Aldo Tambellini. A Cosmic Community
By Helena Girón and Samuel Delgado

Aldo Tambellini performed his first “Electromedia” performances with the Group Center, formed with his partner Elsa Tambellini, Ron Hanhe and Ben Morea (founder of Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers! A group that defined themselves as a street band with analysis). They sought in them a continuous change and expansion handling some of the concepts that are present in Tambellini’s work. Black, Black 2, Black Round, Black Zero (the best known) and other performances would begin to establish some foundation of his work like the conception of black as a nexus between cosmos and racial segregation – a subject that Sun Ra and Afrofuturism had also dealt with from other sides-. They also carried out various actions aimed at those institutions that hijacked art and creativity by reserving it for a small elite.

CREDO: We believe that the artistic community has reached a new stage of development. In a mobile society, it is no longer sufficient for the creative individual to remain in isolation. We feel the hunger of a society lost in its own vacuum and rise with an open active commitment to forward a new spirit for mankind. Creation is not the commodity of a status seeking class. Creation is the vital energy of society. We believe that the ‘our system’ is an enormous dinosaur extinguishing at a fantastic rate which opposes truth and freedom and that it has squeezed out of man the essential vitality which made him part of the human race. For that reason, “Group Center” consciously and intentionally chose to become a counter-culture, underground group trying to find ways to change and impact that harsh closed-in system.
Credo. Group Center, 1962.

Their activity would be brief but intense, and their spirit would continue alive in the space created in 1967 by Aldo Tambellini and Otto Piene on the top floor of The Gate Theater. They would call it the Black Gate and its origin would be the same as that of universe: first darkness, then light. At its inauguration, Tambellini’s Blackout would be followed by Otto Piene’s Proliferation of the Sun. Its doors were open. Fifty years later we will be able to go through them again thanks to a filming made by Aldo the day of its opening and, once inside the Black Gate, we will have the opportunity to enjoy the experience of Moondial.

“We are the primitives of a new era […] the rebellion is against man as an exploded economic commodity man as an exploited economic commodity man as a specialized entity we have witnessed the explosion of the Black man and the apathy of the artists […] the concept of art has disappeared electromedia is our era we must get to the heart of the medium to its tube its filament its energy we must produce visions from the stuff which media are made of it is”.
Black Gate, Aldo Tambellini and Otto Piene statement.

Cécile Fontaine
Commented Filmography

Super 8 movies made in Boston between 1982 and 1986
Traditional Montage
MOUVEMENT NUMÉRO 1 (danseurs et mariage) – MOUVEMENT NUMÉRO 2 (train et statue) – MOUVEMENT NUMÉRO 3 (TV crew et neige rouge)
I consider my first movies small tests, experiments. At first I took my camera in my bag every day, and so I filmed numerous super 8 reels without thinking too much, colleting images that later I would use during my first tests of montage. In my first movies you can see that I have never left a reel untouched, and that they are the result of a rather exhaustive assembly of pieces extracted from different reels, the same sources can be used in several films (as in Mouvement 1, 2 and 3).

Non-traditional montage; Transfer and emulsion collage (1984-86)
CHURCH – ARBRE DIAGONAL
One day, I saw in Vertov’s Man with a movie camera a woman cutting a movie with big scissors. This, or so, gave me the idea to use them to cut the film in a different way than the splicer, which cuts through the line of the frame. I then cut diagonally, and at the same time, two films of trees that I had filmed, and then I reconstructed the film strip replacing the images on the right of the diagonal cut of the first film by the ones of the second one and vice versa. Therefore, you are do not have to use the splicer – because the splicer is a limit. It happens the same with the camera and the lens; without the lens, you can do something else.

A COLOR SOUND PICTURE – A COLOR MOVIE
A movie combining segments mechanically recorded by the camera and manually produced segments with instruments outside the kinematic domains and taken from other visual arts (engraving, painting, collage). The film is composed of a long sequence of overexposed self-portrait taken through a reflecting and deforming crystal, and intersected by several independent sections that are like sketches. The experiment aims to show the physical and cinematographic characteristics of the film, regardless of the conventions of the medium, through incision, tear, burn, perforation, collage, painting and engraving. These procedures, discovered by accident and voluntarily repeated during the handling and montage of the film, play with the great flexibility of the non-precut adhesive tape splicer, which allows the film to be rebuilt back to its original state after being separated in two longitudinally, or overlapping pieces of film, or gluing external elements (such as colored plastics) to create particular effects.

L’ATELIER DE PEINTURE
A movie entirely bleached and then manipulated by adding -on the new surface- colored plastic pieces (red and blue), emulsion pieces removed from the surface of another film; overlapping other film elements (35mm slides) cut in super 8 format, or segments of underexposed and striped films to reveal the layers of color that make up the film. All these techniques aim to recreate the color palette and textures of the painting using only the physical elements of the film.

LA CHAMBRE VERTE
A movie entirely bleached and then manipulated by adding parts of words, printed images and pieces of film images removed from their plastic strip. The game of vertical movements (produced by discoloration) and horizontal (created while shooting) accelerates the timing of the film and reveals the physical continuity instead of offering us the illusion of a normal movement by means of the shooting at a rate of 18 frames per second (by vertical movement); the horizontal movement counteracts this directionality from the bottom up.
The non-uniform discoloration of the ektachrome film partially reveals its chemical composition (the first in its pure, yellow form, the second in its compound, green form due to the blending of blue and yellow, the third layer, magenta, disappears when contancting bleach). The absence of history and the absence of sound respond to my personal conception of the film as a transparent object that filters the light of the projector creating motifs and colors to be seen as moving plastic objects, without any precise reference to the real world, but to the physical reality of the film itself.

Transfer Montage
SANS TITRE, MAI 1988 (1988)
This film consists of home movies filmed by my father in the sixties, except the communion and the building collapse. These images were erased irregularly using bleach, and then embedded by sticking fragments of emulsion removed from different sequences, thus leading -in the final montage- to a slow parade (sometimes literally represented), and to a transformation towards destruction and death. We thus go from a virgin nature to a nature plundered by man. The same happens with human beings: from communicants to old war veterans, from birth to annihilation. A show for passive extras.

HISTOIRES PARALLÈLES (1990) – JAPON SERIES (1991) – SUNDAY (1993) – LA PÊCHE MIRACULEUSE (1995) – SAFARI LAND (1996) – LION LIGHT (1996) – SILVER RUSH (1998)
This movie, like the rest of my films in 16mm, has been composed of multiple sequences of found footage or films given by friends who know my way to “build” films radically transforming their appearance (texture, color, content), chemically and manually. Images from all kinds of sources (documentaries, fiction, publicity, news, family films, amateur films) are re-elaborated removing or partially erasing the emulsion, which is then moved and (or) reconstructed using adhesive tape, without using the optical printer. Silver Rush, following that process, is a real stampede of sequences composed of rushes from various sources (fiction, documentary, publicity), representations of hunts of all kinds, in the mythical scenery of the American western.

Inteview with Stephen Broomer
Potamkin: Death of a Poet

An interview with Stephen Broomer, celebrating the premiere of his latest film, Potamkin, in a A Coruña.

Why did you decide to devote a film to Harry Potamkin? I guess that to undertake a task like this you should be very emotionally linked to this figure.
Harry Alan Potamkin is a figure I first encountered through the poem of Kenneth Rexroth, who talked about Potamkin as a poet who had been wounded deeply by society, who had died under really tragic circumstances and who was only dimly remembered for his contributions to film criticism and not so much for the power of his poetry. I am very interested in Potamkin as a poet, but I came to him through Rexroth, and I came to Rexroth’s writings on Potamkin through my friend Bruce Elder who often teaches courses that end with him reading two poems of Rexroth for Eli Jacobson both of which are about the impulse of society to destroy poets. That is sort of the seed of my interest for Potamkin. As I read and as I searched out and found Potamkin’s poetry, with a lot of help from two people, Cameron Moneo and Mónica Savirón, I was very struck by the power of the poems, but also by the bizarre transit in them from a kind of Ezra Pound modernism to a kind of Mike Gold socialism. There are poems of Potamkin that could be collected under the title A Marxist Garden of Well Meaning Verse, they are really kind of hollowed out poems on social justice. So the idea that he sort of transitioned from the dense broken tone of early 20th century imagism and a kind of explicit politic interested me. I was not sympathetic to all his politics at all, I think that his beliefs actually drove a lot of his despair, rage and things I am sure influenced his demise, out of outrage and passion for his fellowmen. But the idea of that these two things coexisted interested me, and that’s how you get the film that is pitched, I think, between a humanist impulse to calling out acts of brutality and war and the dense fractured and ambiguous compositions of modern art.

How did you come out with the idea of making a film on Potamkin like that?
Actually, a lot of this comes from the failure of an earlier project that I hope to go back to. I was at one point trying to make a kind of film biography like this about a Canadian artist named Sam Perry who had been an incredible live show maker, he had this psychedelic light show in the 60s and I wanted to make a film that was sort of in his style, but his own films have all been destroyed, so we can only go with what has been said about them to simulate them. That project was never able to get finished because of funding and costs, so I am hoping to go back to it. But this idea of film biography which is like in the voice of the subject it’s actually a weird Canadian tradition. The lyric critic Hugh Kenner used to write books in the style of his subject, so he wrote The Pound Era that reads kind like an Ezra Pound writing about Ezra Pound. This kind of approach is kind of like a distinctively strange stream of Canadian criticism. So when I started thinking how to represent someone who hadn’t made images but someone who was so tied to images I thought “If I, without any mind of his qualitative judgment of these films, if I just gathered up every existing film that he had written on than I can access and I use them as a base for this film, I tamper them I destroy them and so on, them maybe what I can get to is to something like a kind of eruption of consciousness, maybe I can make something like a singing out to death”. That’s what brought me to this material, some of it are films that were important to him and his aesthetic ideas: The Passion of Joan of Arc, Battleship Potemkin, and many soviet films. But there are also there some film that he would had find quite objectionable, Hollywood films, melodramas that didn’t do much more than repeat Victorian moralist structures and one of the things I am doing here is straining those films and putting them in this kind of odd montage. The film relationship to montage is not really Eisenstenian montage or anything like that, it’s not really Pudovkin, Kuleshov, but there is this exchange of images and how they build that is rooted in the philosophy of montage in the way that this Hollywood cinema could have been. That’s how I started working in the images.

Can you talk about the physical process of working with the images?
I’m sure this will be controversial for the media specificity crowd: I gathered all the materials in video. That doesn’t bother me because where would I was to seen Battleship Potemkin no on VHS when I was growing up, and many of these films part of this is also my experience. I gathered all the videos that I could, and I selected compositions that were interesting to me or that would resonate with events in Potamkin’s life: for instance, he was kicked out of university for failing to pass a mandatory swimming test, so there is a lot of drowning imagery in the film. This is a man who died of drowning in his own fluids so there’s a lot of resonances on that too. So once I put those together I rephotographed them to 16mm and then I hand processed them with the bucket method, just going from developer to fix and having produced a negative or reversal image I could see whether it turned out and also that parted down the material I was working with, because at this point I had rephotographed about four hours of material. Then I started using a number of processes on that image, one of which was to use household bleach to soften the image, and then use a steel wool to strip part of the images selectively. Another was to use tape as a stop, so you take tape and the you lay it in the emulsion side of an image and then you put it overnight in household bleach and when you take it out you peel off the tape and wherever the tape was the image is preserved and everywhere else has disappeared. Another thing was to work with a type of photographic bleach called mordançage solution which is made by combining glacial acetic acid, hydrogen peroxide and copper chloride which are very unpleasant things to work with to say the least. When you leave an image in this material the emulsion peels up at its edges, has this effective veiling, and you see this is the main technique in the film where you have emulsion that peel up partially and it seems also as like tearing pages out of a book or something. That is a technique that has been used by, I would imagine, Jürgen Reble, Phil Solomon, Eva Kolcze and so on, and that I only have used a few times before in films like Jenny Haniver, and never with this falling in love with material.

Could you tell us about the soundtrack of the film? It is very intense and it has an influence in the impact of the film.
The soundtrack is made by my father. He was a free jazz musician, free jazz experimental music in the 60s, 70s and the 80s and to the present not as active, and he studied electronic music. He is also a writer on improvisational music, and he had previously made the soundtrack of a film of mine, Variations of a Theme by Michael Snow, in which he used Morse code patterns to create distortions and polyphony. This soundtrack is structured in two parts as the film, that is structured in two reels. The soundtrack of the first reel you have a lot of sub base tones creating distortion and drones but against that you have this penetrating M.R.A. sound, the sound of an M.R.A. machine that is giving you these call and response rhythmic patterns. This culminates in the appearance of Skip James song “Hard Time Killing Floor” which hasn’t been treated that much but which plays against this other sounds in a kind of spooky way. And then in the second half of the film the soundtrack is composed by many of the same elements but they are being brought way down. You have Tibetan chants, chakra balls, and bells and at different points of the second part they would play in backwards, because one of the central gestures of Potamkin is that eventually all of this horror is sort of undoing itself and moving in reverse, so that the sound mirrors the picture in that way.

Layers and Lattices: the Super 8 films of Helga Fanderl
By Nicky Hamlyn

Here you can read the beginning of Nicky Hamlyn’s text on Helga Falderl. You can read the complete text here.

Helga Fanderl is one of a very small number of filmmakers making serious formal innovations with Super 8(1). She came to filmmaking after studying European literature, having wanted to be a poet, but found writing a difficult and uncongenial medium. She was introduced to film in the mid 1980s through a Super 8 workshop in Frankfurt, organised by Urs Breitenstein, a former pupil of Peter Kubelka. She went on to study with Kubelka, informally at first, then formally at the Frankfurt Städelschule. She subsequently studied at Cooper Union in New York with Robert Breer. Since the mid 1980s she has completed over six hundred short films. Most of them consist of a single roll of Super 8, lasting around three minutes, but many are shorter, and some but a single shot of a few seconds duration. In Fanderl’s work a number of contrasting elements; formal, spatial, colouristic, graphic and performative, co-exist in productive tension with each other, often pulling one’s attention in opposing directions. Equally, Fanderl will change the conceptual register within a single film by a shift of strategy. This is achieved by, for example, foregrounding graphic connections over representational stability, or reducing information to allow the kinetic to override illusory space. The films thereby create a self-consciously active spectator, for what, at first glance, appear to be straightforwardly observational films. In an important sense they are, of course, observational, since each one strongly conveys the genius loci in which it is made, but the demands the films make are untypical of those made (or not made) by conventional documentaries. Humans and animals are very important for the way in which they inform the formal strategies and eventual structures of these scenarios. The films may be grouped according to some recurring themes and approaches; those that explore reflections, usually in water; black and white films; and a third grouping that have grids, or lattices, in common. The films in this last group often involve a strong performative element, such that the familiar characterisations of grids as predetermining, rectilinear, fixed forms are reconceived. The earliest films were constructed in a more conventionally edited manner, but Fanderl soon found this way of working difficult and constraining. The difficulties were partly technical-practical, in that the tiny size of Super 8 makes editing shots, especially the short shots she wanted to work with, cumbersome. The cuts are also highly visible which makes it difficult to control the effects of montage. In a positive sense, in-camera construction allowed Fanderl to: “concentrate and dip into the flow of time, filming so to say time and events that happen in time, searching for the “gesture” that could integrate the complexity of everything that happens in the “here and now” when I film and for the expression of the reciprocity between what is happening in me and outside of me”

Hence, almost all her films are edited in-camera, so there is no post-production: mistakes are accepted, although in this context they are no longer mistakes, since everything that is made, as it is made, becomes part of the work: When mistakes are judged to be fatal, the entire film is jettisoned. The momentary temporal pauses between shots become motifs, both in the articulation of rhythm and in the play and disturbance of light and movement, continuity and discontinuity. All the films are silent. The films are characterised by their brevity and a dance-like motility and lightness of touch, combined with an improvisatory, yet exploratory purpose. Indeed, in the former respect many of them may be compared to small-group, free musical improvisation, in which a successful interplay of instrumental voices depends on the musicians’ ability both to play and listen at the same time, so that they may modify their playing in response to their fellow group members. As Fanderl herself puts it in relation to her filmic procedures “learning to pay attention to the pace, to the correspondence between the subject matter, my interest and feeling and the timing”. She has honed her ability to look and structure simultaneously –to anticipate- resulting in a structuring process, rather than structure in the sense of predetermined forms, although there are degrees of this in some of the films, for example Zelte am Kanal (Tents on a Canal: 3’, 2006), where a static subject allows for a more pre-meditated approach. At the opposite extreme, in a film like Große Voliere (Big Aviary, 2000), the camera moves rapidly and repeatedly to catch the frenetic to-ing and fro-ing of birds, filmed against the curving grid of glazing bars in an Art Nouveau aviary. It should be born in mind that the real core of Fanderl’s work, its effects, its energies, are what remains after any analysis has taken place.

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FOUND SOUNDS:
A Retrospective of Barbara Meter’s Avant-Garde Films
Por Mónica Savirón

In the early ‘70s, in need of a critical response to the utter commercialization of film production and programming, Barbara Meter (Netherlands, 1939) co-founded the Electric Cinema. Run by members of the Amsterdamse Film Coop, and STOFF (the Studio for the Development of Film and Film Manifestations), the theater became the epicenter of independent film and Dutch avant-garde filmmaking. At the Electric Cinema, Meter curated avant-garde and expanded cinema programs. After that period, she co-created POLKIN (Political Kinema) and made documentaries as part of activist and feminist movements. In her avant-garde films, she pushes the cinematic medium forward with her unique way of repurposing documents and audio recordings, and with an innovative, masterful application of optical printing techniques. Meter manipulates the images and reworks found sounds to find and create a personal expressive mode. Her thesis, Looked for and Found: On Archival and Found Footage Film, was written in 1995 for the London School of Printing, and continues to be of radical importance. After many years of work, the EYE Filmmuseum in Amsterdam has preserved Meter’s films, in all their complexity and in close conversation with the artist. FOUND SOUNDS is the first comprehensive retrospective of Barbara Meter’s avant-garde films in the United States, and in Spain.

Organized by guest curator, and program notes written by Mónica Savirón.

Presented with the support of the Consulate General of the Kingdom of the Netherlands.

Program:

Lamento
Written and performed by Remco Campert. 2012. Audio recording of live performance. In Dutch. 3 min.
From Barbara Meter’s Here Now; part of the film series, Ten Songs. To read the poem, please click here.

Ariadne
2004. Super-8 to 35mm. Color. Sound. 12 min.
In Greek mythology, Ariadne, granddaughter of the sun, plays a significant role in labyrinths, mazes, and circumstances in which sacrifices and reparations need to be made. In Meter’s work, a woman’s hands lay on knitting wheels and vinyl records that turn just as restlessly as the artist’s film rewinders. Shot on Super-8mm film, reworked and blown up to 16mm with the optical printer, and enlarged to 35mm, the blurred, soft grain purposefully becomes an homage to the quality of cinema as both weaving craft and relentless labor of love. Looped sounds of horses, albatrosses, trains, ocean waves, and archival sounds of war planes roaming through the air alternate with Kathleen Ferrier’s and Gerald Moore’s recordings of Franz Schubert’s Gretchen am Spinnrade. Characteristic of the German lied or lit, which sets poems to music, this song cycle incorporates text from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s tragic play, Faust. Other added sounds are of Italian Cecilia Bartoli, with Hungarian György Fischer at the piano, singing in search of peace of heart in Selve Amiche by Antonio Caldara, and in Amarilli, mia bella by Giulio Caccini. One of Caccini’s achievements was to think of musical composition as recitative expression: music as speech.

Appearances
2000. Super-8 to 16mm. B/W. Sound. 21 min.
In this film, Meter listens to found images that never produced any sound. She writes: “Independently of each other, my father and my mother fled from Germany in 1934. They met the same year in Amsterdam. This film is made from photographs they left me, all of which were taken before I was born.” Through slow, hand-held movements of the camera, fades, and dissolves by the artist, the collage of images becomes a journey through the Weimar Republic of the ‘20s and ‘30s, a time when the government organized the railroad system, and of Hitler’s Germany. Meter explains: “This film hesitates between photography and film: static yet in motion, the portraits seem as if between life and death.” The closer Meter gets to these portraits with her lenses, the more inscrutable they become. The music transitions in this film go through what seems to be an intermediate state of dubitative silence, only to be interrupted by sound effects of strangers’ voices played backwards, German radio, magpies’ calls, and a continuous, undercurrent, flapping, pounding beat. With sounds of that era, Johann Sebastian Bach, and Marlene Dietrich, Meter takes these images from their native dark period to try to understand them and reflect this darkness back. The book Letters to Barbara (Gertraud Middlehauve Verlag, 1988; translated to English by James Agee, The Overlook Press, 1995) is a compendium of the scanned letters and drawings that Leo Meter, the artist’s father, sent her when she was a child, once he was separated from his family and recruited by the Germans as a soldier. He died at age 35. These letters, and the memories they provoke, have served of inspiration to several of Meter’s films.

Convalescing
2000. Super-8 to 16mm. Color. Silent. 3 min.
Meter treats her footage as if it were found, creating her own personal archive, re-shooting and manipulating it as if it had been given to her, trying to figure out what it is and what lays behind it. The silence of her films speaks volumes: it is a conscious and loud way of expressing herself. In 2012, Meter made another radically silent film, Little Stabs, edited in-camera, and consisting of politically charged images from newspapers that she had been gathering over the years. In Convalescing, Meter brings the attention towards the one who reads, looks, and listens. The film breaks away from explanations to take solace in the mood created by the natural and the electric light coming through the windows and the television set. In a way, it refers to Meter’s first experimental film, From the Exterior (1970), in which she shot different residential windows from the street—lives as seen from the other side. In Convalescing, Meter reflects on those moments of distancing oneself from the world, and writes: “… the blue, the light of the television, the blue, the book, the patterns, the light, the blue. Time to appreciate how much that really is.” In her films, sometimes we are able to glimpse these words from poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: “Over all the hilltops there is quiet.” Taking place inside a room, Convalescing is both contemplative and self-reflective, as well as the one film by Meter that allows us to take an intimate pause—with just the sound of the film projector, and our very, inner, own.

Song for Four Hands
1970. Super-8 to 16mm. Color. Sound. 3 min.
This is a shot, counter-shot film that creates a conversation without words between a woman, Barbara Meter, and a man, experimental filmmaker, Jos Schoffelen. The film proposes a dialogue deafened by a chord from a Mahler symphony. These tunes are played through two reel-to-reel tape recorders, looped and reedited. The unsuccessful delivery of words leaves room to another kind of language—the cinematic expression. Juxtapositions, light flares, rapid zooms, and overall movement transmit a series of feelings that would have been buried otherwise by words. Breaking away from narrative rules, leaning towards image and sound abstractions, and exposing the materiality of celluloid, the film gets closer to the core of what the artist hopes to communicate. As a stylistic counterpoint, in 1994, Meter made Penelope, where the voice of a woman, who we never get to see, talks to an invisible man about the frustrations of their lack of understanding. The woman’s voice was taken from a Hollywood film from the ‘50s. Meter manipulated this recording, repeating it, fading it in and out, and varying its volume to denote the different degrees of female acceptance towards imposed roles of waiting and longing.

Stretto
2005. 16mm. Color. Sound. 6 min.
The word “stretto” is an Italian musical term referred to the final section of a fugue, characterized by interweaving melodies. The musical theme gets repeated at different pitches and timbres before those notes reach their end. This way, the notations appear superimposed, contrapuntally, and gaining in textural intensity. It sums up several, temporally off-set, statements. These accumulations occur in fast tempo. In the film, Meter, by employing dissociative imagery and disconnected musical tunes, builds on the polyphonic patterns of history and identity. The soundtrack is John Cage’s Music For Prepared Piano 2, a percussion-like piece conceived as a dance accompaniment. Meter defies the storyline standard of beginning, middle, and end, and translates the world, one of death and immigration, by suspending its images and sonorities in a temporality that moves backwards rather than forwards. It is not the meaning of these sounds what is important, but their unsettling emotionality and intensity.

Portraits
1972. Super-8 to 16mm. Double projection + Audio recording. Color. Sound. 6 min.
Alternating one, two, and four screens, Meter features close-ups of artists Sally Potter, Mattijn Seip, Pim van Isveldt, and Mike Dunford from different angles and at fast speed. At the end, a wide, complex portrait may be created by accumulation of layers in the viewer’s mind. What these artists are and what they do become the same thing thanks to the highlighted presence of the grain, color filters, light, framing and reframing, flickering, scratches, and juxtapositions. Portraits, as well as …And a Table, made in 1970, are examples of films influenced by structuralist/formalist art that explores the nature of film as a medium. Steve Reich’s Four Organs gives final shape to this film. As with the image, the sound composition for four electronic organs and maraca dissects the minimalist main chord by its playing parts, the harmonics uneasily pulling and pushing in different directions. Barbara Meter: “What I usually hope to achieve is that image and sound follow their own path, but often connect, after which they distance themselves again—and then connect again.”

A Touch
2008. 16mm. Color. Sound. 13 min.
With sound effects of passing trains, running water, and wind, plus an exquisite imagery manipulation with the optical printer, Meter pays homage to the fragility of celluloid, as well as of our own vulnerable materiality. She treats emulsion as if she were touching skin, with the same attention, permissions, and apprehensions, actions and reactions. Meter’s camera attempts to delicately interact, somehow connect, with the images, and with the light and movement that emanate from them. A Touch commences with a sequence of flakes whirling in the wind, just as the particles of the film emulsion attract our vision. The richness of the color and the grain reinforce the emotional capabilities of film. Human silhouettes fade, and images of Guy Sherwin appear and disappear for fractions of seconds. In A Touch, light and shadows, perceptions, and flashes of memory come and go as a moving landscape. Reminiscent of Armenian filmmaker Artavazd Peleshian’s distrust for the spoken word, there are no statements in this film, but fragments of music, including Francesco Tuma’s Stabat Mater, a Latin hymn on the depths and weights of human suffering and sorrow.

This is an all-celluloid touring program taking place at the Milwaukee Underground Film Festival in Wisconsin (April 22nd), Museum of the Moving Image in New York (April 30th), and (S8) Mostra de Cinema Periférico in A Coruña (June 2nd).

In partnership with EYE Filmmuseum, Amsterdam; Milwaukee Underground Film Festival; and Museum of the Moving Image.

Very special thanks to Cullen Gallagher, Vera Kuipers, David Schwartz, Simona Monizza, Marleen Labijt, Edith van der Heijde, Guy Edmonds, Ben Balcom, Elena Duque, Ángel Rueda, Ximena Losada, Fred Baez, Tom Avitabile, Carolyn Funk, Joel Schlemowitz, José María Armada, Blanca Regina, Karel Doing, Emmanuel Lefrant, Frédérique Devaux, Tomoko Kawamoto, Eric Hynes, Angel Ortiz-Oyola, and Barbara Meter.

Ad libitum:

Broken Tongue
By Mónica Savirón. 2013. 16mm. Color & B/W. Sound. 3 min.
This film pays homage to the diaspora of the different waves of migration, and challenges the way we represent our narratives. It is a search for a renewed consciousness, for reinvention, a “what if,” the formal equivalent of asking a question expressed with a broken tongue. Mainly made with images from the January 1st issues of “The New York Times” since its beginning in 1851 to 2013, Broken Tongue is a heartfelt tribute to avant-garde sound performer Tracie Morris, and to her poem Afrika.

Answer Print
By Mónica Savirón. 2016. 16mm. Color. Sound. 5 min.
Answer Print is made with deteriorated 16mm color stock, and it is meant to disappear over time. Neither hue nor sound has been manipulated in its analog reassembling. The soundtrack combines audio generated by silent double perforated celluloid, the optical tracks from sound films, and the tones produced by each of the filmmaker’s cuts when read by the projector. The shots are based on a 26-frame length: the distance in 16mm films with optical tracks between an image and its sound. This film could be the B-side of the song cycle started with Broken Tongue. In between, the music film Wedding Song was made for Janel Leppin’s album originally titled Music of the One Armed Woman. Leppin wrote this material when she damaged the ulnar nerve in her right elbow and was unable to play the cello for her solo shows in 2015.