbed back under the hard surface of the city. What’s really important to me is that it’s a little glimpse of San Francisco in ’57 – it’s hard to find that anywhere. It’s also a portrait of Michael McClure in 1957, the only one that moves. Film has done very badly at documenting the world as it really is, whereas still photography has done very well. So much energy in film has gone into the mental construct, the script, the drama, the fairytale; so what have you got that’s a time machine ? You’ve got Man with a Movie Camera, Berlin, Symphony of a City and a few films of New York.”

For many years a 15-minute silent version existed, and was occasionally shown as a background at poetry readings. Jordan always felt the film was not particularly tight and in 1978 he returned to the footage to reshape it. By condensing the film and adding a meditative raga soundtrack by Bill Moraldo, he built a freewheeling, but concise city symphony. At this time in the late 1970s, Jordan also assembled Cornell 1965, an evocative document of the artist whom the filmmaker considers his mentor. After meeting in 1955, Jordan corresponded with Joseph Cornell for 10 years. He occasionally did photographic assignments for him, and eventually moved to New York to help with box construction and film editing. 

“With Cornell, I learned a lot about box making; I didn’t learn about filmmaking, and I don’t collage the way he collages. I tend to work in a concentrated manner. I don’t have the same sensibility as Max Ernst or Jess, and feel closer to Cornell, in that there’s no aggressive agenda like with the Surrealists.”

Max Ernst is the other most obvious visual inspiration in the development of Jordan’s techniques, directly influencing his eventual style of animation. The early collage films used a moving camera tracking over a still image, until a moment of enlightenment set him in a new artistic direction.

“In the very early 60s, you couldn’t just go to the bookstore and find an edition of Max Ernst collage novels, but my friend Jess had both of them. He loaned them to me and I loved them so much that I photographed each one – page after page after page. I was putting the negatives in the enlarger and the images would come up in the solution one after another. All of a sudden I realised that I was, in a way, watching a movie in very, very slow motion. By that time I knew enough about film to know how you could single frame things and I thought “I could go out and find engravings and cut them up and make them move !”. It hit me that if you cut up engravings they would have that very photogenic look because there is no half tone there, just white background and black lines, which photographs very well. There would be the surreal element of disparate images coming together and there would be a casting back to another time with that material, it seemed to make sense.”

Aside from the optical aspects of his vision, aural inspiration plays a direct role in the creative process. Jordan has often spoken of filmmaking in musical terms, comparing his approach with that of a composer, and believing that the essential focus in both arts is timing.

“It’s the internal timing that makes all the difference. I’ve a very strong feeling that whether you’re talking about a documentary or a drama, you can get away with some faultiness in almost any area, in sound, colour, or movement, but films that don’t have good timing don’t work, no matter what genre. The best films are the ones that handle the temporal element the best. I’ve been lucky – I’m not a musician, I don’t read or play music, but I feel very strongly that films are a kind of visual music in the sense that the farther I went with animation, the more I realised that my problems aesthetically were the same as the composer’s, centred mostly around the timing. So long as I just kept feeling like I was playing some kind of visual, musical composition, then things would go down the way they should go down. If I tried to force something to be long or slow then it felt superficial or stilted but if I just kept a fine, light tension like playing music then I was okay.”

The use of music in Jordan’s films is incredibly sensitive. Given his impeccable choice of accompaniment, it’s not surprising that he sees his role as an animator being similar to that of a composer. To complement his strong sense of intuition over soundtracks, a certain amount of synchronicity contributes to the marriage of sound and image, and the correct piece of music often arise in a completely spontaneous and unexplainable manner. The soundtrack for Hamfat Asar was a cut from an LP that was purchased on impulse from a discount record bin. One track was found to run exactly the length of the film, even dividing up into 3 movements to match the visual continuity. Duo Concertantes won first prize at the Ann Arbor Film Festival as a silent film and existed as such for 2 years until Jordan turned on a radio during a coffee-house screening in San Francisco. The broadcast was found to fit the film perfectly. After calling the station to find out what it was, he tracked down the sonata by little-known 18th century composer Giovanni Battista Viotti, which has played with the film ever since.

“The process is usually different on each film, whether it’s mystical, or synchronistic. I have something that I say, though I don’t know how exact it is, but if I can feel that I have been working on the film in the same spiritual vein as the composer of the music, then I can put the two together. Whether that’s what it is I don’t really know, but it’s really intuitive. Sometimes I go directly to a piece of music and it’s the first thing I think of, but often I go through a lot of things and eliminate. That’s the way the animation has always worked as well, I eliminate nine things out of ten, and one thing is right for the film.”

For Postcard from San Miguel, his most recent cine-poem, the music was present throughout the filmmaking process. After hearing a performance of “Pavane” by Gabriel Fauré shortly before travelling to Mexico, Jordan took along a cassette, listening to it on a Walkman while shooting to make the pace of filming match the flow of the music.

While many of the live action films seek to capture the pictorial essence of a particular location, it is the mood that becomes the over-riding theme of The Old House, Passing. Deciding to make a ‘ghost film’, Jordan and 3 friends read classical supernatural literature to get into the correct frame of mind. Their discussions were recorded and subsequently used to plan the shoot, which took place in an archetypal haunted house. Though he used out-dated stock, Jordan was surprised to find that the footage he got back from the lab was extremely dark. Being initially disappointed with the result, the film was left unedited for a year.

“After seeing the main character, John Graham, in a film by Ben Van Meter, I got inspired about the project. I remember sitting down in my studio one day and without looking at the footage I thought I’d write down a stream of consciousness list of images from memory. Then I cut the film that way, and not only did it work, but I’d listed all the images that were good, and none that weren’t good. It originally had a straight-line narrative, but now it’s completely elliptically cut. You can’t see a story directly, but it’s there floating around you all the time. I’ve since used that form of cutting on about six other films. I consider it a surreal game of free association, not to be played if there are going to be any interruptions or any equivocation.”

Jordan’s style of animation reached its pinnacle in the 1980s, when he realised two remarkable works. Sophie’s Place is an 86-minute, in-camera edited improvisation that took 7 years to complete. He regards the film as an “alchemical autobiography”, in which unfixed images intimate ancient Greek or Gnostic spiritual wisdom. Stan Brakhage has referred to it as “the greatest epic animation film ever”. Jordan followed up with The Visible Compendium, reaching further out, simultaneously travelling in many different directions. It’s the culmination of everything he has learned as an animator, a carefully constructed sequence of disparate scenes assembled to a sound collage of collected scraps of audio.

“I’m not a scholar, but I have read and absorbed, I think deeply, a lot of the major world religions. For many years I was intensely into Buddhist Tibetan beliefs. I had a classical education and I studied Latin for many years and the ancient world came alive to me. Religion, so long as it’s not formal, is very potent for me. My feeling is that all these things buzz around in my head and get into the films, but if I try to do anything consciously, like make a scene that represents something from the “Bhagavad-gita” or something – forget it, it just looks awful. I have to stay away from meanings for the symbols.”

A vivid sense of the spiritual world emerges from the animated films. It’s a common misconception that Jordan works as a cinematic magician, like Kenneth Anger or Harry Smith, using a system of pre-defined codes to communicate his ideas. He’s keen to make a distinction, claiming that he is an alchemist working without a codified system. It is important to be aware that the filmmaker no more knows the meaning of the symbols he uses than does the viewer.

“I do believe in an underworld, a classical underworld. I think Jung would call it ‘the collective unconscious’, where if I open the door, the images that we all recognise will come out. If there’s any seeming meaning that appears to you, while the film is on the screen, that’s what it means and it will be different for everybody. I don’t want the animation films to be like most film work, which is a reference to something that has been photographed in the past. I want the films only to exist while they’re on the screen and not refer to anything in the past. It’s a Rorschach, in other words.  A symbol is not a metaphor. Those are two separate words and two entirely different meanings. A circle is a symbol and you could write ten books about a circle and you’d never come to the end of the meaning. A symbol, by definition, is not definable.

“Some people ask questions after the screenings, that always centre around the idea that I have a secret language of symbols, that I know what they mean and the audience doesn’t. I have to explain that I don’t know the meaning of them any more than the meaning of my dreams.”

By resisting obvious definition, and by continuing the dualistic approach of interior animation and exterior photography, Jordan has been able to build a considerable catalogue of human and spiritual experience. In allowing everyone to decipher the images in an individual way, he is able to speak to all of all us through his extraordinarily personal films.

Mark Webber

Based on a telephone interview with Larry Jordan, 13 March 2001. Thank you Larry Jordan, Joanna McClure, Milos Stelek, Dr. William Moritz and Alex Deck.

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