Silent and Colorful

Dealing with time some more, we watched some very interesting, and silent again, films in class. All of them were filmed on a walk also. The first and most intriguing was Variations, shot by Nathaniel Dorsky on 16 mm @ 18 frames per second. The effect of the slower exposure speed was pretty captivating, it almost gave you a chance to appreciate the images more, as if they were fragile or something. It reminded me of a hangover, waking up to the world in a way, where everything is sharp and you start to again appreciate reality.

Stan Brakhage, whom we read some quotes from also, shot Comingled Containers, a 16 mm film with extreme close ups and underwater exploration. Brakhage seems to be really into breaking preconceived notions about images and how the eye and the mind should interpret them: "Imagine an eye unruled by man made laws of perspective, an eye unprejudiced by compositional logic, an eye which does not respond to the name of everything but which must know each object encountered in life through the adventure of perception." This quote struck me as very apt when i was at Perry Hoberman and Anne Friedberg's presentation on windows and stereoscopic vision. Perry's Vectors article on brain visual quirks had clips of what that affliction would look like if you had it, reminding us that the eyes are really just tools--the brain is where we arrange the image according to our comforts.

Wot the Ancient Sod, examines time and objects in a silent, color, 16mm format. In this film, Diane Kitchen films close ups of decaying leaves, at some points obscuring detail with such close leaves, showing only the flapping borders of foliage. It takes a much more specific bite out of the theme of "going on a walk." People usually take for granted leaves, the existence of which are defined more in the hundreds/thousands on a plant than in singular form. The theme of the importance of each leaf and its decay to the natural balance of nature brings up time as a subject. Time kills, rejuvenates, and continues. These are basically just clips of that process.

Dealing with time and film using a segmentation technique, Tomonari Nishikaka takes bursts of film with different shapes continuing throughout a sequence, and "an adjustable slit" with a camera on auto mode to get the correct exposure and create continuity in the frenetic, chaotic assortment of images. Of course, chaos is only the effect, the truth is that the shots were meticulously planned out to go with each other based on positioning within his animation viewfinder.

Along with experimentation with time, these films can be seen as an expression of freedom, something which Maya Deren cherishes in her "Amateur vs. Professional" article, writing, "Like the amateur still-photographer, the amateur film-maker can devote himself to capturing the poetry and beauty of places and events and, since he is using a motion-picture camera, he can explore the vast world of the beauty of movement."