<\/p>\n
TONY CONRAD<\/strong>: FLICKER AND PROCESS FILMS
\n<\/strong>Friday 13 June 2008, at 7pm
\nLondon Tate Modern<\/p>\nTHE FLICKER
\nTony Conrad, USA, 1966, 16mm, b\/w, sound, 30 min
\n<\/strong>I think that The Flicker<\/em> acts as a very versatile art object. The observer can really use it to his own means over a wide range of possibilities. The beauty lies within the beholder himself. In most aesthetic presentations \u2013 drama, cinema, music \u2013 the common attitude is that the amusement or the beauty or the effect of the experience is wholly within the entertainer; that the entertainer is actually creating the impressions or the reaction himself. The Flicker<\/em>, I think, presents a clean-cut case of the experience lying within the observer. Most of the details, most of the impact, most of what people find it in, what they take away from having watched the film, wasn\u2019t there, was conjured up only when they watched this film: it didn\u2019t exist before, it doesn\u2019t exist on film, it wasn\u2019t on the screen.<\/p>\nCURRIED 7302
\nTony Conrad, USA, 1973, 16mm, colour, silent, 2 min
\n<\/strong>Conrad began a series of \u2018Cooked Films\u2019 in 1973. Folding social and political concerns into the process in an explicit manner, Conrad \u2013 who at the time was serving as primary caregiver to his child, as well as professor of film at Antioch \u2013 adapted the practice of filmmaking to the stereotypically female role of domestic cook. Usually substituting \u2018raw\u2019 film in the place where different recipes called for onions, Conrad \u2018processed\u2019 the footage in various manners on his countertop or stove, with the result being, as Conrad recalled about Curried 7302<\/em> (1973), \u201cthis gorgeous mottled yellow, abstract thing.\u201d (Branden Joseph<\/p>\n7302 CREOLE
\nTony Conrad, USA, 1973, 16mm, colour, silent, 1 min
\n<\/strong>The second work in the series was a film chicken creole, the projection of which caused \u2013 through the thick alimentary residue still clinging to the celluloid \u2013 gate slipping and other effects simulated in structural films. \u201cWell, this was very interesting because the meat ran all over the projector, and it was full of grease and chicken. It slipped in the gate, and it stunk because the lamp heated it up, and it was really like an olfactory experience, and it tested the skill of the projectionist, who is covered in slime \u2026\u201d (Branden Joseph<\/p>\n4-X ATTACK
\nTony Conrad, USA, 1973, 16mm, b\/w, silent, 2 min
\n<\/strong>Foregrounding the manner in which film could be \u2018exposed\u2019 and developed via heat, pressure, or electricity, rather than merely by light and developer fluid, Conrad produced a \u2018material\u2019 paracinema. In 4-X Attack<\/em>, he struck a roll of celluloid with a hammer in a darkroom. \u201cThe material being brittle,\u201d Conrad noted, \u201cit was not only left with stress-bearing deformations, but was compressed in points, scraped and sheared in others, and generally speaking completely totalled.\u201d Once the film was fractured into myriad pieces, Conrad swept them back together, \u201cflashed the film once with a strobe, so as to activate the latent stress record,\u201d developed it in a cheese cloth sack, and then painstakingly, even archeologically, reconstructed the roll (it is, afterall, an \u2018edited\u2019 film) into a projectable movie.\u201d (Branden Joseph<\/p>\nFILM FEEDBACK
\nTony Conrad, USA, 1974, 16mm, b\/w, silent, 14 min
\n<\/strong>The cybernetics of video applied to film production. Film Feedback<\/em> was produced in \u2018real time\u2019 by processing and projecting the film while it was being shot. Made with a film-feedback team which I directed at Antioch College. Negative image is shot from a small rear-projection screen, the film comes out of the camera continuously (in the dark room) and is immediately processed, dried, and projected on the screen by the team. What are the qualities of film that may be made visible through feedback?<\/p>\nARTICULATION OF BOOLEAN ALGEBRA FOR FILM OPTICALS
\nTony Conrad, USA, 1975, 16mm, b\/w, sound, 75 min (10 min excerpt)
\n<\/strong>The work that served for me as a checkmate in the \u2018structural\u2019 film game is Articulation of Boolean Algebra for Film Opticals<\/em>. This film achieved something of an apogee in formalist design, that conceptual regimentation which, in relation to de Sade\u2019s eroticism, Barthes called \u201cencyclopaedic [\u2026] the same inventorial spirit which animates Newton or Fourier.\u201d (The Metaphor of the Eye, 1963.) Articulation<\/em> literally unifies the optical and sound tracks. Both are the result of a design that follows an algorithmic system of stripes. The scale of the six stripes on the film strip positions them in relation to screen design, flicker, tone, rhythm, and meter, all with octave relationships.<\/p>\nTHE EYE OF COUNT FLICKERSTEIN
\nTony Conrad, USA, 1967\/75, 16mm, b\/w, silent, 7 min
\n<\/strong>The sustained dead gaze of black and white TV \u2018snow\u2019, captured in 1965 and twisted sideways, draws the viewer hypnotically into an abstract visual jungle.<\/p>\nSTRAIGHT AND NARROW
\nBeverly & Tony Conrad, USA, 1970, 16mm, b\/w, sound, 10 min
\n<\/strong>Straight and Narrow<\/em> is a study of subjective colour and visual rhythm. Although it is printed on black and white film, the hypnotic pacing of the images will cause most viewers to experience a programmed gamut of hallucinatory colour effects. Through the intermediary of rhythm, the maximal impact is drawn from the simplest of universal human images: straight horizontal and vertical lines.<\/p>\nAll texts or quotes by Tony Conrad unless otherwise noted. Texts by Branden Joseph have been adapted from \u201cBeyond the Dream Syndicate: Tony Conrad and the Arts After Cage\u201d (Zone Books \/ MIT Press).<\/em><\/p>\nBack to top<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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":[58],"tags":[164],"class_list":["post-1576","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tony-conrad","tag-tony-conrad"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1576","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=1576"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1576\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1576"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1576"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1576"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}