Friday, April 5, 2013

I recommend this screening in Orion today, if you missed the first one on Tuesday. It belongs to the series Cinéma Deleuze, curated by me and Janne Vanhanen...
http://www.kava.fi/esitys/cinema-deleuze-avantgarde/7248.

Some info about the films and their directors:

Wavelength (1967) by Michael Snow, Color, 16mm, 45 mins

Michael Snow’s film Wavelength (1967) remains one of the most influential points
in world cinematography. One of the most common mistakes made while describing
this work to an uninformed individual is made when Wavelength is referred to as
“a single zoom shot for forty minutes”. This continuity is in fact achieved
through the editing process, which is an important composing part and deserves
a deeper discussion later in this essay. Michael Snow created a landmark film
that is far from simple.

Wavelength is a forty-five minute long film, which sees a consequential
progression from a long shot of an interior space –an almost empty room, to an
extreme close-up of an image of waves. Throughout the film the image undergoes
rapid colour and exposure changes, suggesting different times of the day and
use of various types of developing stock. A loose narrative is also present
seeing two women supposedly moving into the flat, and a male figure falling
dead. Some of the plot is told through the sound, which also acts as a divide
between the exterior and the interior space, accumulating the viewers’
attention on one of the other plane for some period of time within the film.
(Olga Koroleva)

Biography:
Michael James Aleck Snow (1929- ) is a Canadian painter, sculptor, filmmaker,
photographer and musician. Between 1961 and 1967, mostly while living in New
York, Snow produced work in the Pop-art mode based on the silhouette of a young
woman, entitled Walking Woman. A series of 11 stainless steel sculptures of the
image was created for the Ontario pavilion at Expo 67. After moving to New York
in 1964, he made films regarded as minimalist and structural, such as New York
Ear and Eye Control (1964) and Wavelength (1966-67). His work is concerned with
the nature of media themselves, with perception and with the interrelation of
language, sound and meaning. Snow has been the subject of exhibitions and
retrospectives in Toronto, Vancouver and Paris.

Diploteratology Or Bardo Follies by Owen Land  USA, 1967, 7 minutes
Colour, Silent, 16mm

A loop-printed image of a water flotilla carrying a woman is manipulated by
editing, burning, and slow-motion rephotography to create an abstract essay on
the pursuit of the "pure light" from the follies of daily life.

A paraphrasing of certain sections of the Bardo Thodal (Tibetan Book of the
Dead) in motion picture terms. Not to be confused with other films which have
done the same thing in dramatic or literary terms via motion pictures.
This is an analogical film, and in order to understand it one must be acquainted
with the process by which it was made. An image was selected, in this case the
image of a woman hired to be part of the display at an amusement park waving to
a passing boat filled with tourists. One of the tourists is filming her with a
'home movie' camera. Frames from this image were then heated in a specially
modified projector, projected and refilmed. The melting of the film engenders
all of the subsequent 'images'. The analogy is between this process and basic
operating procedures of the system of which we are all a part, sometimes called
'creation'; the suggestion is that death (the destruction of the initial image)
is not an end but merely the next stage. perhaps the amusement park scene is
only a preparation for its transformation into the 'diploteratological' (a word
meaning a monster with two heads or other bodily parts which it would normally
only have one of) images. There are three main types of 'abstract' images:
macrocosmic, suggesting planets; visionary, suggesting mythical battle scenes;
and microcosmic, suggesting cellular structures. - G.L.

George Landow´s aka Owen Land´s obituary from The Guardian:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2011/aug/28/george-landow-obituary

Springity-spring to all,

Kari

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