Page 66 - Studio International - November December 1975

will not be understood easily. What are the specific filmic unconscious of, how is the receiver expected to
codes ? That is the question of Kernkodifikate. understand ? As dodecaphonist and serial music used a
Obviously you must not bring these with you into the method of coding intelligible structures, which nobody
cinema, but learn from the film itself. Like chess, where had foreseen as tone systems, the relationship between
the moves seem nonsensical if you do not know the musician and hearer, score and performance collapsed —
rules. So the prime signs and axioms of film (the basis of especially in electronic music where the structures on
operation) are filmstrip, camera, projector, signs, paper are often very different from the structures
patterns, etc, from which the language of film (deduction perceived by the ear. The anagrammatic faculty of
and transformation rules) is devised. Kernkodifikate, language (a problem which the founder of modern
probably lasting about three hours, will be an investigation linguistics could not solve) ie to discover words within
of the codes of cinema in three parts : eg 'Möbius strip', words, sense within sense, is just as much of a
after the Möbius paradox, a projector installation piece; limitation for theories of filmic articulation built on musical
'geometric films', about 10 copies of 1 strip laid together scores, frame films etc8, because it can happen that the
as an area on which patterns are drawn and transformed relationship of meaning to image breaks down, that the
in time sequences ; and 'w-games', visual score of meaning is not at all congruent with the
communication after structures of modal logic. Each 'performed' meaning—which means that, unlike music,
person as a possible world and communication as the the effect of a film is different in different minds, and
transfer between possible worlds : this is the possible sometimes produces no response at all.
combination of images. Shot from several perspectives
with several cameras simultaneously, he tackles the
frame as the frozen concept of image because such a
concept seems to him to hide the problem of meaning
between the frames.

AFFAIRS OF ART
What is the danger of films which are too close to music ?
That they encounter the problems of the dodecaphonists
and of musique concrete or music generally. Cage was
dissatisfied because music was becoming too 1 1951-64. Curt Stenvert and Wolfgang Kudrnofsky made The Raven
instructive through the incongruity between the score (1951) after E. A. Poe. Vesely made Und die Kinder spielen so gerne
Soldaten after In der Strafkolonie by Franz Kafka. In 1963 Adrian 1
and the performance. He dissolved this incongruity by
finished his first film Black Movie. The other film by Stenvert is Flucht
chance composition —an easy way, but the problems ins Schiff (1953). Vesely's other experimental films are 1 An diesen
remain. Music is a language of tones without Abenden (16mm) after the poem Die Magd by Georg Trakl : a very
denotation, but —as Baudelaire remarked—it has similar expressionistic story of the seduction of a maid, with time dilations and
segmentations which he exploited later in his Nicht mehr fliehen (35mm)
effects in different minds. Concrete music uses sounds
1955, and his long film Brot dean:Men Jahre,1962 — a technique similar
with denotation (the whistle of a locomotive, the noise to Mosaik im Vertrauen, 1955, and Resnais' Marienbad.
of a broken glass). The paradox of concrete music is Marc Adrian's films are mostly abstract op art/concrete poetry films,
just this : not to use tones but sounds. These sounds sometimes computer made :
Film: (all 35mm, sound)
should not, however, refer to their source : they are 1957-63 black movie, colour, 198 Sec.
treated as tones, they should be tones, they are used as 1963
random, bw, 285 Sec.
tones in a musical composition (not as sounds in a 1962-64 orange, bw, 198 Sec.
go, bw, 143 Sec.
narration). The same applies to film : images are used 1964
text 1, bw, 154 Sec.
that refer to outside objects, but the reference should not
text 2, bw 220 Sec.
be apparent, they will be treated as abstract 1965
mund, bw, 320 Sec.
elements in the filmic composition. Kubelka, for ich, bw, 100 Sec.
example, used representative images in Adebar and 1958-68 total, bw, 924 Sec.
1969-70 blue movie, colour, ca. 650 Sec.
Schwechater, but by repetition, negative images, frozen
1971
theoria,16mm, colour, sound, 35 min.
stills and other musical techniques he almost eliminated For Kren's Filmography vide the article by Le Grice.
these references and used the images as abstract Kubelka's Filmography :
elements in an absolute film. In Rainer he had no 1954-55 Mosaik im Vertrauen (Mosaic in Confidence), bw-
colour, sound, 161- minutes.
representative image at all, and this film therefore has a
1957 Adebar, bw, sound, 1½ minutes.
complete score and is his most musical (structured). 1958
Schwechater, black, white Et red, two sounds, 1 minute.
But film images do have references, and they are 1958-60 Arnulf Rainer, black and white frames, black and white
unavoidable. You have total freedom only in the sound, 6½ minutes.
1961-66 Unsere Afrikareise (our Trip to Africa), colour, sound,
interval between two frames : you can choose the frame
12½ minutes.
collision and impose the meaning you want. The 2Schmidt finished his first film, Steine, in 1965 (16mm, bw, sound,
paradox of concrete music is the limit — it seems to me — 30 min) but started his first film, P.R.A.T.E.R., in 1963, finished 1966
for film as musical score, because film language exists (16mm, bw, colour, 21 min). Scheugl's last film was made in 1968.
Weibel started film-making in 1965 with 8mm, and showed his last film
(unlike music) in a double embodiment, in phone and in 1971. Kren left Austria in 1971. The Kuratorium collapsed in 1971.
logos, in sound/image and sense. But as phonetic poetry Vide the books of Josef Schillinger (1895-1943) : The Schillinger
has shown, the limits are very far away, where you System of Musical Composition (New York, 1946) and The
lose the sense. E. Benveniste illuminated the paradoxical Mathematical Basis of Arts (New York, 1948). These books had a
considerable influence on the musical avant-garde of the early fifties.
character of the signs by saying 'that the morphemes, Some chapter titles reveal a similarity of approach in some structural
elements of meaning, are constructed of phonemes, films:
elements of articulation without meaning'.6 In this 'Engineering v. Spontaneous Creation'
contradictory shift from meaninglessness to meaning, is 'Definition of an Art Product by the Method of Series'
'Time as a General Parameter'
the frame interval an escapist exit ? 'Series of Values'
The dodecaphonic composers were intrigued by the 'Permutation'
reproach that the ear could not grasp the structure : the 'Mechanical Scheme for the Permutation of Tone Elements'
score, the form on the paper, did not correspond to the 'Composition of Density'
etc.
performance, the received opus. The solution is not to
He also recommended summations in series after Fibonacci 1
learn by heart. It's more problematic than that. If you 1,2,3,5,8,13,21 ...or 1, 3, 4, 7, 11, 18...
learn a poem by heart you do not learn its structure. Vien. Bildkompendium wiener aktionismus und film, p.301.
Even worse, it seems that Baudelaire did not even know 5 'Peter Kubelka filmt Arnulf Rainer', Die Schastrommel 11, Berlin,
the structures which Levi-Strauss and Roman December 1973, editor Guenter Brus. 6
6E. Benveniste, 'Communication animate et langage humain', Diogene 1,
Jakobson discovered in his poem 'Les chats.' Saussure 7 Paris 1952.
also discovered that the old (Latin, Greek, German) 7 Jean Starobinski, 'Les mots sous les mots: Les anagrammes de F. de
poems and poetics made abundant use of anagrams, but Saussure', Gallimard, Paris 1971.
8 Maybe I have stressed the relationship between Kubelka and Webern
that the poets themselves did not talk of them, nor could
too much. Partly because it has never been hinted at anywhere else, partly
he prove that the poets had been conscious of these to emphasize the problems of articulation in film. Despite my arguments
anagrams. If there are structures that even the creator is it must be to Kubelka's credit that these problems have been raised at all.
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