DingXin at Anthology Film Archives

A screening of 16mm films by DingXin at Anthology Film Archives on Tuesday November 13, 2012.

Many hand-processed films, dark silhouettes of sprocket holes bleeding into the frame, flickering afterimages of painted clear leader printed onto high contrast film, patterns of light reflected off the ripples on water, prisms producing rainbows in front of obscure objects. 

The earliest and the latest works made a lasting impression.  The first film shown was DingXin's first film made.  A film of the moon, seen in crescent, slowly arching its way across the frame, in silence, its transit interrupted by the texture and movement of the film; hand-processed (and hand-printed?) with the registration shifting, the sprocket holes visible at times, but maybe just a stencil-like imprint of the sprockets from the processing?  Snowflake like dust adding to the texture of the image, the moon glowing serene and aloof amidst physicality of the photochemically treated strip of film unfurling in the projector.

The last piece, Prisms, a work entirely shot in closeup, with the spectrum of light refracted in the prisms of the film's title.  Sometimes an object was there, a bronze sculpture perhaps? or an imaginary landscape dreamed by the viewer of the film? never seen to the point where we could readily identify it, and the shallow plane of focus an element in the work's intrigue.  While this was a film about the visual experience of the light, refractions, and reflections of angled glass, it was also a film about the mystery of how we can look but not necessarily discern what it is that we are seeing.  The extreme close-up is a clarity of detail as much as it is an abstraction of the whole.

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The screening was introduced by local filmmaker/animator Eric Leiser.  DingXin studied filmmaking in California, but now teaches at the China Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing.  This was the first one-person screening of his work in New York, but hopefully not the last.

The obligatory question for those of us there who were hoping more people could be introduced to this work was "Are your films available on-line?"  The answer was no.  These were works to be screened as works of film.  It's not hard to understand.  A work like Prisms might really suffer without the disorienting sense of scale; the contrast of monumental size of the work on screen with these tiny, macro-lens details would be entirely lost on a computer monitor just due to the size of the image itself.  So no links from this blog post to see these films on Vimeo or YouTube.  You'll just need to go see this work when it's showing again -- on the movie screen!

Cheers!

Magic lantern slides at OptoSonic Tea

Cheers!

Sabrina Gschwandtner at LMAK

A visit to LMAK, just below Delancey Street, and some wonderful pieces by Sabrina Gschwandtner.  Illuminated quilts sewn together from film.

Viewed from afar the quilts resemble fabric quilts, but looking close there are the sprocket holes, optical soundtracks, the frame lines, the sequences of images, the punctures made by the sewing machine.  It is a forest, and then it is trees.  The effect is not unlike the experience of viewing a painting by John Singer Sargent both close and far.  From a distance are objects of a tactile stolidity: faces, hair, fabric, jewelry.  Up close these dissolve away, the illusion is broken, another painting emerges that is about the paint, its tactile qualities spread on the canvas, the speed and movement of the brushstrokes.  Or perhaps the pointillist works of Georges Seurat and Paul Signac are an appropriate comparison, for understanding the near and far effect that Sabrina works with in these pieces?

There is an interesting parallel in the sewing machine and the motion picture and camera, both of which are employed in these pieces.  The two inventions are Nineteenth Century mechanisms utilizing intermittent motion.  The film moves through the camera, advanced by the the pulldown claw, where it stops with a frame in the gate, the shutter opens, light passes through, creating the image on the film.  In much the same way, the drop feed sewing machine employs the "feed dog" to advance the fabric, as the fabric stops, the needle comes down, and the thread passes through the fabric creating the stitch.

The the last day to see the show is Sunday October 21, 2012, so make your way down to LMAK soon!

Cheers!

Cine Soiree in Tokyo

Summertime in Tokyo.  An unpleasantly hot season, but a good time to go do some shooting and discover a little bit about the local film scene.  It's nearly impossible to be a filmmaker visiting Tokyo and not think of Chris Marker, who passed away this summer.  His film "Sans Soleil" is a fascinating portrait of Tokyo among many other things.

Paid a visit to Image Forum, the respected experimental film venue, tucked away in the Shibuya area on the west side of the city.  Their summer schedule is mostly devoted to workshops (film history and animation).  In a sense not unlike Millennium Film Workshop or the London Filmmakers Coop in the multiple endeavors of the institution: screenings and workshops (in the case of Millennium and the London Coop, equipment rentals too).  With Image Forum there is also the production and distribution of DVDs of experimental cinema.

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Meanwhile, on the east side of Tokyo there is the super-8 film lab called Retro Enterprises.  Students from some of the Image Forum workshops would have their film processed here.  In addition to super-8 processing the lab does restoration work, film-to-video, and even video-to-film.  The last of these services for cinematographers who are more confident working in digital video and afraid that they're too inexperienced to use a motion picture camera, but want to have their work shown on film.  There's also some equipment for sale on consignment in a large glass case.  A very nice 16mm Bolex camera had just come in when I was there dropping off some film for processing.  Tak Kohyama describes Retro Enterprises (half-jokingly) as "the world's smallest film lab."  And indeed, Tokyo real estate being what it is, this might very well be the world's smallest film lab.

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A visit out to the more westerly side of Honshu, to the Okayama area, for the Uno Port Art Film Festival with outdoor screenings taking place right next to the Inland Sea.  The video projector for the event had come all the way from Rooftop Films in Brooklyn.  Many filmmakers participated in Q&As after their screenings through Skype.  Not always a smooth process: the audio dropping out, the video freezing, the call disconnecting.  Was much better being there in person to engage with the audience, and also have a chance to see all the other work that was showing in this nicely programed festival.

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In the bohemian neighborhood of Koenji a chance to spend some time with filmmaker Takahiko iimura.  A visit last year to iimura's show at Microscope Gallery in Bushwick, Brooklyn can be found in an older Cine Soiree blog post.  A busy season approaching for Taka; a show at MoMA in New York happening this fall, a screening in London, another one elsewhere in the U.K.

Was still feeling tired that evening from climbing Mt Fuji a few days before, with a super-8 camera to shoot time-lapse of the sunrise -- but that's a story for another time!

Cheers!

Doing or being?

My wife and I were discussing the ritual of people who meet for the first time and ask: "What do you do?" as a way of passing quick judgment on the importance of the other person.  She wondered about the emphasis on "doing."  Looking at what a person does instead of who it is they are.  Doing or being?

I said it reminded me of what happens when people see a work of art -- experimental film, or any other work of art for that matter -- and question what it is the artist is "communicating" through the work, as if the message of the work were secondary to the visceral experience of being in the presence the work itself.  What it is a work of art is "doing" instead of what it is.

By way of analogy, I said, imagine someone looked at a sunset and asked, "Okay, it's nice to look at, but what is this sunset trying to communicate to me?"  Obviously a silly question, since it would be terribly presumptuous to assume that the sunset existed purely for the purpose of communicating something to the questioner.  But often people assume a work of art exists as a receptacle for delivering some message to the viewer.  A work of art might not be intended to communicate anything.  Its purpose might be just to "be."

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. . . for more on this subject, time to turn to Susan Sontag's “Against Interpretation.”

Cheers!

Red Hook Cine Soiree!! - June 2, 2012

A breezy Saturday afternoon, and a full house at the BWAC screening room in attendance for "Red Hook Cine Soiree!! featuring magic potions! ghost towns! and flying bananas!!!" with experimental and underground films from cine-artists:

Jacob Burckhardt & Royston Scott, S.I. Chowdhury, Z. L. B. Dautzenberg, Taylor Dunne, Seth Fragomen, Jodie Mack, Barbara Rosenthal, Lynne Sachs, Sheri Wills

. . . and some pre-show music on the Victrola.

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Some of the films were droll and humorous in nature, others more contemplative and imagistic.  But the curatorial question was, can such different works coexist comfortably in the same program without undermining each other?  So often a coherent program is one that threads together a theme or concept shared by the films.  But this unity might also run the risk of making the work seem redundant.  A more diverse approach brings up the question: will a short and humorous film get the audience out of the right mood for the sublime and slow-paced film that follows it? (indeed, it can happen.)  A good analogy for answering this question comes by way of the arrangement of musical works in a concert; where fast-paced or slow-paced works play off of each other.  If all the works are of the same tempo the concert risks getting a little tedious.  And so an arrangement of films attentive to the pacing and mood of the work (perhaps more than more thematic or concept-driven factors) turns out to be a decent method for programing films of a diverse nature.  The audience will often want a shift in mood from one work to the next to keep things interesting.

Cheers!

Tribeca Film Festival 2012

The Cine Soiree blog has been fallow while I've been spending much time and energy this spring in the editing room with a new project.  But hope to be posting here more frequently now that the completion of this new film is getting closer.

In the meantime, a short film I made recently, shot in super-8 and titled "Scenes from a visit to Japan," will be showing April 18-25 in the Tribeca Film Festival On-Line Screening Room.

Hope you can pay a visit there and check it out.

Cheers!