Tag Archives: experimental film

The Great Flood: Interview with Bill Morrison

The Great Flood
The Great Flood

Format: Cinema

Screening date: 8 May 2014

Venue: ICA, London

Director: Bill Morrison

USA 2013

78 mins

Bill Morrison creates stunning works of cinema from forgotten fragments of footage. His debut feature, Decasia (2002), a beautiful composition of decaying nitrate celluloid, was the first film of the 21st century to be selected for preservation by the National Film Registry, although UK audiences might know him best for The Miners’ Hymns (2010), his majestic, poetic rendering of lost coal mining communities in North East England.

Eleanor McKeown spoke to the American filmmaker ahead of the UK premiere of his latest masterwork, The Great Flood, at Birmingham’s Flatpack Film Festival in March 2014.

Bill Morrison: Selected Films 1996-2014 is released in the UK on 4 May 2015 by the BFI. The 3-disc Blu-ray box set includes The Great Flood, Decasia, Beyond Zero: 1914-1918 and many more.

Eleanor McKeown: How did you find the material for The Great Flood and how did the project come about?

Bill Morrison: I had been looking for a longer project to work on with Bill Frisell. We’d done a couple of shorts before – The Film of Her and The Mesmerist – where I used pre-recorded tracks of his. We were looking for a project where we would start from the ground up; he would write new music and I would find new footage to make a new film. I had been working on looser, more metaphorical treatment of flood footage and was looking for any old footage of flood-inundated houses for a project called Shelter (this was back in 2005), and I kept coming across footage from 1926 and 1927. It wasn’t until some time later that I was at a dinner party where they were discussing a book by John M. Barry called Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How it Changed American Culture, as it related to Katrina and the problems with that storm and the flood in New Orleans. I read that book. Knowing that there was a lot of footage out there from that era and that Bill wanted to work on a project with me, and that there were musical ramifications from people moving out of the area into the newer cities like Chicago, Cleveland and New York, it all kind of conspired and I realised that this could be a long-form project.

Once we had decided that we wanted to go forward with this project, Bill approached his management team – that’s Phyllis Oyama and Lee Townsend at Songtone – and they were able to assemble a list of performing venues that would co-commission the project. It was not the regular route most filmmakers take to finance a film, but it really came about as part of the multimedia side of the live performance. There were a number of venues that contributed more or less money to the thing, and quite a few would premiere the piece in that region.

Was there a difference between how The Great Flood was originally performed live and how it currently appears in its finished version? With The Miners’ Hymns, your last UK film release, I understand that the film was shown on a double screen when it premiered, with live music, at Durham Cathedral.

Both films were much looser when they were originally performed live, before we had a definitive master recording, which we re-cut to. With The Great Flood, it was a very unique set of circumstances, where I was on tour with Bill in the Mississippi River Delta in the spring of 2011. We had booked a tour just to give Bill and his bandmates a chance to familiarise themselves with the material and to work on it together through rehearsals and performances, on sort of a mobile artist’s residency, if you will. We had absolutely no indication, of course, that the tour would be during another major flood of the Mississippi River. Indeed, the flood levels that spring were as high as they had been since 1927, so it became a very real sort of history lesson on what it feels like to be in a community not knowing whether the levees are going to hold or not.

It was through recording all those soundchecks, and rehearsals and performances that I was able to structure a sort of narrative and emotional arc of how I thought the film would sound. That tour became a tool, both for me to start forming a rough cut of the film, and for Bill to write more music or re-write music that was recorded. It was also just a chance to talk to him about things that I was really enamoured with on his previous records, and how I saw the opportunity for some of those same dynamics to work: the idea of taking a theme and expanding on it. He was really receptive to that collaboration, really more so than any other composer-collaborator I’ve worked with.

How was it different to working with other composers in the past? Was there more improvisation?

I work a lot with classical composers and, once they’ve written the score, it’s really in the hands of the conductor and orchestra to perform it the way the composer wrote it. We arrive at a master recording that way. With Bill, it’s almost exactly the opposite. He doesn’t want to repeat himself two performances in a row. In fact, if it’s something’s good, he tries to avoid it the second time, and if it’s bad, of course, he’s going to avoid it the second time! It’s really a completely different way of approaching performance. The music grew from the spring tour but, after it premiered that fall, we used a recording from the premiere to re-edit the film. Then a few months later, we had a better recording that we made at Duke and that became the basis for the film, and the edit that was used during much of the film’s performance life in 2012. It wasn’t until about a year ago, in March of 2013, that the band did a performance in Seattle that we felt very strongly could be the definitive soundtrack of the film. The film, as released in 2014, was entirely re-cut to this soundtrack to support every note and every chord change. It is cut to the beat in a way that would be impossible to do in a live situation, and that was the same with The Miners’ Hymns too. We started out with a very loose edit and then, when we had a final recording, we re-cut to it, sometimes as many as three or four different times.

Thinking about the narrative arc of the film, The Great Flood is divided into chapters. How did you make decisions about these and, in particular, the segment that uses a montage of the 1927 Sears Roebuck Catalogue and the change of pace in this sequence?

Bill was really adamant that we include these up-tempo musical numbers: music that I associate with Thelonious Monk or a bebop tempo. I’m really enamoured with his dirges and ballads, but he was adamant that those don’t work unless you have something that also cuts them and changes the pace and the mood. He’s a real master at constructing a set – and this was after all a set – so including that type of mood was really Bill’s influence. It was something that initially I was resistant to, but I came to see how he was right.

The Sears Roebuck catalogue was my idea. As you can see from the start of that chapter, it’s listed with a circulation of 75 million, so you can imagine how prevalent this book was in just about every house. It would be like the internet is for us today. It was sort of the portal to all the stuff that’s out there. I’ve been told that some houses had only two books: The Bible and the Sears Roebuck Catalogue. There’re also stories about children making up fantasy stories based on the characters in that book. It was a source of amusement but also a source of dreaming. This is all the stuff you could own, if you had a better life. Then, in the context of the film, it’s also all the stuff that’s getting destroyed by the flood and getting thrown away –what you grab onto. I was able to find a reprint of the 1927 catalogue, which is really upheld as an emblem of the Roaring Twenties. It was financially a very fat time in this country, before The Great Depression, and so this book is an artefact of everything we had and everything we could own. Because the layout page-to-page is very similar, it lent itself to this fast de facto animation. I simply scanned every page and then played with it in edit until it kind of moved. It was also a different way of treating up-tempo material rather than relying on fast action or fast editing.

This up-tempo music reoccurs at other points in the film, such as the segment showing footage of politicians visiting the flood sites.

Yes, also in the dynamiting Poydras chapter. It’s an ironic use of the music, because of course the chapter is showing large class discrepancies, treated as business as usual, and I think that the music communicates that.

Out of all the footage you were working with, you chose a woman dancing to live music in Chicago as the last shot of the film. How did you decide on this final image?

That had always been the premise of the film. The water came down the river and the people moved up it – to the north – and, in so doing, brought music and a way of life and a culture to northern American cities that then went global and really affected popular music and popular culture in the latter half of the century. That shot said so much. It’s obviously an old shot, it’s over 50, almost 60, years old. You can see a woman in the back carrying a large poster of John Kennedy, so one can assume that it’s either an election party or an inauguration party. It’s something that would place it in November 1960 or January 1961. My guess is November 1960. It comes from a film that was released in 1964 by Mike Shea, called And This Is Free, which is a beautiful depiction of Maxwell Street in Chicago, a flourishing musical area and commercial area, which no longer exists in the way it did back then, of course. For me, coming from the South Side of Chicago, I always thought of this film as ending there. It’s as much about me trying to understand where I’m from, as how my neighbourhood became that way and the significance of Chicago as a conduit to the rest of the world. We came across that shot and it encompassed so much. It was at once modern, as well as being ancient. It was very beautiful. It showed passion and great intimacy. There was something very real about it; something where the people were oblivious of the use of the camera, or seemingly so.

And after all the work and really demeaning and unpleasant situations that you’ve seen people in throughout the film – and really you haven’t seen that many women, it’s mostly been a lot of men – to see this woman dancing was so emblematic of survival and of strength. That story goes on. This is not just an ending but the river continues.

Her expression is an interesting one, which provokes a lot of different ideas. She seems to convey so much in that expression.

Yes, there’s a lot of resolve to her. She’s very serious about her dance and she’s extraordinarily beautiful. That’s what I wanted the film to be.

It certainly was. What are your plans for The Great Flood and what projects are you currently working on?

The Great Flood is being distributed in North America by Icarus Films and they’re doing a phenomenal job with it. They oversaw a successful opening here in New York and also in Los Angeles, and they are now taking it to independent theatres throughout the United States and Canada. There’s also going to be a DVD release in May, again through Icarus Films. We don’t have an international distributor yet, and I am interested in finding a UK distributor.

The Great Flood is released in the US on DVD (R1) and VOD on 20 May 2014.

In terms of my upcoming projects, I’m working on a new long-form doc about an archive that was found in Dawson City in the Yukon territory in the late 1970s, after having been buried in a swimming pool for 50 years. And I just finished a film on World War One with a score by a Serbian composer, Aleksandra Vrebalov, which will be performed by The Kronos Quartet. That will premiere in Berkeley, California, and make its international premiere at the Edinburgh International Festival in August. With this film, I worked with the Library of Congress to find footage that other people aren’t able to access on the war. Through soaking and restoration, we were unspooling rolls of film that hadn’t been seen in decades. We’re very much looking forward to the reaction to this film.

Read about Bill Morrison’s Decasia in The End: An Electric Sheep Anthology.

Interview by Eleanor McKeown

Flatpack 2014: Old Celluloid, New Perspectives

The Great Flood 1
The Great Flood

Flatpack Festival

20-30 March 2014, Birmingham, UK

Flatpack website

In her introduction to a compilation of shorts from the BFI collection, silent film curator Bryony Dixon explained how she has long admired the Flatpack Film Festival for its strong programming of archival footage. Over its eight-year-festival history, Flatpack has revealed an unusual appreciation of rediscovered lost films and celluloid fragments, creating events around amateur cine-clubs, cans fished out of skips by ex-projectionists and highlights from local archives. Dixon added to this year’s line-up with a thoughtful selection of films focused around the theme of water. Regen, Joris Ivens’s wonderful 1929 study of a city rainstorm, and Peter Greenaway’s Water Wrackets (1975) rounded off a compilation of early 20th-century travelogues and examples from a turn-of-the-century popular genre, the wave film. Watching the simple crash of salt water against an English stone pier, caught by a static camera in Rough Sea at Dover (1896), created a primeval rush, transporting us back to the powerful ‘train effect’ days of early cinema.

Bill Morrison‘s archival footage masterwork, The Great Flood (2013), which screened as part of a mini-retrospective, was a relatively late addition to this year’s programme, but in many ways it acted as the centrepiece of the festival, bringing together various programme themes, including the festival’s preoccupation with depictions of water on film. Morrison crafts a narrative of the 1927 flooding of the Mississippi River using a poetic swell of historical footage, gleaned from the archive of the University of South Carolina. The Great Flood begins with a bird’s eye sweep of the flood plain; a printed map merges into a vast, featureless landscape of water. We see the corner of an aeroplane wing – caught in shot by the news reporter’s camera – and indistinguishable rows of triangles. Social, human history gradually comes into focus over the course of eleven segments, grouped by theme: shots of sharecroppers; fragments of politicians visiting flood sites; refugees living in makeshift tents (those triangles we viewed impassively from the air). The footage is slowed down to a meditative pace and synched to Bill Frisell’s shimmering guitar, allowing Morrison’s history to unfold gradually with a reflective beauty. Punctuation comes in the form of a type of commercial break – a flipbook-style rendering of the 1927 Sears catalogue – playing out to the tsk-tsk of cymbals and bebop-infused rhythms. Clothing, pianos, pens, clocks, books, rugs, cameras, ovens, ploughs – all the material necessities and non-necessities of life – race past until the sequence ends abruptly on a page full of headstones, prices artfully arranged. This up-tempo jazz re-surfaces at various points in the film – when politicians pose for photos, or engineers use dynamite to unsuccessfully divert the course of the flood, sacrificing Poydras, Louisiana, in a bungled effort to save New Orleans – to underline the farcical aspects of political self-interest, all the more tragicomic when set against the almighty, unstoppable force of the flood.

The last segments of the film use footage showing the migration of displaced African-American communities to the north of the US and the development of the blues in places like Chicago (the Great Mississippi Flood caused a spike in an on-going exodus and, at the post-screening Q&A, Morrison was quick to emphasise the problematic oversimplification of the idea that conditions were uniformly better in the northern cities than in the south). The film’s final shot lingers over a woman dancing and twisting with urgent, vital intensity. The bewitching, soaring energy of this sequence echoes the close of Morrison’s last UK film release, The Miners’ Hymns (2010): when the miners’ march, the fluttering banners, the children skipping hand-in-hand combine in an expansive surge of visual majesty and melancholy.

Transience is an inherent quality of the type of footage preserved in archives such as the BFI and creatively used by Morrison. The everyday and forgotten emphasise the passage of history in a way that a narrative film from the early days of cinema does not. Morrison explores this quality in The Great Flood and The Miners’ Hymns, but it is most explicitly on display in his debut film, Decasia (2002), which screened on the final day of the festival. Taking nitrate celluloid that is partially eroded, Morrison celebrates the odd distortions, explosions and ripples that physically mark the march of time on film. A tangled selection of newsreels and works of cinema intertwine to create unified loops and circular patterns – a whirling dervish, a fairground carousel, a group of faded figures turning their heads to the camera, recurring visions of suns – in a progression of time that is not a linear line towards destruction, but instead hints at rebirth or unstoppable mutations that lead to new beginnings. Human figures try to escape the inevitability of decay or mortality – most directly demonstrated by the boxer who hits straight into a vertical column of celluloid distortion – and while they might fail individually, the footage continues to roll on. All the while, a strange, unnerving crescendo is created by Michael Gordon’s soundtrack, which sounds like a stretched-out, looping echo of the orchestral melange in The Beatles’ ‘A Day in the Life’, never reaching its end.

Read about Bill Morrison’s Decasia in The End: An Electric Sheep Anthology.

Henry Hills, another guest filmmaker celebrated over Flatpack’s closing weekend, also takes assemblage of footage as a starting point for exploring ideas of structure and narrative. A programme of shorts brought together Hills’s films from the early 1980s with a more recent work, Arcana (2011). The latter was born when Henry Hills received an invitation from American composer John Zorn: an assortment of filing cards, each with a different image to be included in a short film. The resulting montage of strange juxtapositions – videos of domestic scenes, archival footage of a zeppelin crash, pictures of code, shots from cinematic works – creates mini-sequences of suspense and menace, cut to The Bribe, John Zorn’s tribute to the American crime fiction writer Mickey Spillane. Hills’s earlier works are dense and tightly packed. Hills talked about how he obsessively listened to 45s when young and how he wanted to make films that he could re-watch over and over in the same way. He started out making silent works in San Francisco, keen to make films that could be readily viewed by anyone across the globe, regardless of language barriers, but was influenced by a move to New York and its noisy energy. The 1980s shorts are staccato edits of film and sound, where narrative becomes fragmented in a cacophony of noise: half-finished sentences and monosyllables, spoken by Hills’s poet and musician friends; truncated experimental dance sequences; and cut-up assortments of music and radio interference. In his shorts Radio Adios (1982) and Money (1985), odd phrases ring out – ‘this generation has gone mad’, ‘a certain kind of capitalism’, ‘the man lives across the street and you can’t mess with the man’ – but they are endlessly intercepted and interrupted to create a free-jazz improvisation of language. The splicing of footage starts to point towards the difficulty of imposing meaning or reaching consensus, mirroring our often fragmented experiences in life.

Flatpack has never taken a conventional approach to the screening of film or the medium itself. By exploring the very nature of footage in inventive ways, the festival and its guests open up new perspectives in how we might view film; we can see it not just as an immersive way to tell narratives, but as a poetic form that can sometimes, at its best, throw new light on how we exist in the world.

Eleanor McKeown

Monument Film: Interview with Peter Kubelka

kubelka1
Peter Kubelka (New York, 1967)

Format: Cinema

Screening date: 9 April 2013

Venue: BFI Southbank

Director: Peter Kubelka

It was meant to be the highlight of the London Film Festival’s Experimenta Weekend last October, but a broken projector prevented Austrian avant-gardist and experimental filmmaker Peter Kubelka from presenting his ambitious Monument Film project – a double projection of his works Antiphon (2012) and Arnulf Rainer (1960), back to back, side by side, as well as superimposed. Both works explore the four cinematographic elements – light and darkness, sound and silence – effectively stripping cinema down to its bare essentials as well as offering ‘a countermeasure to the dominating emotional motion picture’ (Jonas Mekas). What’s more, Antiphon literally presents the answer to Arnulf Rainer: what was white before is now black; where there was sound there is now silence. Monument Film is a response to what Kubelka describes as the ‘hostile takeover’ of analogue cinema technology by digital media, and hence might be best understood as a ‘last call to dogged resistance’. This month, Kubelka will be back in London to accomplish his endeavour, which he himself considers to be a culmination, the grand finale to his cinematic labors.

Pamela Jahn talked to Peter Kubelka about the essence of cinema, stealing films and losing friends when making them.

Pamela Jahn: You once said that you’ve lost most of your friends because of your film Arnulf Rainer. Why did you decide to produce another film, which is the polar-opposite version of it, as you’ve done now with Antiphon?

Peter Kubelka: To be honest, I love it when people enjoy my work, but I don’t really care if they leave the cinema. My intention when making films is not a wish to entertain, but rather that of a scientist who does his research. I use my medium – though use is also a too-cool word in this sense – I love my medium, and I use it as a ship to go on a journey to places that I haven’t been to, or nobody has ever seen before, and whatever will be found there is fine. I made my film Arnulf Rainer without having a precise idea of what it would look like on the screen, because I couldn’t project it or look at it on an editing table, because I had no means. I was very poor back then. And as with almost everything, when you are poor, you are more courageous because you have nothing to lose.

But to answer your question, I am overjoyed when people share my satisfaction. But if they don’t, I won’t change my mind because of this. And if some people leave now when they see my work, whether it is Arnulf Rainer or Antiphon or Monument Film, that really gives me pleasure, because it proves that they can evoke a reaction from the audience even after more than 50 years, when so-called ‘art’ has turned into something that is closer to social entertainment, where people accept anything, and it has practically become impossible to get people to admit that they are shocked, because they really don’t feel it anymore, or worse: they don’t care. People are not really interested in what it is they are experiencing any more, they just participate in the social epiphany. But again, I never really had a relationship with the public. I work for myself. And I strongly believe that if I do the best I can for myself, according to my standards, then other people will understand my work, and stay.

But particularly the people you worked for in the beginning didn’t share that opinion. Your first films Adebar and Schwechater were originally commercial films that your clients – a Viennese bar and a brewery – refused to approve.

I consider my position towards the commercial side of cinema, and by that I mean commercially produced films and the industry around it, as that of a parasite. I had to fight a lot in order to squeeze out some pieces of hardware and material for my work. Again, in a way, it’s a very similar position to that of a scientist or explorer, in that you have a wish, or a strong ambition, and in order to get where you want to be, you need to have some sort of a relationship with those who pay for the medium. And the only way I thought I could do this was to become a criminal – I stole all my films. I accepted commissions, but then didn’t really execute them in the way that those who paid for them had anticipated. But what gave me the moral assurance that I was right was to believe that I gave them something that was much better than what they really wanted. So when I worked in the 50s, I had that same attitude.

Were you sued by the brewery, Schwechater?

Yes, I was sued and I had to leave the country. I went to Sweden and worked as a dish washer and god knows what else. It was the only way for me to survive. Schwechater was very influential, so I couldn’t stay and work in Vienna. Even the film lab would no longer do prints for me, because Schwechater was their client and they would tell me: ‘They pay us a lot of money every month and you are nothing. You just create problems because your films are so difficult to print with a thousand cuts in one minute, so go away.’ All in all I paid very dearly for my films, because I lost all my friends, I lost my social and my work environment many times. I lived about 14 years of my life without a clue how to survive until I came to America and started teaching.

Which partly explains why your entire body of work comprises barely 90 minutes of actual film, but you have become a very well-respected lecturer around the world. What do you teach your film students, or your audience, about filmmaking based on your own experience?

Well, I am very strict in declaring that what I do in my films has nothing to do with what I say in terms of my authority. When I talk about my films, I do it in a way as if I wasn’t the maker of these films. And when the films are fresh, as my new work is, I actually talk very little about them, because the verbalisation is of course a completely different medium, and it takes some time to digest what you have done in a medium that, as film does, excludes the medium of speaking and excludes literature, for example. On the other hand, the whole spectrum of what the human being is experiencing in its conscious life is bigger than what one single medium can show. It’s a fact that music is a very important medium that is extremely rich in content, but this content remains within the medium. No one is able to fully explain a piece of music to people who haven’t heard it. It’s like the phenomenon of ‘deaf-mute’. If you are deaf, you are mute because you don’t know what speaking sounds like. So, it’s practically impossible to translate the content of films like mine into another medium like language. So what I do in my lectures is to try to help people to find a non-verbal entry into my work by leading them into my thinking. For me, speaking is just another medium I exercise. It’s not like the filmmaker translates what he has to say. In fact, for me the phrase ‘what do you have to say’ already expresses the dictatorship of language over all the other media which now exist. So, in essence, my lectures are ‘talk’ work, which I have pleasure in exercising.

What was your main intention when making Arnulf Rainer and, subsequently, Antiphon?

Arnulf Rainer is the logical consequence of my previous film travels, so to speak. It’s like when Schönberg started 12-tone music: he didn’t invent it as people always say, rather it was a logical consequence of musical history up to that moment that opened the door to 12-tone music. In the same way, Arnulf Rainer uses the most simple and essential elements that constitute the medium of cinema, namely light and the absence of light, sound and the absence of sound. These four elements are the bare essence of cinema, you cannot go beyond that.

Do you differentiate between the absence of light and darkness, for example?

No, but I prefer the absence of light in this context, to take the thoughts of a person who hears the word ‘darkness’ away from its other connotations, for example, fear or even a romantic kind of darkness. It’s a more neutral way of saying ’darkness’. I don’t want to work the spectator’s brain in that way. Again, it goes back to an essential situation of the human being. We have our senses and with their help we react to changes in the situation we are in. In fact, every sound is the message of a movement, of a change in situation. And that sound is a warning that wakes us. We start to analyse the situation in order to decide what we will do, how we will react, and if it is actually necessary to react. But the important thing to understand is that the change in situation is what makes us feel that we are alive in the here and now. And since the earliest days of mankind, there is a desire to artificially create such moments, to create a ‘now’ experience, like clapping hands, for instance. And then comes, let’s say the artist, who extracts the element, who uses those ‘now’ moments, and by this intensity and rhythmic condensation, ecstasy is given to the audience. So when I made Arnulf Rainer my intention was to use these most simple elements of cinema to create this ecstasy for the movie goer, for the people who cannot dance, and drink or take drugs or party for days, but quite the opposite, they sit very well educated in their cinema seats. In a way you could say with Arnulf Rainer the pole of the cinematic universe has been reached, the point of its most simple form of existence. But it might not be as clear when you look at the film alone. Its counterpart, Antiphon, which I have now made, completes the work in that way. It’s comparable to the philosophy of yin and yang in that both films complement each other to create a whole. This is what I was trying to achieve with Monument Film.

Did you need to go through a process in order to come to that conclusion, or did you always intend to make Monument Film after Arnulf Rainer?

The idea was already there in the very beginning, and it was first of all an economic question at the time. But then, all my metric films are only prototypes, where I realise only one phase that defines that kind of cinema. For example, in Adebar, I had already had the thought that light and darkness should be equal, and I achieved this by showing all the elements in positive and negative for the same amount of time, so by the end of the film, the screen has received the same amount of light in all its parts. So this was my first metric film, an idea that I then followed up with Monument Film. And another point is important here, which is that with Monument Film, I wanted to create a memorial to cinema that explains the materiality of film.

How would you describe your idea of a cinema?

For me, the idea of a cinema is a machine, not a place of entertainment. It’s a machine that has the aim to bring the work of the author to the public in the least disturbed way. And my model of a cinema is the interior of a classic camera, namely complete blackness, where in the place of the lens there is the screen and in the place of the negative in the back of the machine is the brain of the author, represented by the projector and the film strip, and in between is darkness. So the ideal cinema for me would be a black space in which you don’t even feel that there is a space. You should only feel that it’s black and the only element of reference would be the screen and what happens on the screen. As for my films, I call my cinema normal cinema, I make normal films and the industry makes commercial films. The real filmmakers are those who work for a result without compromising.

Interview by Pamela Jahn

Zipangu 2011 preview: Sounds and Music

KanZeOn

Zipangu Fest

18-24 November 2011

ICA + Cafe Oto, London

Zipangu Fest website

The second Zipangu Fest, celebrating the best of cutting-edge and avant-garde Japanese cinema, will be held at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts and Café Oto from November 18 to 24, before moving to venues around the UK. The festival will showcase a selection of Japan’s finest features, documentaries, shorts, animation and experimental films. This year, it includes a strand exploring sound and film, which is previewed below by Eleanor McKeown and Tom Mes.

KanZeOn (2011)

KanZeOn begins on a tranquil note. A young Buddhist priest kneels, softly chanting while the camera produces languid shots of the temple’s interior. The calm is punctured when he leaves the floor, picks up a set of headphones and starts spinning hip hop records on a set of decks. It is one of many magically strange scenes that make up this thought-provoking exploration of links between Japanese Buddhism and sound.

The documentary follows three individuals in Kyushu: Akinobu Tatsumi, the hip hop-loving priest; Eri Fujii, a master of the Sho, an ancient bamboo instrument that mythically mimics the cry of a Chinese phoenix; and Akihiro Iitomi, a jazz-loving performer of Noh theatre. Divided into elliptical segments, the film switches between the three musicians as they perform their art and discuss what sound and music mean to them. The beautifully filmed sequences leave behind strong images, from the shadow of beat-boxing Tatsumi reflected onto perfect turquoise river water to the inspired performance of Fujii, set against a backdrop of crashing waterfalls. The sounds of nature and human endeavour combine to create exquisite duets. The languorous pacing allows the audience to absorb these fascinating combinations and contemplate the part that music and everyday sounds might play in their own lives. Accompanied by a discussion between SOAS lecturer Lucia Dolce and filmmakers Neil Cantwell and Tim Grabham, the Zipangu festival screening should provide a thoughtful insight into the role of sound in Japanese society and religion. EM

Listen to directors Neil Cantwell and Tim Grabham discuss the film + Tatsumi Akinobu give a performance of his Buddhist chanting and beat-boxing skills on the Electric Sheep’s I’m Ready For My Close-Up radio show on Resonance FM 104.4, Friday 18 November, 5-5:30pm.

We Don’t Care about Music Anyway (2009)

Those who care as much about music as about movies will find a rich harvest at Zipangu again this year. Not least in the shape of We Don’t Care about Music Anyway, Cédric Dupire and Gaspard Kuentz’s rather fascinating documentary on some of the leading lights of Japan’s noise scene. Alternating a round-table discussion between the participants with their individual performance pieces, the film is less radical in its form than Kikoe, Iwai Chikara’s documentary tribute to the great Otomo Yoshihide from three years ago – not to mention Ishii Sogo’s pivotal film on German noise pioneers Einstürzende Neubauten, Halber Mensch (1986) – but it is all the more accessible and emphatic as a result. The debate/performance structure conveys the theory and practice that inform the divergent methods of these musicians. The sparse set-up of the round-table talk contrasts greatly and effectively with the more exuberant mise en scéne of the performance pieces, which see the participants at work on scrap heaps, in underground tunnels, in ruined buildings and – in the most eye-catching sequence (which also provides the film’s main promo visual) – on the beach. Those looking for a history lesson or a broad overview of Japan’s noise scene will be left wanting, since the focus of We Don’t Care about Music Anyway is firmly on the small group of featured artists. As a brief immersion, however, it is a genuine delight. TM

Enter the Cosmos: Takashi Makino Special (2004-2011)

As part of its exploration of Japanese sound and film, the Zipangu festival will be screening a showcase of three films by acclaimed experimental filmmaker Takashi Makino. Makino’s films provide bizarre journeys through enigmatic soundscapes, composed of various sonic textures from the dislocated organ of a carousel to discordant piano notes and extreme feedback. The whir, crackle and drone of machines are accompanied by the imperfections of film and pixelated distortions of video. The visual scale is vast and the pacing is slow, like a 45rpm record set to 33rpm.

The first work, Intimate Stars (2004), provides the most recognisable sounds and visuals of all the films with occasional glimpses of vaudeville performers and fairground rides. The film offers representations of both exterior and interior landscapes as shots of branches and rushing skies segue into images so enlarged as to be wrought into completely abstract forms. The later films to be screened show an even greater exploration of abstraction. Elements of Nothing (2007) and In Your Star (2011) take the audience on trips through different emotional states and immersive sensations from the peaceful plucking of strings to uncomfortably intense feedback. Not for the faint-hearted, these bold, challenging, extreme odysseys provide a fascinating introduction to Makino’s work. EM

Coming soon: Comic Strip Review of Abraxas, about a ex-punk musician turned Buddhist monk.

London Short Film Festival 2011: Leftfield and Luscious

Until the River Runs Red

London Short Film Festival 2011

7-16 January 2011, various venues, London

LSFF website

With details of LSFF’s 2011 programme still under wraps, I ventured forth to an icy Soho street, buzzing with the Christmas rush, to collect a bundle of DVDs from festival programmer Philip Ilson. Home-burnt screeners whirring on my precariously balanced laptop may be a far cry from this month’s forthcoming screenings at the ICA but they provided a lovely taster of things to come: a preview of the festival’s most experimental new shorts selection, Leftfield and Luscious. Films are brought together for this programme under a fairly loose premise – namely that they lean towards a more abstract approach – and, as a result, it’s a varied assortment of discs. First to make it into my computer is the strange, poetic Sea Swallow’d, a collaboration between the filmmaker Andrew Kötting and artists Leslie Hill and Helen Paris, working under the name Curious. A work with clear surrealist influences, the film is at times madcap and lively; and at others, ominous and lilting. Divided into sporadic, episodic chapters, the film slowly builds to reveal its themes. The sea appears, disappears and reappears as a mysterious force. Guts figure in several forms: the camera trails the texture of a human stomach; a female voice declares her love in terms of digestive organs (she loves his insides, the darkness of his liver); and a fish is de-boned. Sea and guts represent the powerful, primeval aspects of life, ones which we do not often consider in our day-to-day humdrum. Sea Swallow’d is a beautifully made film and one that gently reveals some poetic lines and interesting questions about how far such primitive forces might influence human behaviour. The other stand-out example of filmmaking from the collection of discs was Paul Wright’s Until the River Runs Red. This film has some extraordinarily sumptuous cinematography – close-up shots of open meadow, wet skin and long tresses of hair, glimpses of sun and road snatched through a car boot. The film follows a girl who was kidnapped from a shopping centre and the couple who abducted her but, unfortunately, it felt as though the content itself had been underdeveloped; the subject matter was treated slightly melodramatically and the dialogue a little unoriginally. But director Paul Wright is clearly a very talented filmmaker; his step into features is an exciting prospect.

Wright’s film is nominated for the festival’s Best British Short Film Award, alongside two other shorts in the Leftfield & Luscious category. One of these, Murmuration, by Sophie Windsor Clive and Liberty Smith, perfectly encapsulates the other side to this programme; a lighter, more playful side, which popped up across the selection. The film tracks a river canoe trip paddling underneath a murmuration of starlings: an acrobatic display put on by thousands of synchronised, flocking birds. With camera work aimed at emphasising their DIY-approach and a soundtrack by Beirut, there is a vivacious, carefree appeal to the film. This lightness and playfulness also struck me in Dominique Bongers’s Gallop, a visual experiment with a nod to Eadweard Muybridge’s flying horse, and Ruth Lingford’s Little Deaths, an animated representation of interviewees discussing their experience of sex. The content and tone of the Luscious and Leftfield films might vary enormously but the films’ abstract leanings mean that there is common ground: a shared love for the visual side of filmmaking. It is encouraging to see such strong work in this category. If this treat of DVDs is a hint of what the festival is offering, it should be another interesting year for LSFF audiences.

Eleanor McKeown

PhotoFilm: Taking Film Apart

Arthur Lipsett's Very Nice, Very Nice

PhotoFilm

5-14 March 2010

Tate Modern, London

There is an element of surprise when a still image appears in a film; it creates an incongruous interruption in the endless rolling of 24 otherwise imperceptible frames. Still images offer the filmmaker a change in pace; a climax; an aside; a punch-line. It is often the frozen frame that lingers and floats before your eyes as you leave the cinema. So it creates a certain incongruity when the punch-line becomes the story itself.

Tate Modern’s current film season, PhotoFilm, presents an assortment of films that are all composed from still photographs. The selected works are stripped of the gradual unfolding action that characterises much of cinema, making the filmmaker’s craft immediately more apparent. The juxtaposition of still images reveals the filmmaker’s decisions and choices; and it also makes the audience a more active participant, allowing more time to reflect, make connections and let imaginations wander.

The programming provides a mixture of languid introspection and high-speed playfulness. Perhaps the most intensely contemplative film screening over the season’s first weekend was Ken Jacobs’s Capitalism: Child Labor (2006). A claustrophobic 14 minutes of relentless strobe flickering, the film consists of a single Victorian photograph of a factory floor. Jacobs focuses in on specific aspects of the picture – the cotton bobbins, the young boy’s bare feet, the stare of an older worker – always threatening to move beyond the single image but never able to leave it behind. Confronted with this interminable concentration on a single picture, the audience has no choice but to consider the serious implications of a seemingly non-descript, everyday image. Similarly, Toshio Matsumoto’s lyrical film on the work of Japanese stonemasons – Ishi no uta (Song of Stones, 1963) – presents us with a beautiful sense of time passing and history as the workers labour with the enduring, imposing rock-face. The more light-hearted films played with juxtaposing images to create humorous rhythms and connections, like Pas de repos pour Billy Brakko (No Rest for Billy Brakko, 1983), an early comic-strip animation by Jean Pierre-Jeunet, or De Tuin (The Garden, 1999), which cuts between different characters at a country residence to create a melodramatic soap opera of sexual tension, all merely suggested by constructing a knowing sequence of images.

The best films showing over the season’s first weekend managed to combine both serious observation and joyful whimsy. Arthur Lipsett’s Very Nice, Very Nice (1961) was a frenzied Pop Art short that created a critique of consumerist society while retaining a comic and celebratory love of montage. Der Tag eines unständigen Hafenarbeiters, (A Day in the Life of a Casual Dock Worker, 1966) may have had a more serious political or social aim in presenting the life of someone at the bottom of the labour hierarchy, but it also had a playful edge with its moving image interludes and nice set sequences presenting the dock worker’s morning routine. Agnès Varda’s Salut les Cubains (Hi there, Cubans, 1963) also had a political undertone with its love of ‘lyrical revolutionaries’, ‘romantic revolutionaries’. Its lingering still images allow the audience to reflect on Cuba’s political history; but the film does not separate its more sober aspects from beautifully lively montages of cha-cha-cha dance sequences. Cutting the photographs to a lilting voice-over, Varda’s pacing is extraordinarily perfect.

Loosely collected into different strands – the dancing photo on film, the photo novel, the filmic photograph – the films presented across the PhotoFilm season provide a great example of innovative and individualistic filmmaking, highlighting the processes and decisions that go into making cinema. Unfortunately, the thoughtful consideration of the programming is not reflected in its presentation: as the curators choose to introduce each individual film rather than providing a general introduction, the flow of the screenings becomes frustratingly fragmented. As the form of the photofilm encourages the audience to actively make connections within films and across works, it would be nice to allow the audience more room for contemplation. However, this problem aside, the curators have done a great job in bringing together rare works and drawing out some very interesting common threads within the genre.

Eleanor McKeown