Invisible Cinema

Creative destruction . . .

"Dear Rob: Thanks for being in my dream last night. We were in a beat-up, barely running old Chevy on a windy, dusty trail. You explained that it would be highly beneficial for a Sagittarian like myself to demolish this junker. With me behind the wheel and you riding shotgun, we slowly and gently smashed it again and again into the side of the cliff, cracking and denting and tearing it up. Then we got out and hammered it with logs. I felt free when I woke up, like I'd achieved some great feat." -Liberated Wrecker.  Dear Liberated: I'm pleased I could join in the work that you (and all Sagittarians) are best suited for right now: creative destruction. It was smart of you to dismantle a symbol of what you'll no longer settle for and what wouldn't drive you to where you need to go anyway.  - Rob Brezsny

What is poetry? Part 3

PURE by the Lightning Seeds

"Nighttime slows, raindrops splash rainbows
perhaps someone you know,
could sparkle and shine
as daydreams slide to colour from shadow
picture the moonglow, that dazzles my eyes
and I love you

just lying smiling in the dark
shooting stars around your heart
dreams come bouncing in your head
pure and simple everytime
now you're crying in your sleep
I wish you'd never learned to weep
Don’t sell the dreams you should be keeping
pure and simple everytime

dreams of sights, of sleigh rides in seasons
where feelings not reasons,
can make you decide
as leaves pour down, splash autumn on gardens
as colder nights harden,
their moonlit delights
and I love you

just lying smiling in the dark
shooting stars around your heart
dreams come bouncing in your head
pure and simple everytime
now you're crying in your sleep
I wish you'd never learned to weep
don't sell the dreams you should be keeping
pure and simple everytime

look at me with starry eyes
push me up to starry skies
there's stardust in my head
pure and simple everytime
fresh and deep as oceans new
shiver at the sight of you
I'll sing a softer tune
pure and simple over you

if love's the truth then look no lies
and let me swim around your eyes
I've found a place I'll never leave
shut my mouth and just believe
love is the truth I realize
not a stream of pretty lies
to use us up and waste our time

lying smiling in the dark
shooting stars around your heart
dreams come bouncing in your head
pure and simple everytime
now you're crying in your sleep
I wish you'd never learnt to weep
don't sell the dreams you should be keeping
pure and simple everytime

look at me with starry eyes
push me up to starry skies
there's stardust in my head
pure and simple everytime
fresh and deep as oceans new
shiver at the sight of you
I'll sing a softer tune
pure and simple over you
pure and simple just for you"

(Thanks to Karl Lagerfeld for this one . . . )

What is poetry? Part 2

I know that Walt Whitman and Coleman Barks have mentioned that poetry is a mystery, but I cannot help but continue to wonder about the subject.  Poetry fascinates me endlessly . . .

I typed in "origin of poetry" into Google, and let me tell you, it is slim pickings out there on the World Wide Web.  However, this particular excerpt from Aristotle's, The Origin and Development of Poetry, is interesting:

"Poetry in general seems to have sprung from two causes, each of them lying deep in our nature. First, the instinct of imitation is implanted in man from childhood, one difference between him and other animals being that he is the most imitative of living creatures, and through imitation learns his earliest lessons; and no less universal is the pleasure felt in things imitated. We have evidence of this in the facts of experience. Objects which in themselves we view with pain, we delight to contemplate when reproduced with minute fidelity: such as the forms of the most ignoble animals and of dead bodies. The cause of this again is, that to learn gives the liveliest pleasure, not only to philosophers but to men in general; whose capacity, however, of learning is more limited. Thus the reason why men enjoy seeing a likeness is, that in contemplating it they find themselves learning or inferring, and saying perhaps, 'Ah, that is he.' For if you happen not to have seen the original, the pleasure will be due not to the imitation as such, but to the execution, the colouring, or some such other cause.

Imitation, then, is one instinct of our nature. Next, there is the instinct for 'harmony' and rhythm, metres being manifestly sections of rhythm. Persons, therefore, starting with this natural gift developed by degrees their special aptitudes, till their rude improvisations gave birth to Poetry."  -- Aristotle

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(There are a few items that I do not agree with here, but the idea that we copy a subject so that we can learn from it, and that "to learn gives the liveliest pleasure" is very right on and really resonates with me.)

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After not finding much else on the Internet, I referred to my copy of Poetics of Cinema by Raul Ruiz.  I love him so much . . . In the chapter entitled, "Images of Images" he states:

"Poetry is the authentic copy of nature."  - Raul Ruiz

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I resist the word, "copy," but I guess that what poetry reproduces is the authentic truth within nature, which is a lot more difficult than it may seem!  I prefer to use the word "capture" in regard to filming nature, but I guess this is an inherently untruthful statement.

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I also think that the following idea hints at the mysterious nature of poetry:

"Copying, invention, and discovery are extremely complex processes which are not necessarily easy to tell apart."  - Raul Ruiz

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While I'm here, I'd like to share Ruiz's contemplation of "The Photographic Unconscious:"

"Let's imagine that in the process of fabricating images, the spectator searches for images lived or seen in other films, just as in the process of dreaming.  We can bet that each particular film will be different, but not very different from the one common to all.  And not only because everybody shares in the same stock of films and the same way of life, but also because those films will come from a "corpus of visual opinions."  Visual opinions are the automatic sequence of images touched off by the first arbitrary image created on the basis of abstract stimulus.  Some examples of visual opinions:  when we go into an unknown house, we see the living room, and on that basis, along with our impressions of the external aspect of the house, we develop an opinion about the rest.  That enormous quantity of bets we make when we go down a path, thinking about everything but the path, when we go up a staircase, thinking of everything but the stairs, those bets, blending drives and timorous appetites, can make up autonomous dramatic sets, separated by moments of "tuning out" or bouts of amnesia.  Such sets create another kind of photographic unconscious."  - Raul Ruiz

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So is this why people don't understand experimental cinema?  :)   

To be continued . . .

What is poetry?

Hey!  I was re-reading, How to Speak Poetry by Leonard Cohen.  You know, the poem where he mentions among other things that "You look good when you're tired"?  (How could anyone not love him?)  This poem was very pivotal for me, because it helped me understand poetry the way I was trained to understand scientific examination.  As Leonard says, "Think of the words as science not art."  One of the examples he provides is how speaking words is like reading a laundry list.   Leonard suggests that speaking poetry is about honesty.  It's just your clothing, just your underwear and socks, don't create a lot of drama and diversion around what these simple items could represent, just wear them!  :)

What I would like to explore here is a statement I have said over and over but have never really explained:

• the document is the poem

What the hell does that mean?  Well, I realized yesterday (!) that poetry is a human construct.  Poetry is a field of study like the discipline of science.  Where scientific discovery specifically can be measured and proven to be an essential truth, poetry is a bit more mysterious.  The breathtaking nature of seeing the sky is humbling, but the sky still exists whether we see it or not.  The poetry exists, because we see into the truthful nature of the sky!  We bring the poetry!  And in some way that can never be measured, what we see becomes a part of us.  As Rumi once wrote, "When I say the word, you, I mean a hundred universes."

I've been thinking a lot about Jeanne Liotta's new film, Observando El Cielo and James Benning's recent essay on Life in Film.  An experimental film, such as Observando El Cielo, is the data.  This filmmaker in essence is proving that the way she sees the world is truthful, and the film is the result of the experiment.  Like a scientist, Jeanne Liotta gathered footage for seven years!  If the footage came back unclear or poorly exposed, she would have had to conduct the experiment again and again and again until she got the results.  Without this data, she cannot show what she has seen . . .

This discussion is still confusing to me, and if anyone has any book recommendations, please let me know!  I hope that I've conveyed a bit of what philosophically may go into one branch of experimental film.  (The A.G. is a gigantic network of a nervous system, it is a very complex organism!)  This is really an entirely different animal than the narrative, although the poetic landscape is where they can overlap. 

I would love to see a website or journal or newspaper devoted specifically to experimental cinema, where all of us who write about it could gather in one place and be published.  Cinema-poetry is a field of study too . . .

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"All truths wait in all things,
They neither hasten their own delivery nor resist it,
They do not need the obstetric forceps of the surgeon.
The insignificant is as big to me as any,
What is less or more than a touch?
Logic and sermons never convince,
The damp of the night drives deeper into my soul.
Only what proves itself to every man and woman is so,
Only what nobody denies is so."

                        --Walt Whitman, "Song of Myself," lines 647-655.

Life In Film by James Benning

The following essay by James Benning, in the Nov-Dec (2007) issue of Frieze is so beautiful it hurts!  Thanks to Girish & David Hudson for this one!

James Benning has been making films since the early 1970s. His most recent works, RR and Casting a Glance (both 2007) are about freight trains crossing American landscapes and Robert Smithson’s 1970 Spiral Jetty.

"Every so often I teach a course at California Institute of the Arts entitled ‘Looking and Listening’. Each week ten or 12 students and I go somewhere to practise paying attention. We spend a whole day crossing an oilfield, an early morning watching the sky gain light, ten hours on the local buses or a night along 5th Street in the homeless section of downtown Los Angeles. We find looking and listening to be a political act, our differences in perception reflecting our individual prejudices. Occasionally I am asked to teach this course elsewhere. Last spring I did it in Mexico City. After spending the day in a large industrial area, I asked, ‘What did you see and hear?’
Student one: There was a white wall on the opposite side of the street. It was very bright. On the right there was a small door that was recessed a foot or two, causing a rectangular shadow to fall upon the door. On the left side there were two more doors that were quite large, but they had no shadow, since they weren’t recessed. It was relatively quiet – that is, just an overall industrial ambience. Then after some minutes someone exited through the small door. The shadow went from a rectangle to a triangle and back as the person opened and closed the door and disappeared down the street. Then nothing happened for a long time. But finally the two other doors opened inward, revealing a negative space with the faint presence of two men working somewhere in the back of the black void. One of the men ignited a welding torch and sparks flew. The outside wall remained bright. The rectangular shadow got longer.

Student two: There was a small green area. A path crossed it diagonally from left to right. Two men were cleaning the path with long straw brooms. One of the men worked his broom from left to right, and then right to left. He made a swish-swish, swish-swish, swish-swish sound. He worked methodically, taking no break. The other man worked from left to right only. His sound was continuous and faster: swish, swish, swish, swish ... until he took a break. It was very musical.

Student three: A railroad track curved its way back between two old factories. They sounded like foundries but weren’t. I’m not sure what they were. People lived in makeshift homes along both sides of the tracks. There were children and dogs. Right where I stood a road crossed the tracks. Vehicles coming down the street would brake due to the bad condition of the crossing. As they passed, I could hear part of a conversation or the sounds of a radio. Words and songs came and went. A large truck didn’t slow and crossed with a loud bang. All the dogs began to bark.

Student four: I watched three men unload a boxcar full of yellow powder. They had a long tube that sucked the powder out of the car. One of the men held the tube, alternately filling burlap bags held by the other two men. As soon as a bag was full, the man would seal it and place it on a pallet. When the pallet was full (about 50 bags), a forklift driver would haul it away. Then one of the men had the added task of getting an empty pallet to replace the full one that had just been carted away. I watched for two hours. The process never stopped. The sound was like flowing sand but was hard to hear over the noise of a gasoline-powered compressor. They were working on their third pallet when I left.

Student five: There were about 20 workers outside the factory on a break. Some sat on benches provided by the factory. A man in dark blue overalls was talking to an attractive young woman. They were both standing. She too was in blue, but it was a very fine dress. You could see the shape of her body through the fabric. Perhaps she was a secretary or part of management. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but I could tell they were flirting by their body language. Three women in yellow overalls were sitting together, smoking cigarettes and laughing. Two men on the left were engaged in a serious conversation. They too had blue overalls. Then a bell rang, and they all walked back into the building. It was orange.

Etc. etc. etc. ... and it’s one of the best films I have ever seen or heard.

Oh, and this morning I saw another amazing film. I was at my school, which has been rented out to a high school summer arts programme. The halls were filled with teenagers. Off to the side in one of the main galleries a young man was playing Erik Satie’s Vexations (1893), a piano piece with 840 repetitions that is composed to go on for ever. I went in and listened for a few hours. What a treat and surprise to hear this being performed. Occasionally a few students would come in, most of the time for less than a minute, and then wander off. Two young girls stood in the doorway for 30 minutes, mystified and perhaps a bit afraid to enter the genius of this work. They reminded me of myself, the first time I saw and heard John Cage. Then a blind student came in and sat down. He carried a red and white cane that folded into itself. He listened intently and was still there when I left. Imagine what he saw."

-James Benning (c) 2007 by Frieze.

MM Serra's interviews, The Film-Makers' Coop

For experimental cinema, you have to know where to listen!  Check out the podcasts by the beautiful, radical MM Serra here!  I'm listening to the interview with P. Adams Sitney & Ed Halter right now at work!

Where I'm Calling From . . .

Hmmm.  I had a big epiphany this week, so obvious and so simple that it humbles me entirely.  I want to be precise as possible in this revelation and that is not an easy task.  I'd love to provide a bio of how I arrived at this realization, but it would just take too long.  So the short version is that I've been a curator since 2002, and my shows were composed of some of the most beautiful & radical films I have ever seen!  Also, I made my first experimental film in 2000.  I have absorbed film & video art through the best teachers, such as Mike Kuchar, who taught me how to edit sound on the Steenbeck, Su Friedrich, who taught me how to operate the optical printer, Jeanne Liotta, who taught me how to treat film as a material object using applications such as paint, bleach, collage, and nail polish, Bradley Eros, who helped me learn how to write poetry, Nisi Jacobs & Tim Reardon, who helped me learn Final Cut Pro and other aspects of working in video, and I'd estimate at least 50 other film/video artists, curators, & poets that I know.  I have to say that when I am in this world, often I feel such a sense of belonging & being at home, as well as a high level of engagement, that it eclipses any negative emotion.  I feel very lucky!

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A few years ago, several of us were hanging out at Millennium Film Workshop, and I had wondered aloud what I imagine every contemporary experimental film/video artist must wonder at some point:  "Why isn't anyone writing about experimental cinema?!"

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(Okay, I have to back track a minute and say that this query pre-dated the blogosphere & there are people who are writing about experimental cinema (Ed Halter, Pip Chodorov, Michael Sicinski, Bradley Eros, Brian Frye, Chrissie Isles, Henrietta Huldische, Adrian Martin, everyone at the Millennium Film Journal, the Frameworks Archive, all the curators who compose notes for their shows, academics, and of course, the bloggers:  Albert, Courtney, Zach, Aquarello, Brian, Girish, Thom, Long Pauses, & so many others.  You people rock my world!)

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Back to the story . . .

I had just asked this question, when we noticed that Ken Jacobs was a few feet away.  I had not met him yet, and I was a bit intimidated.  Ken is the nicest, coolest, youngest experimental film/video artist, and he is also one of the best!  So one of my friends posed my question to him, "Jen wants to know why no one is writing about experimental cinema!"  And Ken looked at me with all of his handsome charisma, and he said this:

"If you want to see writing on experimental cinema, you're going to have to do it yourself!  And be out there! 

Write!!!"

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Let me just get to the point.  There are a growing number of writers who are addressing experimental cinema, but yet the 50 or so experimental film/video artists that I love are not represented in print or even on blogs, if we don't count my little blog.  Yes, Jonas Mekas is somewhat known, Stan Brakhage in certain circles, Ken for people in the know, but this world I've participated in for the past 7 years is essentially missing in the media. 

So my big revelation is this:  Contemporary experimental cinema (from NY & other locations) should be documented & recognized in the media!

Really obvious, right?  Well, I had every excuse for why this omission was okay, from considering that perhaps it was better for me personally that this little avant-garde family remain underground, to being fearful that if the film critics initiated more writing on the subject, that it would be disparaging.  I had the excuse that the war and all the brutality of the world made the documentation of experimental cinema irrelevant.  And a rationale so selfish as to wonder if I would approve of the film critics style of writing!  I still struggle with this.  :)  Anyway, these are all excuses. 

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I will give you an analogy:

Let's say that the engineers at STScI were able to create the Hubble Space Telescope with their own incomes.  (Yeah, right!)  Okay, let's say that they launched Hubble and when the first photos came back from the earliest, youngest reaches of the universe, that no scientific media would publish & recognize the photos.  Think about that . . .

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Experimental Cinema absolutely should be documented and recognized in the culture, because if not, the knowledge will be lost.  I curated the most beautiful cinema programs for 5 years, and they were never addressed in the Village Voice, a newspaper only a few blocks away from the screenings.  It's personal!

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So I know that I've been all heavy here, and that you want for me to find the humor in this situation, but honestly, I don't find it amusing at all.  If anything, I think it's just bizarre.  I live in Brooklyn!  In the media capital of the world!  With the most fantastic film/video artists in the universe!  & the NY media is erasing the A.G. cinema?!

Look I'm not going to sweep in Jonas Mekas style and become a one person PR agency, there is too much cinema to write about, even if I wanted to.  I'll do what I can in a way that I find creatively interesting and true to myself as a person.  I wonder if experimental cinema will become like the early Greek poems created by Homer, passed down from person to person, until some future generation finally comes along to see how ahead of our time we really are!

xoxo

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This image is from Sheri Wills's papermedia series, Efflorvescent. Her photogram films are some of my favorites! 

The Close-Up: Under the Microscope!

The House Next Door, Close-Up Blog-a-thon, Oct. 12 - Oct. 21

The first thing to do when focusing a microscope is to bring the lens down as close to the specimen as possible without touching it.  Then proceed to focus the image.  Everything you will see afterward, from varying angles of vision, will be sharp.  The zoom lens of a camera works the same way, except that the camera must be positioned at least three feet away from the subject, or the image will be distorted.  Without the close-up, you would never have the long shot . . . The close-up always has the potential to surprise, reveal, transform, turn the world upside down, and at times even devastate me!  Why is the close-up so imperative and what gives it such power?  What makes it so different from a long shot?

When we respond to a long shot, we are primarily responding to the movement of the camera through space and time.  Do I think that the long shot is sexy?  Of course.  It's all good.  But I think that the close-up is radical. I think that it derives its impact from the distortion of how we perceive time and space, and I will attempt to prove it!

I will be referring to a particular paper from Scientific American, Sept. 2002, "That Mysterious Flow" by Paul Davies for the following conclusions.  You can download the PDF on-line here. 

Okay, so according to contemporary physics, the passing of time is probably an illusion. We can prove this statement simply using evidence of Einstein's special theory of relativity, where it has been shown that the measuring of the present moment is subjective.  (Don't make me use the space-ship analogy!)  Also, it may seem counter-intuitive, but time doesn't flow.  According to the second law of thermodynamics, events are defined by different levels of entropy, an irreversible physical process (i.e. drop an egg on the floor & watch it shatter, there is no physical law of nature that defines the reversal of this process.)  We can summarize these ideas from the article simply as follows:

"After all, we do not really observe the passage of time.  What we actually observe is that later states of the world differ from earlier states that we still remember.  The fact that we remember the past, rather than the future, is an observation not of the passage of time but of the asymmetry of time."

What does this have to do with cinema?  Physicists believe that time and space exist together on a timescape, analogous to a landscape.  This is a very revolutionary concept!  Time & space are not separate.  When the camera is zoomed in to a close-up of a person's face or of the petals of a flower, for example, space is dramatically reconfigured.  And consequently, so is time.  How do we measure time in the glances and expressions of a baby for example?  Time and space become dramatically redefined into what I like to consider the poetic universe -- the invisible world.  When I see a close-up, often time seems to stop.  While that may not actually be true, my perception of time is certainly distorted.  And I have the potential to see something radically new!

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The close-up?  It's personal!  This year I discovered the poet, Rumi, and his writing has been earth shattering for me!  All of these ideas of perceiving the visible and invisible worlds are woven through his work.  I like this expression so much right now:

"If you want what visible
reality can give,
you're an employee.

If you want the unseen world,
you're not living your truth."

-Rumi

So true.  It's so hard to be torn between them, but Rumi seems to suggest that these worlds are united from some (okay don't laugh) . . . greater love.  The close-up is not unique to cinema.  The close-up belongs to everyone.  And I prefer to think that the close-up is seeing with the heart, seeing with the eye of the soul . . .

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"Remember, the looking itself is a trace of what we're looking for."

-Rumi

Black and White Trypps Number Three by Ben Russell

A tiny blog document,10/7/07:  Ben Russell, where have you been all my life?  I've been waiting for this film!  I've heard rumblings of your collaboration with Lightning Bolt.  My friend, T., ventured alone out to a dark, unknown location in Bushwick(?).  He told me about this, oh yeah, blood circulates through the veins of the underground.  This work reminds me of the Zanzibar films, early Philippe Garrel, the figures lit up against the black night, the beautiful losers I love so much.  And the saints and poets of El Greco . . .

(top photo):  from Black and White Trypps Number Three by Ben Russell (2007) 16mm

(bottom photo): el Caballero de la mano al pecho by El Greco (1584)

Black and White Trypps Number Three by Ben Russell (2007), From the Canyon to the Stars, NYFF, Oct. 6, 2007

Observando el Cielo by Jeanne Liotta

A tiny blog document, 10/6/07:  Observando el Cielo by Jeanne Liotta is a masterpiece!  I see this film when I look at you . . .