{"id":1385,"date":"2007-10-27T19:00:48","date_gmt":"2007-10-27T18:00:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/?p=1385"},"modified":"2018-01-25T14:54:53","modified_gmt":"2018-01-25T14:54:53","slug":"carolee-schneemann-preservations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/2007\/10\/27\/carolee-schneemann-preservations\/","title":{"rendered":"Carolee Schneemann Preservations"},"content":{"rendered":"

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CAROLEE SCHNEEMANN PRESERVATIONS
\n<\/strong>Saturday 27 October 2007, at 7pm
\nLondon BFI Southbank NFT3<\/p>\n

Newly preserved prints. Carolee Schneemann is a multi-media artist whose films, performances, installations and writings are a radical discourse on the body, sexuality and gender.<\/p>\n

Carolee Schneemann, Fuses, USA, 1964-67, 29 min
\n<\/strong>Fuses<\/em> is a vibrant celebration of a passionate relationship, openly portraying sexual intercourse without the objectification of pornography. To extend the tactile intimacy of lovemaking to filmmaking, Schneemann treated the filmstrips as a canvas, working by hand to paint, transform and cut the footage into a dense collage. The erotic energy of the body is transferred directly onto the film material. Recently preserved by Anthology Film Archives, this legendary work glows with a clarity unseen since its debut in the 1960s.<\/p>\n

Carolee Schneemann, Kitch\u2019s Last Meal, USA, 1973-76, c.60 min
\n<\/strong>The moving conclusion to the autobiographical trilogy which began with Fuses<\/em>, Kitch\u2019s Last Meal<\/em> documents the routines of daily life. It was shot on the Super-8 home movie format and is projected double screen (one image above the other) as an interchangeable set of 18-minute reels. The soundtrack mixes personal reminiscences with ambient sounds of the household, and includes the original text used for Schneemann\u2019s 1975 performance \u2018Interior Scroll\u2019. Time passes, a relationship winds down and death closes in: filming and recording stopped when the elderly cat Kitch, Schneemann\u2019s closest companion for two decades, died. Each performance of the film in its original state was a re-ordering of the visual and aural materials, arranged by the artist according to mood and environment. For the preservation print, three pairs of reels have been selected and blown up to 16mm.<\/p>\nPROGRAMME NOTES<\/a>

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CAROLEE SCHNEEMANN PRESERVATIONS
\n<\/strong>Saturday 27 October 2007, at 7pm
\nLondon BFI Southbank NFT3
\n<\/strong><\/p>\n

FUSES
\nCarolee Schneemann, USA, 1964-67, <\/strong>16mm, colour, sound, <\/strong>29 min
\n<\/strong>I wanted to see if the experience of what I saw would have any correspondence to what I felt \u2013 the intimacy of the lovemaking \u2026 And I wanted to put into that materiality of film the energies of the body, so that the film itself dissolves and recombines and is transparent and dense \u2013 as one feels during lovemaking \u2026 It is different from any pornographic work that you\u2019ve ever seen \u2013 that\u2019s why people are still looking at it! And there\u2019s no objectification or fetishization of the woman. (Carolee Schneemann)<\/p>\n

By interweaving and compounding images of sexual love with images of mundane joy (the sea, a cat, window-filtered light), she expresses sex without the self consciousness of a spectacle, without an idea of expressivity, in her words, \u2018free in a process which liberates our intentions from our conceptions\u2019. Carolee and her lover James Tenney emerge from nebulous clusters of colour and light and are seen in every manner of sexual embrace \u2026 one overall mosaic of flesh and textures and passionate embraces. Every element of the traditional stag film is here \u2013 fellatio, cunnilingus, close-ups of genitals and penetrations, sexual acrobatics \u2013 yet there\u2019s none of the prurience and dispassion usually associated with them. There is only a fluid oceanic quality that merges the physical act with the metaphysical connotations, very Joycean and very erotic. (Gene Youngblood, Expanded Cinema)<\/p>\n

Pornography is an anti-emotional medium, in content and intent, and its lack of emotion renders it wholly ineffective for women. This absence of sensuality is so contrary to female eroticism that pornography becomes, in fact, anti-sexual. Schneemann\u2019s film, by contrast, is devastatingly erotic, transcending the surfaces of sex to communicate its true spirit, its meaning as an activity for herself and, quite accurately, women in general. Significantly, Schneemann conceives the film as shot through the eyes of her cat \u2013 the impassive observer whose view of human sexuality is free of voyeurism and ignorant of morality. In her attempt to reproduce the whole visual and tactile experience of lovemaking as a subjective phenomenon Schneemann spent some three years marking on the film, baking it in the oven, even hanging it out the window during rainstorms on the off chance it might be struck by lightning. Much as human beings carry the physical traces of their experiences, so this film testifies to what it has been through and communicates the spirit of its maker. The red heat baked into the emulsion suffuses the film, a concrete emblem of erotic power.\u2019 (B. Ruby Rich, Chicago Art Institute)<\/p>\n

The preservation of Fuses by Anthology Film Archives, New York, was supported by the University of Chicago Film Studies Center and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.<\/em><\/p>\n

KITCH\u2019S LAST MEAL
\nCarolee Schneemann, USA, 1973-76, 2 x <\/strong>16mm, colour, sound-on-cd, <\/strong>3 x 20 min
\n<\/strong>In Kitch\u2019s Last Meal<\/em> synchronicity becomes a physical property, as with accident, as with joke \u2013 double entendre. The actual projection system is of two simultaneous Super 8 reels \u2013 vertical, one above the other. The disjunctive imagery has been intricately edited: two reels periodically phrase simultaneous images of the local freight train, which ran behind our house, as well as domestic events between the artist couple and the thematic constancy of the cat, Kitch, eating during the last four years of her life.<\/p>\n

The film is composed of five hours of double co-ordinated reels; each set approximately twenty minutes long, so that various time units can be shown. The reels were edited over the five years of the filming. The sound was edited on cassette tapes.<\/p>\n

The double vertical projection was intended to increase perceptual tension and its incremental satisfactions during the unexpected synchronisation of the horizontal entrance and exit of the train, of the figures moving in space, of the cat leaning to her dish. The verticality emphasises the axis of the body \u2013 its aspect of elongation in contrast to more predictable bilateral symmetry, the horizontal nature of stereoscopic vision. The repeated motions of the freight train situates a narrative physicalisation, corresponding with film itself moving through the mechanisation of the fixed track. Here the edge of the frame implies a leakage of time existing both before and after, just as the train enters our perceptual field seemingly from elsewhere (behind, moving forward to an invisible destination). At the conclusion of reels 11 & 12, I stand in the railroad tracks filming a train in diminishing perspective \u2013 as if time is actually being pulled away, as if the scale of an object can be reduced to a grain, a blur.<\/p>\n

The visual parameters were determined by placing the camera close to positions occupied by the cat. The sound was recorded by suspending a microphone adjacent to the cat both indoors and outdoors. My premise was to film fragments of Kitch\u2019s observations so long as she lived. I began this diary film on returning home to the Hudson Valley with the cat after dislocated years in Europe. Kitch, returning to her original house was already 16 years old. Since death and film seemed in a determined interchange, my intention was to film the cat in our domestic surround until she died.<\/p>\n

Stan Brakhage always told me how mysteriously and consistently places he filmed were subsequently destroyed \u2013 houses disappeared, bridges were taken down; friends appearing in his films would soon move away, often without a trace. With Fuses<\/em>, the celebration of an equitable and passionate relationship unexpectedly dissolved; Plumb Line<\/em> became the imprints of a deforming love affair; Viet-Flakes<\/em> observed fragments of brutality and disaster; while my small film portrait Carl Ruggles Christmas Breakfast<\/em> captured the composer at 84 years old \u2013 the unintended poignancy of a simple meal. By 1973, the premise of Kitch\u2019s Last Meal<\/em> seemed to provide certain safety valves.<\/p>\n

Our collusion was such that Kitch died almost 20 years old while eating a lamp chop. Kitch died on February 3rd. In March, the Walkill Valley Railroad announced that the small freight running behind the house from Albany to Walkill would be discontinued and the tracks dismantled. In May, my partner Anthony McCall decided we should separate and in June I was informed my teaching position would not be renewed. So much for my anticipated trade-off with film-death!<\/p>\n

(Carolee Schneemann)<\/p>\n

The 16mm blow-up and preservation of Kitch\u2019s Last Meal by Anthology Film Archives, New York, was supported by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.<\/em><\/p>\n

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Alina Rudnitskaya\u2019s humanistic approach to documentary filmmaking often brings out the humour in her chosen subjects. As an introduction to her work, this programme depicts three diverse groups of contemporary Russian women.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[9],"class_list":["post-1385","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-london-film-festival-2007","tag-london-film-festival"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1385","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1385"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1385\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1385"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1385"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1385"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}