Wed, Oct 3rd, 2012
Jordan Belson's Magical Motion Pictures
I saw some other wonderful Belson movies on vhs tape that day, such as
Re-Entry, Chakra, Northern Lights, Bardo, and Cycles. I immensely
enjoyed all of them. I thought the beautiful moving color light effects of
Northern Lights were especially interesting as they seem to mark a departure
in his life. He started to foreground those kinds of visuals in his later works
such Fountain Of Dreams and Epilogue and that imagery is always flowingly
colorful and luminously gorgeous to behold.
Sausalito Frank Stauffacher
A lovely black and white piece with some nice camerawork and editing. Some
striking shots of a man's eye peering through a peephole of some kind, intercut
with the imagery of the small Bay Area town on the pier; the interior close ups
of the man's face reminded me of similar close ups in Vertov's Man With The
Movie Camera. I could definitely tell that it suffered from being on seen dvd
and projected that way but it still retained a lot of gorgeous filmic
qualities. From this piece and Notes On The Port of St. Francis it is clear
that Mr. Stauffacher possessed a fine control of cinematic craft, with a
beautiful camera eye and smooth editing rhythm. He had a subtle, excellent
visual sensibility and style and I really wish he hadn't passed away so young.
I'm sure we would have more of these exceptional movies to enjoy if he had
lived to an old age.
Image, Flesh, and Voice Ed Emshwiller
A very strange black and white 35mm piece by the great abstract movie maker Ed
Emshiller. For the last few years he's been one of my top cinematic passions
and interests. I love his 16mm work Thanatopsis, Carol, Film With 3
Dancers, and Life Lines, and I really enjoyed his lyrical portrait George
Dumpson's Place. I'm also excited to see his extraodinary-sounding
Relativity and his other celluloid work such as Dance Chromatic,
Transformations, and Totem.
He was a very skilled and agile camera man. He could operate 16mm and 35mm
movie cameras with a graceful dance-like precision and control. This talent of
his was especially valuable in the days before the steadicam and he found easy
employment as director of photography and camera operator on many other
director's features such as dance movies, narrative independent features, and a
beautifully shot docmuentary from the 70s on modern New York painters called
Painters Painting.
Having said this, Image, Flesh, and Voice is a purposely odd and truly
experimental work. It is very dark and stark, floating camera moves in
interiors, gliding past people in people in seetings such as living rooms,
usually when they're together at parties, with a constant soundtrack montage of
conversations, presumably between those people. They are all reflecting on
different aspects of social behavior, such as learning how to visually observe
people's physical mannerisms and behavior in a more concentrated non-verbal
manner. It's a long piece, over an hour I think and it didn't help that I saw
it projected on dvd. it seemed to especially suffer visually this way. I was
bothered by what looked to me to be a technical flaw - he has a lot of match
cuts on black screens when he slowly moves the camera from people to an unlit
black space and cuts to another screen of black and moves the camera to reveal
some other lit setting; on these cuts
there are jarring frame lines on the bottom of thw image that are especially
noticeable because they're purely black. Emshwiller was a technically
meticulous craftsman and he never has these kinds of mistakes in his other
work, so i don't if they're intentional. maybe he had an esoteric reason for
including them?
Robert Haller has said that it is an important and overlooked work that needs
to be seen more than once to be comprehended. I'd definitely like to see it
again, preferrably on 35mm on the big screen.
Doug Graves
4636 Talbot Drive
Boulder, CO 80303
702-580-4293___
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