<\/p>\n
RITE WORDS, ROTE ORDER
\n<\/strong>Thursday 2 June 2005, at 7pm
\nLondon Corsica Studios<\/p>\nANAEMIC CINEMA<\/strong>
\n Marcel Duchamp, France, 1925, b\/w, silent, 7 min<\/strong>
\nDuchamp used the initial payment on his inheritance to make a film and to go into the art business. The film, shot in Man Ray\u2019s studio with the help of cinematographer Marc All\u00e9gret, was a seven-minute animation of nine punning phrases by Rrose S\u00e9lavy. These had been pasted, letter by letter, in a spiral pattern on round black discs that were then glued to phonograph records; the slowly revolving texts alternate with shots of Duchamp\u2019s Discs Bearing Spirals, ten abstract designs whose turning makes them appear to move backward and forward in an erotic rhythm. The little film, which Duchamp called Anemic Cinema, had its premiere that August at a private screening room in Paris. (Calvin Tomkins)<\/p>\nASSOCIATIONS<\/strong>
\n John Smith, UK, 1975, colour, sound, 7 min<\/strong>
\nImages from magazines and colour supplements accompany a spoken text taken from \u2018\u2018Word Associations and Linguistic Theory\u2019\u2019 by Herbert H. Clark. By using the ambiguities inherent in the English language, Associations sets language against itself. Image and word work together\/against each other to destroy\/create meaning. (John Smith)<\/p>\nSYNTAX<\/strong>
\n Martha Haslanger, 1974, colour, sound, 13 min<\/strong>
\nAs the word \u201csyntax\u201d implies, this film deals with the way in which images and sounds come together. Its main concern, however, goes deeper, and resides within a more personalized syntax: a process of retaining a narration. Syntax is a small gem, exhibiting \u2026 a kind of joyful, competent wit and strength. Haslanger prowls her camera through several rooms in an ordinary middle class house while her voice-over describes what we are about to see or have seen, never what is actually on the screen, wringing the changes of the relationship of the spoken word, image and the printed word. It is a wonderfully self-contained and seductive film. (Jump Cut)<\/p>\nPICTURES ON PINK PAPER<\/strong>
\n Lis Rhodes, UK, 1982, colour, sound, 35 min<\/strong>
\nIn Pictures on Pink Paper, the voices of three women describe experiences of domestic life, gradually become identifiable as belonging to specific individuals. Different generations are represented in the voices of the three women, and also in the generations of images used. Here, Rhodes engages with the representative quality of the images – throughout the film photocopies and super 8 film are blown up and re-presented. This film seeks to find a female voice, but avoids generalization of a single narrative through the interweaving of these voices. In Pictures on Pink Paper the authoritative voice is slipping between appearing to be one woman\u2019s voice and thoughts, to the experiences of three different women. Minnie, a Cornishwoman, narrates the past, Kate imitates accents and voices, and Lis Rhodes\u2019 voice becomes identifiable as the filmmaker. This film asks how women\u2019s oppression can be articulated without mimicking that very expression and language which produces the unbalance. In spite of being structured around these voices this film denies narrative structure – even time here is broken down. Pictures on Pink Paper highlights the gaps between and explores language as a creator, rather than a symptom, of gender relations. It seeks to ask how a female voice can be found without reducing all female experience to a generalization. As with many of Lis Rhodes\u2019 films, Pictures on Pink Paper looks to the ways in which women are associated with nature. The alignment of women with nature and men with culture is embedded within language: unlike French and Spanish the English language is non-gendered grammatically, yet the female pronoun is regularly used for \u2018natural\u2019 objects. Language is powerful: we become inscribed within language, and Lis Rhodes challenges these assumptions by problematising language. (Lisa Le Feuvre, www.luxonline.org)<\/p>\n\fRAT LIFE AND DIET IN NORTH AMERICA<\/strong>
\n Joyce Wieland, Canada, 1968, colour, sound, 16 min<\/strong>
\nWieland returned to the kitchen table with Rat Life and Diet in North America in 1968, a study of her pet gerbils. She filmed them in extreme close-up among cups and dinner plates, eliminating all sense of spatial depth and place, producing luscious images teeming with texture and colour. More and more, Wieland\u2019s films were distinguished by this sensuality, setting her apart from her male counterparts in the Structuralist movement. Interestingly, Rat Life and Diet in North America contains a narrative thread, transforming the gerbils into political prisoners who escape their American oppressors, played by Wieland\u2019s cats. They make their way to Canada where they set up an organic farm and appear to live happily ever after until an invasion by the United States. Influenced by Vietnam War protests, this political allegory is one of the most hilarious denouncements of American imperialism found in any genre. The film also betrays a basic Canadian fear and coincides with Wieland\u2019s increasingly nationalistic concerns. Discussions of such concerns were commonplace in Canada at the time and Wieland felt drawn in, even from as far away as New York City. Rat Life and Diet in North America marked the beginning of a shift in her career. Moving away from the purely formal, Wieland plunged head-long into the political. As she did, she felt herself both disconnected from and rejected by the very movement that had initially inspired her. (Barbara Goslawski, Take One)<\/p>\nSO IS THIS<\/strong>
\n Michael Snow, Canada, 1982, silent, colour, 45 min<\/strong>
\n\u201cWith formalist belligerence, So Is This threatens to make its viewers \u2018laugh cry and change society,\u2019 even promising to get \u2018confessional.\u2019 Although the film does reflect Snow\u2019s personality – his Canadian-ness, preference for humor over irony, obsession with art world chronology (who did what first) – its only confession is the tacit acknowledgement that he\u2019s sensitive to criticism. Snow takes full advantage of his film\u2019s system of discourse to twit restless audiences. A lot of this is pretty funny but So Is This is more than a series of gags. Snow manages to de-familiarize both film and language, creating a kind of moving concrete poetry while throwing a monkey wrench into a theoretical debate (is film a language?) that has been going on sporadically for 60 years. If you let it, Snow\u2019s film stretches your definition of what film is – that\u2019s cinema and So Is This. (J. Hoberman, The Village Voice)<\/p>\nFIRST HYMN TO THE NIGHT – NOVALIS<\/strong>
\n Stan Brakhage, USA, 1994, colour, silent, 4 min<\/strong>
\nThis is a hand-painted film whose emotionally referential shapes and colors are interwoven with words (in English) form the first Hymn to the Night by the late 18th Century mystic poet Friedrich Philipp von Hardenberg, whose pen name was Novalis. The pieces of text which I\u2019ve used are as follows: \u2018the universally gladdening light … As inmost soul … it is breathed by stars … by stone … by suckling plant … multiform beast … and by (you). I turn aside to Holy Night … I seek to blend with ashes. Night opens in us … infinite eyes … blessed love. (Stan Brakhage)<\/p>\nBack to top<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
RITE WORDS, ROTE ORDER Thursday 2 June 2005, at 7pm London Corsica Studios An evening of films that use written or spoken language to verbalise and hypnotise. A selection of works which, to a greater or lesser extent, use words and text to communicate their message or impart their expression. An event to educate, fascinate […]<\/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":[154],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4178","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-write-stuff"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4178","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=4178"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4178\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4178"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4178"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4178"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}