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INTIMATE VISION: FILMS BY CHICK STRAND 1
\n<\/strong>Thursday 15 November 2012, at 8pm
\nBarcelona Xc\u00e8ntric CCCB<\/p>\nCARTOON LE MOUSSE<\/strong>
\nChick Strand, USA, 1979, 15 min<\/strong>
\nIn her collage films, Strand uses the magic of editing to conjure surreal humour from the connections between disparate fragments.<\/p>\nMOSORI MONIKA<\/strong>
\nChick Strand, USA, 1970, 20 min
\n<\/strong>The impact of American missionaries on the Warao Indians in Venezuela is considered from the viewpoints of women from each side.<\/p>\nANGEL BLUE SWEET WINGS<\/strong>
\nChick Strand, USA, 1966, 3 min
\n<\/strong>A multi-layered cine-poem apropos life and vision.<\/p>\nLOOSE ENDS<\/strong>
\nChick Strand, USA, 1979, 25 min
\n<\/strong>Found footage is used to convey the effect of information overload, finding wit and pathos in the complicated synthesis of personal experience and media assault.<\/p>\nARTIFICIAL PARADISE<\/strong>
\nChick Strand, USA, 1986, 13 min
\n<\/strong>\u2018The anthropologist\u2019s most human desire: the ultimate contact with the informant. The denial of intellectualism and the acceptance of the romantic heart, and a soul without innocence.\u2019 (CS)<\/p>\nKRISTALLNACHT<\/strong>
\nChick Strand, USA, 1979, 7 min<\/strong>
\n\u2018Dedicated to the memory of Anne Frank, and the tenacity of the human spirit.\u2019 (CS)<\/p>\nChick Strand:<\/em> I had a Degree in Anthropology and I was going to San Francisco State University to get my MFA and then my PhD and I thought, \u201cOh man, I\u2019m 30 fucking years old and now I\u2019ve got two kids \u2026 I don\u2019t want to listen to these old farts ever again!\u201d So I came down to Los Angeles to go to film school at UCLA.<\/p>\nUCLA is where I met Pat O\u2019Neill, he was a student in the Art Department and I was in the Film Department, but we came together over photography because I thought that if I took photography then I\u2019d learn more about film \u2013 the physics of it, how you do it, how you can manipulate it. We were down the dark rooms with a wonderful teacher there called Robert Heineken, he was pretty well known, who somehow had got a 16mm contact printer. Pat O\u2019Neill was the only one using it, and he showed me what he knew and then I was using it. It was quite wonderful. We had to develop our films in regular trays and stuff like that. I was pretty good. Pretty hard to keep our butts out of the soup there but it was really rather fun.<\/p>\n
MW:<\/em> And so was this how you made Kulu Se Mama<\/em> and those early abstract films?<\/p>\nCS: <\/em>It was. Kulu Se Mama<\/em> was an independent course that I did using special effects, my first attempt really. I was interested first of all in photography and Bob Heineken turned us onto solarisation. There was a photographer named Edmund Teske who was really involved in that. I think maybe Pat had made 7362<\/em> by then and maybe we talked about it. So I was pretty much playing with solarisation and was sort of entranced by the natural colour that came out. Rather than putting colour in I was really entranced by these bronzes and coppers. I found out too that if you made the soup thick, just sort of let it sit there and gel, then you could get these marvellous greens and I thought, \u201cOh, that\u2019s what I want to do,\u201d \u2026 but then I got into the ethnographic thing and got sent to Venezuela, to the jungles of the Orinoco. So what was a girl to do but just do an ethnographic film?<\/p>\nI went there with the idea in mind that Mosori Monika<\/em> was going to be an ethnographic film, using that methodology more or less. I never believed that an ethnographic film would ever take the place of the written word, but that it would sort of introduce people who\u2019d watch the films and then studied the culture to actual seeing the people move around, you know? I was so sick of the black and white photographs of guys with spears and all that stuff \u2026 But you cannot be objective, totally objective, I couldn\u2019t help myself juxtaposing what was actually being said by an Indian woman \u2013 translated \u2013 over a picture, over an image \u2026<\/p>\nEven though I shoot documentary style, it isn\u2019t, because I don\u2019t set out to do that and I don\u2019t weigh it out in any certain way, although I\u2019m so nosey \u2013 \u201cTell me about your life?\u201d \u2013 but I couldn\u2019t understand this Warao Indian woman I was filming one bit. There was a guy who spoke Spanish and English that was part of the trio of us that went down to Venezuela, totally paid for by UCLA, then he had a translator that spoke Spanish and the Indian language, and then there was the Indian woman. I said, \u201cTell me about your life,\u201d and then he left her talking for about 20 minutes. I\u2019d say, \u201cJorge, is she telling about the life?\u201d and he asked and the guy says, \u201cYeah, yeah!\u201d I had no idea what she was talking about, no idea at all, but we translated it immediately so I could somehow get some images that went along with it. Of course it\u2019s a lie because if she\u2019s talking about when she was young you can\u2019t really show it, you have to be symbolic about it in a way.<\/p>\n
Margaret Mead hated it. The Flaherty Seminar was going on and she was still alive, and it was just at that time when I was seeing ethnographic films a lot. That was very interesting because one of the things that sort of influenced me to be a little more humane about what I was doing, a little more digging in, was her film called Trance and Dance in Bali<\/em>, where the guys are flaying themselves. You never got the feeling of what it was like to be one of those guys, never, it was just like going to the zoo \u2026 It was absolutely wonderful that these people went out there with cameras and filmed all this stuff and tried to preserve the cultures, at least on paper and then film, it was really remarkable. In a sense, that film and many others like Nanook of the North<\/em> influenced me with ethnography and all my work.<\/p>\nThen I went to Mexico and I was so entranced with the colour and the feeling we got there, and how mysterious it was, like true-life surrealism. You\u2019d go into a church and they\u2019ve got Jesus in a glass case, bleeding all over, and on the walls they\u2019ve got relics that are supposed to be the skin of saints or something like that. Or you sit in your patio and down the street you hear the donkey braying and ducks quacking and then you go out the door and up the street there\u2019s some guy playing a flute and drum. It\u2019s crazy and it really is wonderful. Mexico to me was a very magic place.<\/p>\n
MW:<\/em> Artificial Paradise <\/em>is one of your Mexican films.<\/p>\nCS:<\/em> For some complicated reason, I met this young man who was a groom at a horse ranch outside of town and I really fell in love with him, like when you get crushes on people but you never follow through or anything. It was just this young guy, couldn\u2019t speak English, totally uneducated, so I taught him how to drive a car and how to read. He was quite beautiful to me. I thought that every movement was sort of his art, and the way he saw things and the poetry he\u2019d write, the songs he\u2019d sing. Not only that but he was completely captivated, not by me so much as just the adventures we could have together. \u201cCome on \u2026\u201d, in my lousy Spanish, \u201cI want to film you in the lake because of these pink flowers here.\u201d So we\u2019d go in the water and then I realised, \u201cGod, it\u2019s smelly, it\u2019s probably where the sewer came out!\u201d but he didn\u2019t say anything. He had this big crush on my friend Lee and I just had to make a romantic film about it, it had to be about Sappho thinking of men instead of women. That\u2019s the way it was really, the boy across the river whose skin is like peaches but I cannot swim. Of course in the end she swims \u2013 have your cake and eat it too! I really love movement close in. We never see it because we\u2019re never that close. Instead of special effects and all that stuff, I could just use the camera itself, and move with the camera and let everything unfold. That\u2019s what Artificial Paradise<\/em> is about, aside from this romance that wasn\u2019t a romance. I always thought of films as poems, they\u2019re poetic, but anyway that\u2019s old-fashioned!<\/p>\nMW:<\/em> At a certain point you were making the Mexican films and found footage films like Loose Ends<\/em> in parallel. What was your interest in making collage films?<\/p>\nCS:<\/em> The footage was available, and certainly after Bruce Conner\u2019s example I thought, \u201cOh, that\u2019s a possibility.\u201d I used to make cut-out collages with stuff from magazines, but when I saw A Movie<\/em>, that really blew me away. While I was teaching I somehow got my hands on a whole bunch of old black and white footage from the educational department, and maybe I stole a little bit of footage from Dream of Wild Horses <\/em>and stuff like that, and I just did it. The thing that I love about found footage is you have to make something out of nothing in a sense. You have all these disparate pieces that can be connected or re-connected or woven and re-woven and you make the choices and it becomes a very personal thing.<\/p>\nThe secretary of my department, her father had all this stuff that showed his children during the war. And there were educational films in the Occidental College Library which I just absconded with, I mean they didn\u2019t want them anymore, it was quite wonderful. Then of course there was the L.A. Public Library and, you know, I just would have dupes made. I had a student whose father owned a big special effects place. I could take my black and white footage there and he would wet gate print it and make a master so that a lot of the scratches would be gone. I can\u2019t believe I did that, but I\u2019d do it again! When I started, I\u2019d shoot my own stuff but still I sort of see it as a collage because I don\u2019t know what I\u2019m shooting, I had no idea, and most the time I don\u2019t have control over the people because they give me a present of themselves. \u201cGive me the gift of yourself, tell me your life story!\u201d<\/p>\n
These excerpts are from an interview with Chick Strand conducted on 15 March 2008 for the forthcoming book <\/em>\u201cCritical Mass: An Oral History of Avant-Garde Film, The New American Cinema and Beyond\u201d<\/em>. Initial research for this project was funded by the British Academy.<\/em><\/p>\nBack to top<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
INTIMATE VISION: FILMS BY CHICK STRAND 1 Thursday 15 November 2012, at 8pm Barcelona CCCB Xc\u00e8ntric As one of the instigators of Canyon Cinema, Chick Strand (1931-2009) was at the heart of 1960s West Coast avant-garde. Her body of work, comprising of found footage and personally photographed material, has an astounding strength and vitality. Strand\u2019s […]<\/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":[141],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5032","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-chick-strand"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5032","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=5032"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5032\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5032"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5032"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5032"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}