<\/p>\n
CALIFORNIA CONSCIOUSNESS
\n<\/b>Thursday 19 June 2003, at 7pm
\nLondon Barbican Screen<\/p>\n
LAPIS
\nJames Whitney, 1963-66, colour, sound, 10 min
\n<\/strong>\u201cLapis<\/em> was as close as I could come at the time of conceiving a totally balanced opposition of stasis and flow, holding the paradox symbolically through wave and particle, pointing to a still centre of emptiness. Both in stasis and time, Lapis<\/em> conforms to the circular form of the mandala. Only at the end is there an off-centre parting of two central black-eyed forms, which allow an emptiness to pass through and return to the beginning image.\u201d \u2014James Whitney<\/p>\n1970<\/strong>
\n Scott Bartlett, 1972, colour, sound, 29 min
\n<\/strong>\u201c1970 – the year of the moon shot; the year of the Bartlett\u2019s only son, Adam; the year Scott\u2019s life peaked in high harmony and discord with the American culture. This autobiographical film presented so thorough a summation of Bartlett\u2019s personal work that it rendered him harmless for years to come.\u201d \u2014Canyon Cinema catalogue<\/em><\/p>\nTHIS IS IT<\/strong>
\n James Broughton, 1971, colour, sound, 9 min
\n<\/strong>\u201cJames Broughton\u2019s creation myth, This Is It<\/em>, places a 2-year-old Adam and a bright apple-red balloon in a backyard garden of Eden, and works a small miracle of the ordinary. And since that miracle is what his film is about, he achieves a kind of casual perfection in matching means and ends.\u201d \u2014Robert Greenspun, The New York Times<\/em><\/p>\nRE-ENTRY<\/strong>
\n Jordan Belson, 1964, colour, sound, 6 min
\n<\/strong>\u201cWhen Belson gave up filmmaking in the early sixties, he diverted his creative energy to the practise of Hatha yoga. When the Ford Foundation offered him one of their coveted $10,000 grants in 1964, he turned them down. But after reconsidering, he accepted the money and re-entered filmmaking with Re-Entry<\/em>, the first of his \u2018personal\u2019 films. For Belson the opposition of impersonal to personal art does not indicate an antithesis of geometrical formalism to Expressionism. As a yogi, Belson seeks the transcendence of the self. His personal cinema delineates the mechanics of transcendence in the rhetoric of abstraction.\u201d \u2014P. Adams Sitney, Visionary Film<\/em><\/p>\n7362<\/strong>
\n Pat O\u2019Neill, 1965-67, colour, sound, 10 min
\n<\/strong>\u201cThis is film as art in pure presentational form. Patrick O\u2019Neill has utilised colour, sound and images in a symphonic mode, attacking the consciousness with unusual power. 7362<\/em> does not say anything, but simply is, in the way that a kaleidoscope is<\/em> the shapes, images and colours presented to the eye. Groups who want to break away from seeing cinema as stories and morals will find this a stirring introduction to the real possibilities of the form.\u201d \u2014Christian Advocate<\/em><\/p>\nTAKE OFF<\/strong>
\n Gunvor Nelson, 1972, b\/w, sound, 10 min
\n<\/strong>\u201cFor contemporary audiences, particularly student audiences, Take Off<\/em> is confrontational on several levels simultaneously. First, the apparent over-exploitation of the \u2018male gaze\u2019 during much of the film seems particularly outr\u00e9 in a 1990s classroom (both for those who believe in the liberation of women\u2019s bodies from male control and for those who are uncomfortable with nudity in film and in public), until the film\u2019s final destination is clear, at which point we realise that the three women who collaborated on the film have raised the spectre of \u2018the gaze\u2019 only to dismantle it. Indeed, we recognise, once Ellion Ness has \u2018taken it all off\u2019, that her smiles at the camera are not the smiles of submission to male desire that we thought they were, but smiles of complicity with her two media-guerrilla collaborators and with all those watching who are aware of the implications of a dehumanising gaze. A second level of confrontation, which is at least as powerful now as it was in 1972, results from the decision to use a stripper who does not precisely conform to contemporary societal standards for beauty or eroticism.\u201d \u2014Scott MacDonald, A Critical Cinema 3<\/em><\/p>\nAPROPO OF SAN FRANCISCO<\/strong>
\n Charles I. Levine, 1968, colour, sound, 4 min
\n<\/strong>\u201c(After or for Jean Vigo) with Ben Van Meter. Sound recording by Bob Cowan. A study in visual rhythms and structure, using the same basic element repeated with variations.\u201d \u2014Charles I. Levine<\/p>\nBack to top<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
CALIFORNIA CONSCIOUSNESS Thursday 19 June 2003, at 7pm London Barbican Screen The California Dream became a psychedelic hallucination when eastern mysticism fused with drug-fuelled fantasy in the heady 60s & 70s. Transcend trance end. James Whitney, Lapis, 1963-66, colour, sound, 10 min Scott Bartlett, 1970, 1972, colour, sound, 29 min James Broughton, This is it, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[122],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3821","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-california-sound-california-image"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3821","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=3821"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3821\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3821"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3821"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3821"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}