Page 69 - Studio International - March April 1975

interacts with the variables of the with his actual intention, which wheel barrows-and-skeletons-of-
filming situation. A synthesis thus in fact was (as per tautology) deserted-warehouses-land, the
results which is a result of these perfectly adequately realized, film functions as a mask for what
two elements, and which was since it was realized at all. is essentially a horror story, a tale
arrived at during the course of the There are shots of various stills of alienated loneliness, bicycle
film. set on an easel. The images standing dead-centre frame (mid-
The intention in this film was to (prints) are rather large, ie large distance), some old rags hanging
enough to fit on an easel, large from the fender blowing (like
mounted photographic prints. puffballs), in the wind. The
Something (vertical) slightly cameraman is the deserted 1 to r i Roger 011erhead, Mike
blurred mid-distance intervenes fragment of humanity, absent Henley, Birgit Hein
between the camera tense and the from the representation but
prints. The pictures are placed on forcefully present as imaginary
the easel mostly sideways, referent, quite clearly there as well.
necessitating a reading through The film is a traditional story of
difficulty (at the same time hypnotic, isolated, heat-ridden
forcing the beginnings of a desperation. But it is, as
reading rather than an imagistic, mentioned, masked. People kept
abstract or transparently calling it 'that Wavelength film'
illusionistic identification). The because of the soundtrack's
image (signifier, whatever) similarity to the former's, and
becomes primarily object, dense: because the forty-five minute film I to r: Mike Dunford, Anna
Ambrose, Simon Hartog, Sally
presenting its denseness. takes a slow zoom from described Gidal
Into that setup, a black and wide-angle to full close-up on a
white sequence of a dead hare (or light-bulb slightly behind and
photographs of a dead hare, or an above the centre-frame bicycle.
immobile one) is cut. The camera The light becomes sharp-edged
frame moves around the outlines as the f/stop is closed down;
of the animal and breaks the becomes blurry as the f/stop is
integrity of the representation, and opened up; there are
a representation at that in which superimpositions of negative on
the dominant inscription is one of positive, creating momentary bas-
illegibility further obscured by - relief. There are also negative
the insertion of a person shots pure and simple, wherein I to r: Sally Gidal, Steve Dwoskin,
Mary Dickinson
apparently taking stills of each the distant (and less and less
successive enlargement on the distant) light source is in material
easel. The personal intrusion in presence a flat black spot of
each shot, the blacking out of radiating "light". The film does
Martha Haslanger image beyond, is, though, a not work with such technical
Syntax somewhat fatuous rhetorical functions as synchronity,
deal with the act or intention to device after Warhol's usage in, for relations between neg and pos in
initiate a film, the prior structure example, Couch and Chelsea Girls terms of the materialized time
for filming was limited to a simple and tends in fact, to be a disjunction, etc. The film as potent
time base, the distortion of this as commentary which, signifier, potent signified. Post-
a result of other factors renders unfortunately, re-introduces Hiroshima. Blinding hypnosis. I to r: Mary Dickinson, Dore 0,
the process as well as the elements "adequate documentation" as a But because of its grandiose scale, Werner Nekes, Alan Power,
involved perceptible." seemingly viable concept, its persistent slow zoom, its Wilhelm Hein
Dunford's notes are presented masking the illusionist ideology concentration on a narrow range
here as representative, in fact, for underlying it. of effects and operations, it takes
the kind of notes the catalogue The difficulty in writing on the on a clarity at least that separates
maintained, and also for the way film is based on one viewing in it from the quasi-surrealist
in which current film-making an admittedly less than optimal meanderings of the other films
seems to be rooted in an situation. Also, the film stood out at the festival, which were still
unawareness of the instantiating so strongly against the other held down by the Belgian
of a documentariness which is mediocrities, but it is no abjectly surrealist view of the late 'forties.
upon examination the setting up insecure apologia to maintain that It comes to mind that the
of the pseudo-documentary, the I am not sure whether on its own reason so many mediocre
illusionist documentary wherein or in a good programme of film phantasies were taken into this I to r: Mike Dunford, John Du Cane,
Peter Gidal
film (experimental or otherwise) the work would stand up to the festival is precisely that the
poses as the adequate analysis given. This is a problem selection jury's categories of implications (as they are called) of
representation of an object or not so much of over-reading a criteria, even those present since the surrealist order.
experience: film becomes the work, as of suspending rigidity (for 1949, has always been the The flicker at the end of
window to life, and whether filmic example when one speak of surrealist shock aesthetic, and Alchemy takes the film into
process or love story amounts Gertrud in anti-illusionist terms, that American underground and empty screen, pure brightness of
formally to a parallel transparency as if the diegesis were not `personal, poetic cinema' flickering projector light. But in
which if not thought and presented overdetermining, or worse still, happened, in the fifties and early fact, we have a loaded signification
clearly as the theoretical when the bourgeois critics speak sixties, to fit this conception, for transcendence, for precisely
problematic threatens to take the of Welles in terms of technique through precisely this misreading the supposed "alchemy" of the
current English avant garde into a presented rather than techniques of, for example, Jack Smith, mind in its transition from
dangerously retrograde and used, subservient to the narrative Stan Brakhage, Gregory materiality to spirituality. The
ideologically reactionary position. as constituted; in fact, Markopoulos, not to mention catharsis of this high-pitched
The misreading of non-narrative constituting it.) It amounts to Maya Deren and Kenneth drone in conjunction with (i.e.
cinema, a substitution into attempted assimilation of Anger. Thus, the American films false naturalisation of) the
"unfolding of process", with the retrograde work to advanced at that time which made Knokke blinkering flashes of light is the
representation transpiring along contexts. seem advanced, slipped into a gap retrograde, aristotelian theatre all
the routes of documentary The film Leica Job has loose in knowledge. The films were a over again. The film is thoroughly
cinema, belies the existence of the ends, quite arbitrary choices for simulacrum. Wavelength, then, retrograde, and it is only
film itself as procedure, as the images selected (arbitrary because of its incredible shock at unfortunate that such a strong
transformational dialectic present. within the framework of the film; the time, also easily fitted into film does not work in an
One of the most interesting I am not positing some formalist this essential misreading, and led aesthetic that is ideologically
films at the festival was out of `rightness' in the abstract). The even to a totally unified final productive of anti-illusionist
competition Leica Job by film, to me, presages, if its selection jury giving it the grand materialism, instead of
Diego Cortez, twelve-minutes, problematic is followed up, prize. All this is not to say that no obfuscation and expressionistic
silent. I couldn't quite understand interesting work. surrealisme are detectable in any story in its simplest (though
Cortez's notes of intention, Another work which merits of the above-mentioned films, but somewhat masked) form.
perhaps the discrepancy is based some interest is Alchemy by their thrust (for want of a more One last example: an interesting
on his intention not being Tsuneo Nakai. With a droning adequate word) was certainly not film which received no kudos
realized, or merely his verbalized soundtrack and a longshot fairly dominantly in that direction nor from the jury at all, Syntax by
intention not being consistent wide angle out in the ghosts-of- were their philosophical Martha Haslanger. A twelve-
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