Experimental

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The long way around the barn never looked so good. Larry Gottheim composed BARN RUSHES from eight tracking shots tracing the same arc around a barn in different conditions. The fact that nothing changes makes it all the much more apparent that everything does: a meditative approach that Tony Conrad described as “a textbook of atmosphere, camera vision and lighting, as they relate personal concept to purely visual relationships.” The simplicity of the film’s structure echoes the functional design of the barn while simultaneously suggesting a distinctly cinematic equivalent to Claude Monet’s serial views of Rouen Cathedral. – Max GoldbergRead More »

THE GEORGETOWN LOOP
(Ken Jacobs, 1996, 11m, widescreen 35mm film, black and white, silent)

Originally photographed in 1903, US Library of Congress collection. New arrangement in 1996 by Ken Jacobs, assisted by Florence Jacobs. 35mm optical rephotography by Sam Bush, Western Cine, Denver.

I’ve been raiding the Paper Print Collection of the Library Of Congress in Washington, DC, since the late 1960s with TOM, TOM, THE PIPER’S SON. It’s a preserve of early cinema. Until 1912, in order to copyright film, one deposited with the library a positive from the negative printed on paper, unprojectable, but – unlike nitrate prints – capable of weathering the years without Crumbling into chemical volatility. And there the stacks rested, safely out of mind, hundreds and hundreds of silent rolls most less than 30 meters, many Edisons, American Mutoscope And Biograph, Gaumont, Lubin, Vitagraph ; cine-snatches of life as it was lived, vaudevillians, proto-dramas, and too many state parades.Read More »

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Jonas Mekas’ The Brig is a fake documentary about ten confined soldiers in a U.S. Navy ship and the three guards who beat and humiliate them. After the title of the film, “The Brig”, the next title is “March 7, 1957 – U.S. Marine Corps – Camp Fuji, Japan – 4:30” Then Mekas goes on showing the daily lives of the soldiers, which consists of beatings, degradations, unnecessary cleanings and senseless rituals. The audience is expected to constantly question the reality of what is on the screen while being moved by the illusion.Read More »

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A Tom Tom Chaser is Jacobs’ 2002 poetic riff on the transformation of his classic film Tom Tom the Piper’s Son from chemical to electronic form during the telecine process.Read More »

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“Jolting in every sense of the word, this short masterwork flickers between stereographic cards depicting Victorian-era child laborers, creating a portrait of standardized horrors, endlessly reproduced.” —MoMARead More »

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The moving camera shapes the screen image with great purposefulness, using the frame of a window as fulcrum upon which to wheel about the exterior scene. The zoom lens rips, pulling depth planes apart and slapping them together, contracting and expanding in concurrence with camera movements to impart a terrific apparent-motion to the complex of the object-forms pictured on the horizontal-vertical screen, its axis steadied by the audience’s sense of gravity. The camera’s movements in being transferred to objects tend also to be greatly magnified (instead of the camera the adjacent building turns). About four years of studying the window-complex preceded the afternoon of actual shooting (a true instance of cinematic action-painting). The film exists as it came out of the camera barring one mechanically necessary mid-reel splice. –K. J.Read More »

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To return again. To re-align is the object of these visits, perhaps. Geography of origin becoming catalyst for an inner re-alignment with the secret, private, unspoken work of one’s being. Peering into layers, sliding planes of windows and time, the fragmentary gesture of the dance.
A series of rapid contrasts, a synthesis of elemental and everyday experience.
Structures shift and intermingle, two worlds become one.Read More »

Lost dreams is made out of those little remnants of images,from a single glance to a detailed moment, of those women from youth’s love and young dreams. They are woven together, like fragments of the mind, and from the ends of film to the corners of the frame, into a memory of them. They are once again embraced and, if only briefly, poetically honoured.Read More »

Intoxicated by My Illness (in which images photographed by several people are extensively superimposed) loosely and dreamily tracks a phase in Dwoskin’s recent life that took him from medical examination to intensive care.

Mostly it is a reverie about erotic fantasy – especially the excruciating, poignant ambiguity of bodily sensation strung out between intense pain and exquisite pleasure, between the figures of the nurse, who might be imagined as a bondage mistress, and the bondage mistress, who touches the ‘dominated’ body in the most tender way imaginable. Dwoskin periodically overlays known ‘movie music’ in order to ironically foreground his own ‘self dramatisation’, all the while drawing us into a rare and precious intimacy in extremis.Read More »