Film - Think

I have been off and on involved with a local gallery/studio space here in St. Louis that often sets up exhibitions. This month, there will be an open studio night for which I have programmed an hour's worth of shorts. The Solanas isn't actually my first choice, but since no one is sending me the Treasures IV: American Avant-Garde Film set for review, and I lost my Maya Deren discs, I kind of ran out of time. I hope to be able to do this again sometime when I will be able to DJ short films into more invigorating orders and patterns.

Here are the program notes:

Luminary Open Studio Short Film Program

“Imagine an eye unruled by man-made laws of perspective, an eye unprejudiced by compositional logic, and eye which does not respond to the name of everything but which must know each object encountered in life through an adventure of perception. How many colors are there in a field of grass to the crawling baby unaware of 'Green'? How many rainbows can light create for the untutored eye? How aware of variations in heat waves can that eye be? Imagine a world alive with incomprehensible objects and shimmering with an endless variety of movement and innumerable gradations of color. Imagine a world before the 'beginning was the word.'”

Stan Brakhage

This selection of short films is interested in the exchanges that happen between film and additional material. CGI, hand animation, bits of moths and leaves, paint, scratches in celluloid by metal tools - these are all alternative film processes that challenge the way we see, experience, and appropriate the projected image.

Ryan (Chris Landreth, 2004 – CGI/Stock Footage/35mm - 14 min.)

Landreth refers to the animating process that takes place in Ryan as psychorealism, which is just a snappy way to describe the way he uses color and form to enact the emotions of his subjects. Through the use of CGI and embedded footage, Landreth stages an interview with Ryan Larkin, a seminal hand-animation artist who has fallen on hard times. Ryan is a compassionate look at addiction and the creative process, as well as an engrossing ode to a past age of short format filmmaking.

Mothlight (Stan Brakhage, 1963 - Moth Bits/Tape/16mm - 3 min.)

Brakhage took piles of moth wings and pressed them between two strips of clear tape. He then passed this long strip through a 16mm film printer, and out came one of our most treasured short films. Brakhage described it as “What a moth might see from birth to death if black were white and white were black.” But the flutter of these dancing moth bits also challenges the idea that cinema is inherently fictional, disembodied, and disconnected from the physical ebb of life.

Eye Myth (Stan Brakhage, 1967 - Paint/16mm - 9 sec.)

Though it passes by in the blink of an eye (it took Brakhage a year to paint), Eye Myth is a complicated parable about the way looking and storytelling relate. Can the eye tell its own stories, produce its own myths? If so, what do they actually look like? What exactly is this man trapped in the paint at the end of Eye Myth? These messy ontological riddles haunted much of Brakhage’s filmmaking.

The Wold Shadow (Stan Brakhage, 1972 - Glass/Paint/16mm - 3 min.)

While walking through the woods one day, Brakhage encountered a shadowy image that he could only reproduce by filming through glass that had been painted frame by frame. What he came up with was several minutes of film in homage to whatever it was that haunted him about nature throughout his life, expressible only through these multiple screens of image that passed through his acute perception, painterly hands, deliberately affected celluloid, and then the projector.

The Garden of Earthly Delights (Stan Brakhage, 1981 - Paint/Plant Material/16mm - 3 min.)

A close cousin to Mothlight, this short film is an ecstatic celebration of nature in a crescendo of projected paint and plant material. It is a fine example of Brakhage’s commitment to these lengthy construction processes that confront the viewer with a microcosm of pure cinema. Imagine putting this together frame by frame, 24 frames per second, 3 minutes worth of film.

The Stars are Beautiful (Stan Brakhage, 1974 - Voiceover/16mm - 18 min.)

This is a grueling, atypical Brakhage film that most people fast-forward through. He breaks his silence in this one to recite a litany of ad hoc creation myths that have much to do with why he became a filmmaker in the first place, and layers these thoughts over footage of clipped chicken wings and assorted farmland terrors. Watching Brakhage work with actual footage, clipping it, merging it, and stretching it across and abstract narrative, is an odd experience.

Kindering (Stan Brakhage, 1987 - 16mm - 3 min.)

Kindering is built on shots of grandchildren playing in a backyard split by streams of color and shadow, unexpected light, and massive jump cuts. You get a glimpse of Brakhage’s love for childlike perception in the film, which is enhanced by the way something far more sinister and consuming threatens to overtake his original footage.

L’homme sans tête (Juan Solanas, 2003 - CGI/35mm Film - 18 min.)

This acclaimed short is about headless man going on an important date in an industrial wasteland. On his way, he stops off at the head shop to pick just the right noggin for the occasion, and has troubled settling on the right visage. Crafted over four years through painstaking CGI, Solanas’ film is as painterly as a Dutch master (or is it a Magritte?). It is hard to see the incredible amount of work it took to create the film through its jaunty, romantic exterior. But Solanas’ film is a fledgling experiment in the kind of immersive world-building that mainstream cinema has begun its slow movement towards.