New video / inspirations

I'll start this post by including some screenshots from my latest video:

I hope these images speak for themselves. The video is simply a 1 minute take of a couple sleeping together. In the last few seconds we can see another hand coming from behind the girl. I'm quite happy with the video because I think it managed to capture the essence of the story in just one shot. I also like the fact that the last few fames make it slightly humorous. The story was not filmed with the heads cut off but I felt that the identity of the couple was not needed, especially of the guy at the front, who all of sudden loses a bit of importance once the other hand is introduced.

Ok so aside from this, this week I am 'shadowing' two German lecturers at my college who are teaching and experimental film module to the BA Media students. Shadowing basically means I have to see what they are doing so once they leave I can carry on the lectures myself, and I can teach the module next year (most probably). Although most of the examples given in class are familiar to me, I have come across certain works that I hadn't seen before and that I have found to be interesting and even relevant to my Masters projects.


"A Movie is a 1958 experimental collage film in which Bruce Conner put together snippets of found footage, taken from B-movies, newsreels, soft-core pornography, novelty short films, and other sources, to a musical score featuring Respighi's The Pines of Rom" (youtube, 2012)


"Directed by Peter Mays. A sight/sound combine of exotic imagry shot semi-randomly in superimposition off a TV and then cut to make a fast moving but extremely ambiguous "story". GORILLA moves through modern man's myth mind like a runaway train bursting at the seams. Prize at Ann Arbor Film Festival, 1967." (youtube, 2012)



Harry Smith's drug inspired mirror animations.

Besides the history of experimental film we are also having discussions about 'experimental' film in general, such as the fact that dreams are one ways to be experimental in traditional films as they are purely surreal and therefore allow for plenty of ways to portray the distortion of time. We also discussed the difference between MTV style editing and experimental; MTV being for the masses (albeit the young generation masses) whilst experimental is more personal and much more risky. One of the lecturers expressed that common everyday youtube videos are perhaps closer to experimental than music videos, although the pity is that the subject is always the same; cats / accidents / food / sports, since most people like the same things.

The subject of minimalist and reduction was of course a prominent one, where the lecturers constantly told the students to reduce to the extreme. They told them how minimal projects are often not taken seriously by the viewer, however they are extremely difficult to copy and reproduce because they are so simple, that a project which is even remotely similar, cannot be said to be inspired from the original since the concept is so minimal. Therefore this makes minimal experimental art rather unique. They gave us an example of Paul Sharits' Ray Gun Virus, that was essentially an experimental film using just flickering colour. The point here was not to tell a story but to instigate a mood, and the conclusion was that if a visual piece manages to change the viewer's mood, then it has definitely done its job.




Ray Gun Virus (with sound!)
1966
According to artist, sound is to be turned to max volume.

"Although affirming projector, projection beam, screen, emulsion, film frame structure, etc., this is not an "abstract film"/projector as pistol/time-colored pills/yes=no/mental suicide and then, rebirth as self-projection. "... just colors and strobe ... 'light-color energy patterns (analogies of neural transmission systems) generate internal color-time shape and allow the viewer to become aware of the electrical-chemical functionings of his own nervous system' ... It's true." - David Curtis, International Times "RAY GUN VIRUS is a work in which no images appear yet one can get pure identity on film. ... projected film itself makes the viewer aware of where he stands. RAY GUN VIRUS is not so-called 'Psychedelic Cinema' but even more and goes beyond it through Sharits' bright clarification of the media." - Takahiko Iimura, Film Art Exhibition: Fourth Int'l Experimental Film Competition, Knokke-Le-Zoute; "Twenty Years of American Personal Film" anthology, National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, 1966. Collections: Museum of Modern Art, NY; Royal Archive of Belgium." (youtube, 2012)

Finally I will be creating a "Manifesto" category in my blog to explain the boundaries and rules of my project, and to define exactly why I have chosen this process and what I am expecting from the viewer.