NATHANIEL DORSKY: DEVOTIONAL CINEMA

As an antidote to the frenetic pace and complexity of modern life, Nathaniel Dorsky’s films invite an audience to connect at a precious level of intimacy, nourishing the mind and spirit. With films assembled in an almost selfless way, the viewer is given the freedom to express oneself more fully, rather than be consciously absorbed in the projections of another person. ‘In these films the audience is the central character and, hopefully, the screen your best friend.’

The films are photographed, non-narrative and have none of the visual trickery we might associate with the ‘avant-garde’. Dorsky’s camera is drawn towards those transient moments of wonder that often pass unnoticed in daily life: the jewelled refraction of sunlight on water, reflections from windows and dappled shadows cast along the ground. His iridescent cinematography is arranged in carefully montaged phrases that remain entirely open to the viewer’s personal interpretation; no heavily coded meanings and subtexts are imposed through associations in the editing. The world floods through the lens, onto the screen and into our minds.

Dorsky approaches each film as though it is a song, weaving together lyrical statements in a rhythmic cadence. His work achieves a sensitive balance between humanity, nature and the ethereal, creating space for private reflection. To accompany this screening of Variations and his new film Threnody, Nathaniel Dorsky will discuss the aspects of cinema that attracted him to use the medium in such a poetic way, to explore the inexpressible qualities of human life, and read from his recently published book ‘Devotional Cinema’. Though his work has been screened at major international museums, festivals and cinematheques, this is his first public appearance in the UK.

Nathaniel Dorsky lives in San Francisco, where he makes a living as a professional ‘film doctor’, editing documentaries that often appear on American public television and the festival circuit. In 1967 he won an Emmy award for his photographic work on the CBS production ‘Gaugin in Tahiti: Search for Paradise’. He has been making personal films since 1964, and his works are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art (New York), Pacific Film Archives (Berkeley), Image Forum (Tokyo) and Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris). It is widely acknowledged that the ‘most beautiful image’ sequence – a plastic bag floating in the wind – from the Oscar winning feature American Beauty was directly inspired by a similar shot from Dorsky’s film Variations.

(Mark Webber)

VARIATIONS
Nathaniel Dorsky, USA, 1992-98, 16mm, colour, silent, 24 min
‘What tender chaos, what current of luminous rhymes might cinema reveal unbridled from the daytime word? During the Bronze Age a variety of sanctuaries were built for curative purposes. One of the principal activities was transformative sleep. This montage speaks to that tradition.’ (Nathaniel Dorsky)

THRENODY
Nathaniel Dorsky, USA, 2004, 16mm, colour, silent, 20 min
‘Threnody is the second of two devotional songs, the first being The Visitation. It is an offering to a friend who has died.’ (Nathaniel Dorsky)

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THROW YOUR WATCH TO THE WATER
Sunday 31 October 2004, at 7pm
London National Film Theatre NFT3

TIRA TU RELOJ AL AGUA (THROW YOUR WATCH TO THE WATER)
Eugeni Bonet, Spain, 2004, 35mm, colour, sound, 91 min

Despite a circle of admirers that includes the directors Chris Marker and Victor Erice, José Val del Omar (1904-1982), one of the pioneers of European avant-garde film, remains virtually unknown. In pursuing his dream for a cinema for all the senses he made numerous technical innovations and discoveries, and patented designs for cinematic surround sound, wide-screen projection and special lenses years before they became commonplace.

His career began in the 1920s with dozens of ethnographic films made for the Misiones Pedagógicas. Focusing on the impoverished regions of Spain, the surviving examples are reminiscent of the stark, early documentaries of Luis Buñuel.

Throughout the 1950s he worked on the Triptico Elemental de España, consisting of three short 35mm films that each characterised one of the elements: water (Aguaespejo granadino, 1953-55), fire (Fuego en Castilla, 1958-60) and earth (Acariño galaico, 1961). Val del Omar was fundamentally connected to the soul, landscape and culture of his Andalucian homeland, and these films embody its diverse cultural history, referencing Christian and Islamic beliefs, and the connections between life on our planet and the universal whole. There are some similarities with the trance films of Anger, Brahage, Deren and Markopoulos, though Val del Omar’s methods are overtly mystical and cosmic. Throw Your Watch to the Water has been assembled by Eugeni Bonet, working with the Archivo María José Val del Omar and Gonzalo Sáenz de Buruaga, to realise a work that occupied the film-maker for decades up until his sudden death in a car accident.

The film is set in Granada, an extraordinary location where east meets west. It opens with footage of the Alhambra and its surroundings, detailing the extraordinary Moorish architecture and intricate decoration, the pulsing water of its fountains and the activities of the local people. The ancient citadel, shown at first serene and regal, is later overrun by the transparent bodies of tourists, while the ‘videoterrorifico mirror’ of television reflects the frenzy of modern media.

These ‘variations on an intuited cinegraphy’ have been created entirely from material shot by Val del Omar between 1968-82. The newly commissioned atmospheric score is punctuated by his poetic declarations which invite comparison with both Federico García Lorca and Sun Ra.

Val del Omar envisaged a “cinematic vibration” that would be the vertex of his life’s work, a development and elaboration of the ‘Elementary Triptych’ in which he first presented his radical cinematic visions. The passage of images, which ranges from documentary to complete abstraction, is exquisitely photographed in lush colours and tonal monochromes. Delirious visual sequences mark the passage from the earthly world to a transcendental plane. The film is a meta-mystical allegory of life, death and rebirth led by the elementary forces of the universe, seeking unity between the spiritual realm, the ancient world and contemporary life, where images and thoughts flow free of time.

(Mark Webber)

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DRIFT STUDIES
Sunday 31 October 2004, at 9pm
London National Film Theatre NFT3

WATER, WATER
Nicky Hamlyn, UK, 2004, 16mm, b/w & colour, silent, 11 min
Water Water revisits the bathroom location of a previous film White Light (1996). It is based around a set of antinomies that operate at various levels, from between frames to between the two halves of the film. The black and white first part is composed of individually filmed frames (animation) which form shots of interlaced contrary motion that nevertheless can be read as sequences of individual frames, and/or in which alternate frames are lit in contrasting ways so as to emulate negative-positive juxtapositions. In the colour second half, dissolves replace cuts, light softens and contrast decreases. Continuity, by way of isomorphic features in the room, replaces the discontinuities of part one. (Nicky Hamlyn)

ASPECT
Emily Richardson, UK, 2004, 16mm, colour, sound, 9 min
Aspect was filmed in a forest over the period of a year. Using photographic techniques such as time-lapse and long exposures on single film frames the forest year is condensed into a few minutes. Light, colour and shadow travel across its surface and the film shifts between seeing the trees as trees and seeing the movement of light and shadow abstracting the real environment. Your eye is taken all over the screen with this perpetual movement and change of light and colour. There is no single focal point – it is continuously changing. As with Redshift and Nocturne, light becomes the main protagonist. In Aspect fragments of unconscious forest sounds, ants in their anthill, the wind across the forest floor, the crack of a twig are reconfigured into an audio piece which articulates the film (and the forest) in an illusive and ambiguous way. Sound by Benedict Drew. (Emily Richardson)

SKAGAFJÖRDUR
Peter Hutton, USA, 2004, 16mm, colour, silent, 35 min
Peter Hutton’s films defy easy categorisation, eschewing narrative as well as the abstract formal vocabulary explored in much experimental filmmaking. Rather, his work is related to traditions of the 19th-century landscape painting and still photography. The films are silent and unfold in a series of tableaux separated by black leader, individual shots that are often completely still. The meticulously framed compositions of city views or landscapes are depicted in extended takes, inviting the spectator to take time to look closely. While sharing some formal characteristics of structural film, Hutton’s approach to the medium is more meditative. He states: “The experience of my films is a little like daydreaming. It’s about taking the time to just sit down and look at things, which I don’t think is a very Western preoccupation. A lot of influences on me when I was younger were more Eastern. They suggested a contemplative way of looking … where the more time you spend actually looking at things, the more they reveal themselves in ways you don’t expect.” Skagafjördur draws its title from a particularly striking region of northern Iceland. The film documents the area’s ravishing landscape in a series of serene vistas of rolling hills and open sky. After an introductory sequence in black and white, the film switches to luminous colour to capture the atmospheric play of light on the coastal valley. Hutton finds the mythic character of Iceland in its ancient physical landmarks, like the imposing Drangey Island, as well as in the brilliant, ephemeral moments slowly transforming the landscape. (Henriette Huldisch, Whitney Museum of American Art)

FLOWER
Yuiko Matsuyama, Japan, 2004, 16mm, colour, sound, 6 min
When you look the world of the same size as a pin through the lens of a camera, you see the spectacle of the light shaking greatly and the beautiful dynamic flow spread before the eye. By shooting this beautiful experience repeatedly, a layer of time and space was born. This work using the flow of China Ink is the fourth work of the series begun with Field in 2000. (Yuiko Matsuyama)

ZWERK
Bart Vegter, Netherlands, 2004, 35mm, colour, silent, 8 min
Zwerk is an abstract film that depicts an illusionary world. The film is made with the purpose to create an opportunity to view something as it is. What remains is a visual experience. When making the film I let myself inspire by the words “at the edge of emptiness” and by my interest in the field between chaos and order. Self-written software, light-frequencies and mesmerising abstractions. Silent images which shift between stagnation and continuous movement. (Bart Vegter)

ARKTIS – ZWISCHEN LICHT UND DUNKEL
Jürgen Reble, Germany, 2003, video, colour, sound, 32 min
This new video is a surprising departure for Reble, who is best known for his alchemical treatment of celluloid. Digitally processed, it transforms shots of the arctic landscape, drawn from education films and travelogues, into a virtual fantasy world illuminated by the hallucinatory half-light of evening.

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THE VISITATION
2002, 16mm, colour, silent, 18fps, 18 mins
Part one of a set of Two Devotional Songs. The Visitation is a gradual unfolding, an arrival so to speak. I felt the necessity to describe an occurrence, not one specifically of time and place, but one of revelation in one’s own psyche. The place of articulation is not so much in the realm of images as information, but in the response of the heart to the poignancy of the cuts.

ALAYA
1976-87, 16mm, colour, silent, 18fps, 20 mins
“Alaya manages a perfection of ‘musical’ light across a space of time greater in length than would seem possible…and with minimal means of line and tone … After about three minutes I began to be aware of the subtlety of rhythm, within each shot and shot-to-shot, which carried each cut, causing each new image to sit in-the-light of these several previous. … A little short of a miracle.” (Stan Brakhage)

LOVE’S REFRAIN
2000-01, 16mm, colour, silent, 18fps. 22.5 mins
Perhaps the most delicately tactile in this series, Love’s Refrain rests moment to moment on its own surface. It is a coda in twilight, a soft-spoken conclusion to a set of four cinematic songs.

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VIDEO VISIONS
Saturday 29 October 2005, at 2pm
London National Film Theatre NFT3

SPECIALIZED TECHNICIANS REQUIRED: BEING LUIS PORCAR
Manuel Saiz, Spain, 2004, video, colour, sound, 2 min
Manuel Saiz has done it! The Famous Hollywood Actor has once again gracefully accepted to be or not to be what he is. Witness the film that inspired the pun in the title of this short video – he is not afraid of a few digs at his person and status. He probably has a small army of agents, managers and assistants around him, to keep all those who are trying to make use of him because of his name at a distance. Perhaps Manuel Saiz was lucky, perhaps he knows the friends of the friends of – perhaps he has been waiting on the doorstep and hanging on the phone for months, driving the whole army crazy. He probably just used a sympathetic argument that struck the right cord: Would the actor who likes role reversals for once lend his charismatic voice to a man who is used to doing precisely that? A man who always obligingly keeps out of sight, but who is, to the Spanish speaking part of the world population, the actor’s mouthpiece, and therefore to a great extent ‘is him’. Being Luis Porcar is part of the series Specialized Technicians Required, and it makes you wonder who actually is the specialized technician in this construction. Is it the main character, the man who does the dubbing, or is it the artist himself, who nowadays has to master so many different skills in order to be able to carry out his profession properly? (Vinken & Van Kampen)

HOW TO FIX THE WORLD
Jacqueline Goss/USA-Uzbekistan 2004, video, colour, sound, 28 min
How To Fix The World is a digitally animated video adapted from Soviet psychologist A.R. Luria’s research in Central Asia in the 1930s. In Luria’s book ‘Cognitive Development: Its Social and Cultural Foundations’, the author presents data collected from three years of interviews with Uzbek and Kyrgyz farmers who lived on or near the Soviet-sponsored collective farms in the 1930s. During this time, the Soviets introduced literacy programs into these primarily Muslim oral-based agricultural communities. Interested in documenting the cognitive changes that people experience when learning to read, Luria also captured the cultural conflict of Soviet Socialism and Islam. In How To Fix The World, the conversations transcribed into Luria’s book are brought to life via simple animation techniques. Max Penson’s photographs of the collective farms serve as the visual model for the animations and they play against a backdrop of landscape images shot in Central Asia in 2004. At once humorous, conflicting and revelatory, these conversations between Luria and his subjects illustrate a particular historical moment when one culture attempted to transform another in the name of education and modernization. The subtleties of this transformation are found in the words exchanged and documented seventy years ago. (Jacqueline Goss)
www.jacquelinegoss.com

WILD BOY
Guy Ben-Ner/Israel-USA 2004, video, colour, sound, 17 min
Wild Boy tells the story of a wild child and his educator, a story of power relations and the fantasy of bringing somebody up after one’s own image. It is the story of every parent-child rearing, but more than that, it is a story of a director and his child-actor, raising the question of what it means to direct a child, to contain a child inside a fixed frame, to command him in and out of the frame (as if it is his private room). On another level, it also raises the possibility of looking at early cinema (the “cinema of attractions” as was coined by Tom Gunning), as a mute wild child that was tamed, eventually, by language (sound, narrative). Wild Boy is based on several case histories, some myths, some educational manuals and refers to a wide range of movies, from old photos left of the vaudeville acts by father and son Buster and Joe Keaton, through Truffaut’s Wild Child to The Kid by Chaplin. (Guy Ben-Ner)

LEGAL ERRORIST
Chris Haring & Mara Mattuschka, Austria, 2005, video, colour, sound, 15 min
A performance of transformation, a transformance, changes its medium and encounters a camera, which plays dance music – under the secret eye of a room that bends and twists along with it. The Legal Errorist – personified by the dancer Stephanie Cumming – is a creature that cannot stop crashing. The sudden overpowering by the ‘error’, the system error, engenders the creature’s obsession. She commences with great relish through a series of transformations; that which hits upon the limits of a simple machine serves as a learning program for the Legal Errorist. Film and performance – parallel projection or articulated interference? Massively, like a mountain, the body of the Errorist falls to the floor and lands with an obstinate sound whose source seems remote from anything human. As though she were her own director, she speaks animatedly with numerous invisible colleagues. She speaks to the microphone, not through it: an eerie animated world of objects, which become fellow creatures when one creature cannot categorise herself precisely. “What?!?” roars the Legal Errorist defiantly – as though to a higher being in the dark and not the diffuse collective of the audience. And she begins to lure the gaze through the catalogue of her body parts. The voyeur’s fatally bundled attention seems inverse to the body set against it, anamorphically distorted by the extremely wide- angled lens. Does this gaze document a foul subjectivity or does this closed world look back as its own lens? The camera is a shrewd ally in the counterattack launched by the body on display. (Katherina Zakravsky)

TUNED
Oliver Pietsch, Germany, 2004, video, colour, sound, 14 min
Portraits of people consuming drugs taken from film history are edited together in rapid succession. All appear radically isolated, their inward-looking eyes looking out from the screen, appearing helpless and disorientated. Their trip alternates between giggling lust and panicked anxiety, turning increasingly into blank horror. The paradox: In these edited sequences, the crazed and overwrought figures once again build a community whose unifying core is the flight from the community and the search for the true self in itself. The film can here be understood as a metonym for western culture. (Ute Vorkoeper)

MOUSE HEAVEN
Kenneth Anger, USA, 2005, video, colour, sound, 10 min
It’s a study of animated toys of a rare nature. These are collectables of early Walt Disney toys. I’ve always loved Mickey Mouse since I was a little boy and I’m outraged about the current Disney company’s attitude to Mickey Mouse. I mean they think they own it, but all the children of the world own Mickey Mouse. And I have devised a way to star Mickey Mouse in a film that the current Disney company can’t legally object to, by filming an antique toy collection of early Disney toys. And it’s just a coincidence all those toys happen to be Mickey Mouse. I’m actually being very respectful of early Mickey Mouse. I hate later Mickey Mouse, because from Fantasia on, the Disney people decided to humanise the mouse, remove his tail – which is a kind of castration – and turn him into a little boy who is a sort of a goody-two-shoes. And he’s no longer the mischievous, sadistic mouse that he was in the beginning. He used to do nasty little tricks like twist the udders of cows and things like that. And that’s the only mouse I’m interested in, this kind of demon ‘fetish’ figure. (Kenneth Anger)

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LITERARY LANDSCAPES
Saturday 29 October 2005, at 4pm
London National Film Theatre NFT3

THE GREAT ART OF KNOWING
David Gatten, USA, 2004, 16mm, b/w, silent, 37 min
On either side of a Life find a Library before and an Auction after: consider these figures as the sites for a collection created for the purposes of division and dispersal. The journey this time moves from the first light at dawn to the last rays of a sunset, reflected and refracted. In between find dry Fall turn toward the shadows of Spring and the stillness of death sparked by the singularities of a transcendental field. Find yourself resting uneasily half way up the stairs: Something has left the body, yet the body remains: what has left is on its way Elsewhere but cannot help but look back: this look animates the world and makes possible this Theory of Flight in the form of a bibliography. From Leonardo da Vinci to Jules-Etienne Marey practitioners of a certain mode of transcendental empiricism turned repeatedly to combinations of words and images describing the flight of birds.
In 1726 William Byrd returned to Westover in Virginia and began construction of a garden soon to be called “the finest in the country, filled with the charming colours of the Humming Bird.” In a parallel pursuit, he collected the largest library in the colonies to serve as mirror for his mind and testament to his knowledge. Evelyn Byrd was fond of sketching the birds in the garden. Her interest was more than aesthetic and scientific; she devised a very different use for her father’s vast library. This chapter of my ongoing exploration of the Byrd library finds its name and shape within a single volume from that collection: Athanasius Kircher’s 17th century encyclopaedia, ‘The Great Art of Knowing’. Herein find tangled texts and crossed destinies, filled with figures at once buried deep and tossed high by History, lined with traces of a forbidden romance. Love finds purchase between tightly shelved volumes. In the spaces between the letters. In the lines themselves. An antinomian cinema seems possible. A gentle iconoclasm? The image is always backwards in a mirror. The story unfolds slowly.
Part IV of the Byrd project. (David Gatten)

NAUSEA
Matthew Noel-Tod, UK, 2005, video, colour, sound, 53 min
Existentialism is present in so many developments in 20th Century Art History and Sartre’s debts lie as much with Cezanne and Van Gogh as with Descartes and Heidegger. The whole text of Sartre’s book ‘Nausea’, at a speed of one word per frame, lasts for 53:37 minutes, so I used this duration as a base for editing. The text was then cut up and ordered randomly – missing every other word, backwards, etc, so that what is seen is literally just ‘words’, not Sartre’s words. The text is sometimes slowed down and edited to suggest a narrative, drawing unique relationships between word and image. In 2004, I started using a mobile phone video camera to record daily images. Like early cinematograph-style inventions, this technology’s legacy seems destined be through the very simple recording of people and their backgrounds. I thought it could support an attempt to record footage that was free from mediation, which was instinctive and free from analysis and artifice, and I recorded my life for roughly a year. The variability of the video frame rate and image compression became mostly predictable, but still surprised me with unpredictable rendering of one image or another. The most constant of these artefacts was the camera’s inability to register extreme areas of light, mostly apparent when filming the sun. These areas appeared black. Many things didn’t record ‘well’, such as people and movement. Other things took on a magical, painterly aura when filmed with the phone camera – skies, landscapes, still lifes. The pure colour sections are enlargements of certain clips to the scale of one pixel filling the screen. Other ‘abstract’ images, which appear like camera-less process driven distortion, are in fact the limitation of the camera to record certain images, notably ‘nothing’. Echoing the ideas of phenomenological discovery, reflexive consciousness and modernist redemption through art which inspired this video, the often casual nature of the images in Nausea comes ultimately from an examination of a certain ‘end-point’ in cinema, wherein we only ever imagine and receive mediated images – images of images. Is creative instinct in filmmaking purely an extension of this mediated post-modern situation? A failed romantic, moribund and nostalgic ideal? Or a valid area for self-examination and analysis of aesthetics? (Matthew Noel-Tod)

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RABBIT PIX
Saturday 29 October 2005, at 7pm
London National Film Theatre NFT3

“Trust and offerings”

RABBIT PIX
James Herbert, USA-Italy, 2004, 35mm, colour, sound, 75 min

Carter Davis and Maria D’Amato, the couple with French toast, lived in my house. They were lovers. James Taylor, the blond boy lifting stone while in lawn chair (opening), was a painting student of mine. (His parents warned him that I would want to use him in a film … they are artists, former students of mine). Pier Nicola Bruno, the photographer, was in La Presenza (which has never been screened publicly). His girlfriend, at the time we began the film, a Canadian living in Cortona, appears against the tree with a local boy from Cortona, Edouardo Fracasso. The attractive couple seen often, detached and posing, are Alessandro, a former model from Milan home in Cortona, and his then girlfriend Lucia. The juggler is a street performer here. The young boy dropping the glass is an Albanian immigrant we found in a neighbouring town. I have known Coky (P. N. Bruno) for five years and talked him into a film when he saw the interview with me in the Oberhausen Festival catalogue. He has opened up possibilities to use local people … with trust … but I rely on core group of American friends to get the film underway here in Italy. (Language problems etc.)

Carter has appeared in a total of four films and can intuit exactly the right moves on his own, with no direction. I pay the actors, as well as offering room, board, transportation for the Americans. I’m currently working with Maria D’Amato and a Norwegian she met in New York City. Flew him here for the new project. She suggested him and I trust her. He is great. I occasionally will get someone sight unseen but not usually. Most people have exactly the wrong idea of who to select, except kindred spirits Carter and Maria. One time I saw a beautiful German couple visiting Cortona and boldly asked them if I could film them. They were very agreeable. I showed them my book ‘Stills’ to demonstrate some credentials. Once used a kid from a town near Lago di Como and a girl from Florence, a friend of a friend. Good results, as she would not have anything to do with the lower class nude boy. A successful tension. ‘Di Luce in Luce.’ A male renting a room in my house and a female model from the art school. ‘Alcove in the Palazzo Rosso.’ They became lovers.

My partner for seven years appeared in 14 films (two a year). She also helped cast others for her to be with. Once I filmed 10 young friends on a hippie commune outside of Athens, Georgia, for Night Horses. Carter’s best friend, Andy, was flown over here for Speedy Boys. I knew what he looked like as he also lived in my house. Over the years, many people who lived in the house (it averages 13 residents, a southern mansion) have been in various films. Occasionally I use students from the UGA ‘Studies Abroad Program’ – with great care. Scars, girl in Jumbo Aqua, James Taylor in Rabbit Pix. For the females in Speedy Boys I used Carter’s then girlfriend (the only person in clothes, her choice) and two female dancers connected to a local famous modern dance company. I never use theatre or film actors or students of same as their delivery is way too dramatic and over the top for the visual treatment I like. Also I like the flatter delivery non-actors have for my purposes (this is subject to criticism of course).

For a strange selection of models in John Five I used a principle’s lover sight unseen the famous teen gothic novelist, Poppy Z. Brite. She was plump but beautiful and worked well even though out of my canon. I have an elderly couple in Automan. They came with the house in John Five. Willing eccentrics. The lead in Automan was Graham Hacker, who lived in Athens as a town kid. I used him also in Trains with his girlfriend. The white dog was hers.

Automan girl in car was a model in the art school, obtained on the day of shooting as another girl bailed in fear. People are chosen primarily on looks and physical demeanour or affect. The age range is 18 to 26 or so, lean and somewhat free spirited. Usually art kids. It is essential that they not be talking head types disconnected from their bodies. In fact, a definite natural animal grace, a kind or organic movement that is supple and confident. I can tell whether I can use them by how they sit in a chair: brittle or sprawling. I can also usually tell who will trust me and themselves in a vulnerable situation. My new project came up short on one person I riskily thought would be interesting because he was a talking head … but he bailed on hearing the content of the piece.

No directing in the traditional sense. Figures are put into events, or grounds as the painter might say, and only vague notions of content are ever suggested. I would also not direct the placement of a leg, for example, or the explicit gesture of a hand. I just bore the models until they give in to the moment. Or, in contrast, accept the urgency of the one-take sound scene. Scenes in the features are sometimes storyboarded to get people in the right frame of mind. Mostly it’s about getting on my wavelength and rhythm. Carter is amazing at this; that’s why I’ve used him so frequently. Again, most things are one take only – and by financial necessity the 35mm is always one take – without rehearsal because non-actors go too flat if they rehearse.

Only once in Q & A have the subjects of voyeurism or pornography come up, but they come up in interviews frequently. The only time at a screening was for Speedy Boys at Edinburgh. Young-ish guy asks, ‘Is this the first time soft core pornography has been shown at the Edinburgh Film Festival?’ Actually, I told him that down the street they were screening [French female director who specializes in explicit sex scenes] but that I thought pornography could always be differentiated from art because porn was utilitarian and art was useless. I added that I was glad he got hold of the wrong end of a half-truth.

I do use explicitness as another layer or texture because it sits differently in the psychic space and, like violence, gives range to the total orchestration. It also allows for dynamic range in time-based medium. But to me dropping the glass, rubbing the rabbit, hard-on by a tree are all part of the palette and not a reason for the films being. Of course I recognise narrative implications and pushing buttons, but really am most interested in dynamic range tactility, as well as psychically. It’s all well known in long range of the human condition, storytelling, painting. Nobody cares what went on in the Parthenon; we just like the way the building looks.

Nudity is a lifelong fascination but also a voice. I do love the way people change their body language when they are nude: lots of opportunities for interesting motion and twists of limbs etc. that you never witness in the clothed. Then there is the mix of innocence and remotely, (mostly for men I have discovered) threat. Someone drinking a glass of water does it differently nude, believe me. The subtle difference is everything.

In about 50 short films I always shot in 16mm, then re-photographed onto 16mm using primitive hand-operated projectors, one frame at a time in still mode, like slides. Front projection onto a piece of paper 11×14 inches. The features Scars, Speedy Boys and La Presenza were all straight 35mm no re-photography. Jumbo Aqua is the first film to shoot in 16mm and then hand enlarged to 35mm. Rabbit Pix is different still in that all the colour is 16mm hand enlarged to 35mm colour, but the black and white is straight 35mm, no re-photography. Rabbit Pix has about three seconds cannibalised from Jumbo Aqua, not Speedy Boys. That footage is all from another source. But a lot of Rabbit Pix revisits my past work, in attitude, intentionally. I thought of it as an homage to film and grain and analogue before I tried my hand at digital in all its non-plasticity and coldness. That’s what I am currently dealing with in a new piece. So Rabbit Pix may be a kind of ending or coda … but never say die.

(James Herbert, from email discussions with Mark Webber, 2005)

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DESOLATION ROW
Saturday 29 October 2005, at 9pm
London National Film Theatre NFT3

FOR THEM ENDING
Jonathan Schwartz, USA, 2005, 16mm, colour, sound, 3 min
swallowed up in the sky,
the sound sustained by echo, always fading.
the nature of a season,
moving forward with growth or death and growth.
or i was wondering how to make new england fall colours linger so if you couldn’t visit soon
the yellows oranges and reds would still be waiting for you.
(Jonathan Schwarz)

NEPTUNE’S RELEASE: A SHOT IN THE DARK
Joell Hallowell & Jacalyn White, USA, 2004, 16mm, colour, sound, 17 min
In a collage of 16mm found footage and sound, Neptune’s Release: Shot in the Dark is a dialogue between the purveyors of salvation and the seekers, between the past and the present, the hopeful and the hopeless, the humorous and the devastating. In the human search for profound answers to complex questions we are often thrown onto the path of false prophets, indecipherable jargon, bad advice and mixed messages. But as we shoot into the dark, hoping to find a worthy target, we occasionally hit upon accidental wisdom that is surprisingly relevant and life changing. It’s an action-packed film with a star-studded cast. See Janis Joplin tussle with Timothy Leary and Shirley McClaine in a dark alley. “The day it happened was just an ordinary day.” Hear Jack Kornfield perform eye surgery, and watch Zippy the Chimp save the day. Collecting obscure advertisements of the fifties, spiritual audiotapes from the sixties and seventies, obsolete medical films and some of their own editing-bin discards, the filmmakers are a product of this jumble of material. As a consequence they have formed unique connections linking sound and image, dark and light, and the sacred and profane. It’s a 16mm roller coaster ride through time and space – where the end is just the beginning. “You will find the results unusually refreshing.” (Joell Hallowell & Jacalyn White)

L’ECLAT DU MAL
Louise Bourque, Canada, 2005, 35mm, colour, sound, 6 min
We were promised a perfect world growing up. We woke up one day and realized that those vows were little more than wishful thinking. There is a war going on. The memories of our childhood have melted, deteriorated, like the footage of Bourque’s childhood (shot by her father). An oppressively grim vision of innocence lost, of promises unfulfilled. (Ivan Lozano, Cinematexas)

TERRACE 49
Janie Geiser, USA, 2004, 16mm, colour, sound, 6 min
Images of impending disaster – slamming doors, a truck careening down a hill, and a frayed, almost snapping elevator rope – collide with the repeated image of a woman-body, cycling toward ephemerality as the woman disappears into the texture of the film itself. In my recent films, I have been exploring the possibilities found in merging video texture with film, creating a lush, disorienting, ambiguous film space, and an atmosphere of temporal suspension. In Terrace 49, I further break up this space, dividing the film frame into shards, as fractured as memory and as fragile as glass. (Janie Geiser)

TWO MINUTES TO ZERO TRILOGY
Lewis Klahr, USA, 2003-04, 16mm, colour, sound, 33 min
1. Two Days To Zero (2004, 23 min)
2. Two Hours To Zero (2004, 9 min)
3. Two Minutes to Zero (2003, 1 min)
A feature length narrative compressed three different times into three separate films of diminishing duration until the synoptic is synopsized. A crime story told three different ways concerning the events of a two month period leading up to, and immediately following a bank robbery. The imagery has all been appropriated (the fancy, art world sanctioned term for stealing) from four issues of an early 1960s comic book version of the then popular, American TV show ‘77 Sunset Strip’. […] When I first started ‘time travelling’ via collage in my mid-twenties, I naively figured I’d immerse myself, exhaust the impulse by coming to grips with some core revelation about my childhood and get back to describing the present. If someone had told me that more than two decades later I’d still be unpacking that trunk of veils where memory and history intersect and collide, I wouldn’t have believed them (back then I still believed in catharsis). So what exactly has been taking so long? What I underestimated is the degree of difficulty, despite how one pointed my focus has often been, to ‘unpack that trunk’. It’s been a long, slow wind inside, to penetrate collage and experimental film deeply enough to fine tune the empathetic projection required to reach the far shores of memory both lived and imagined. Only now, perhaps aided by the distance of middle age, am I feeling the control and insight to fully engage the found images and sounds that provoked this journey of (re-?) animation in the first place. (Lewis Klahr)

TRILOGY ABOUT CLOUDS
Naoyuki Tsuji, Japan, 2005, 16mm, colour, sound, 13 min
Three short animation films about clouds. It is based in charcoal drawing. The clouds without fixed forms are the worlds which surround us.
1. Breathing Cloud (Eros) (3 min)
People’s bodies and souls transform into a large cloud and are mixed with erotic shapes.
2. Looking at a Cloud (Memory of Childhood) (5 min)
Something happens at the junior high school. When a boy starts to draw a cloud,
the drawing begins to move and eat the students …
3. From the Cloud (Fantasy) (4 min)
A funny little story about people living on the soft cloud. A look at their daily life.
In the morning, they hear the bell and begin to come down from the sky.
(Naoyuki Tsjuji)

NOSTALGIA (APRIL 2001 TO PRESENT)
Christina Battle, Canada, 2005, 16mm, b/w, sound, 4 min
“The picture of the world that’s presented to the public has only the remotest relation to reality.”
(Noam Chomsky)
www.cbattle.com

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