Thursday, March 11, 2010

Fluxus Film No.23 - Sun in Your Head : Television Decollage (1963) by Wolf Vostell and a 1968 interview

Wolf Vostell (14 October 1932 in Leverkusen, Germany – 3 April 1998 in Berlin) was a German painter, sculptor, noise music maker and Happening artist of the second half of the 20th century. Wolf Vostell is considered one of the pioneers of video art, environment-sculptures, Happenings and the Fluxus Movement. Techniques such as blurring and the dé-collage are characteristic of his work, as is embedding objects in concrete.
His philosophy was built around the idea that destruction is all around us and it runs through all of the twentieth century. He used the term dé-coll/age (in connection with a plane crash) to refer to the process of tearing down posters, and for the use of mobile fragments of reality.


More information on Wolf Vostell can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolf_Vostell

Wolf Vostell, 1968 Interview





The Exorcist Trailer (1973) Warner Brothers

This vintage trailer for William Freidkin's film, The Exorcist based on William Peter Blatty's novel of the same name was banned by executives due to concerns that the content within was too disturbing for audiences. It's possibly one of the finest trailers I've ever seen and plays like a short film.
Release Date: December 25, 1973



Peyote Queen (1965) by Storm De Hirsch





A classic of the psychedelic tendency, Peyote Queen is directed by the film-maker, Storm De Hirsch. The film is designed as an attempt to visually render the wealth of kaleidoscope visions of peyote (the hallucinogenic cactus ritually used by the Indians of New Mexico) onto film. According to the film-maker, Peyote Queen is an exploration in the color of ritual, in the color of thought, a journey in the depths of sensory disorder, of the inner vision, where mysteries are represented in the theater of the soul.
Storm De Hirsch : Like many experimental filmmakers at the time, she did not begin her artistic career as a filmmaker. She had been a poet and published a number of works in the early 60's. She wanted to find a new mode of expression for her thoughts that went beyond words on the page, which is when she turned to film making. Despite lack of recognition, she was very present in the underground film movement and socialized with every big name on the scene, filmmakers such as Stan Brakhage, Jonas Mekas, Shirley Clarke and others. She mentions Jack Smith, Ingmar Bergman, Gregory Markopoulos, Michaelangelo Antoniono, Vittorio De Seta, Ken Jacobs, Federico Fellini" and Jonas and Adolphus Mekas as her favorite filmmakers.

On Peyote Queen:

"A further exploration into the color of ritual, the color of thought; a journey through the underworld of sensory derangement." - Canyon Cinema

"Soon the technicolor tiger claw scratches melt into dancing, human-like lines, and this is intercut with the progressive symbolism of the glyphs — breasts, fish, water, stars, the moon, female lips, seemingly a sailboat — De Hirsch represents these prehistoric glyphs by painting directly on the film stock. Unique, psychedelic motifs such as these certify Peyote Queen as an avant-garde gem." - DINCA BLOG

"A very beautiful work! The abstractions drawn directly on film are like the paintings of Miró moving at full speed to the rhythm of an African beat." - D. Noguez, La Nouvelle Revue Française

"Among my favorites ... beauty and excitement." - Jonas Mekas, The Village Voice


Refrences: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storm_de_Hirsch

Din of Celestial Birds (2006) by Q6 (David Wexler, Ben Gillespie, Ariana Tosatto, Miguel Eckstein, Leigh McCloskey and E. Elias Merhige)




















''Din of Celestial Birds'' is a short film created by Q6, an evolving collective of philosophers and artists. The film begins with the phrase "hello and welcome ... do not be afraid ... be comforted ... remember ... our origin..." and proceeds to depict the first violent formation of matter from nothingness. Then, after a hyper-accelerated trip through the evolution of life and the earth, the film culminates in the birth of a embryonic pseudo-humanoid that reaches to some unknown source.

Written by David Wexler
(Visual Designer/Cinematographer/Composer for Din of Celestial Birds)


Leigh McCloskey has been working with his long time friend and fellow visionary, the director E.Elias Merhige (Begotten, Shadow of the Vampire, Suspect Zero) on a short film for Turner Classic Movies and Hermes, entitled, Din of Celestial Birds. Leigh and Elias drew together a group of unique ... See Morephilosophical and creative beings to give birth to the entity of this film. The six members are David Wexler, Ben Gillespie, Ariana Tosatto, Miguel Eckstein, Leigh McCloskey and E. Elias Merhige. Together they formed the Quintessence of Six or the Q6, as a way of creating in tangible form an alternative approach for exploring the nature of consciousness. If consciousness is to be known with any depth only the languages of creation hold the key. This film is a tangible expression of this philosophical proposition. The Q6 and their film, Din of Celestial Birds, visually takes us on a journey into the darkness, mystery and struggle of origin and will be a living statement and invitation to consider an alternative model for the purpose and function of art and creativity. Din of Celestial Birds will be shown on TCM in Sept. and shown at Hermes galleries and kiosks throughout the world.

From: http://www.leighmccloskey.com/Contact_me/feedback.htm#Movies:_

Din of Celestial Birds by E. Elias Merhige: Merhige recalls the celebrated works of such film pioneers as the Lumiere Brothers and Fritz Lang through this visually sumptuous short film. In it, he uses the camera as an all-seeing eye witnessing the divine mystery of creation―the soul's movement into matter and the first glimpse of Eden. To make the film, he employs an astrophysicist, a visionary painter, and a multi-media performance artist, and implements filming techniques that cover the full range of cinematic history.

E.Elias Merhige
Native to Brooklyn, New York, Merhige received his Bachelor of Fine Arts in Motion Picture Directing from State University New York. After graduation, he dove into film quickly with his first feature Begotten (1991).Doing just about everything from directing and writing, to producing and editing, his hard work was rewarded when it was listed among the top ten films of the year by Time magazine. Susan Sontag, Donald Richie, Amos Vogel, and Chris Marker, embraced the film and praised it as a masterpiece of visionary art.After Begotten, Merhige worked for the stage, directing a number of plays, including A Dream Play, A Midsummer Night's Dream and Waiting for Godot.

In 2000, Merhige returned to the big screen and completed his second feature, the dramatic expressionist film, Shadow of the Vampire, produced by Nicholas Cage, starring John Malkovich and Willem Dafoe. The film became a critically acclaimed success and earned one Golden Globe and two Oscar nominations in the year 2001. Elias's third film, "Suspect Zero" was hailed by the Los Angeles times as a "wildly visionary and original psychological thriller." Besides directing, Merhige also produced the film with Cruise/Wagner. It was released by Paramount Pictures, starring Ben Kingsley, Aaron Eckhart, and Carrie-Anne Moss.Besides directing, Merhige has lectured on aesthetics at the Carnegie Mellon Museum and the American Film Institute in Washington, D.C.

A Statement from E. Elias Merhige Regarding Din of Celestial Birds:
For me making a film is about a vision, a dream that is liberated through the very act of it's making. It comes out of an intense desire to hold nothing back.I look at all the painters and poets who have extended our senses and given us a view of the extraordinary that is always ... See Morepresent in what we think is ordinary. Painters like Bosch, and Blake showed us worlds and got us to see and feel what was previously impossible. They opened a door to the mysterious and mythological much the same way the technology and invention of the Hubble telescope has allowed us a window to see and experience the universe for the first time as a magnificent work of art, a canvass upon which God has painted the great mystery of creation.Imagination and technology, art and science, this is what gave birth to the cinema.Invited to make this film I asked: "What are the myths for our time?" The stories and images that nourish us and hold us rapt in awe and remind us of the ferocious beauty that always surrounds us. This question brought me back to the imagination and technology of Fritz Lang's "Metropolis" where he and his team created miniatures and used special mirrors and lenses to create a magnificent future city. I thought of the Lumiere brothers and the image of the train pulling into the station and how something so simple and ordinary made it's audience scream and run from the theater howling in terror and delight. I recalled the brilliant poetic use of technology in Jean Cocteau's film "Blood of a Poet" where camera speeds and camera position take an audience through multiple worlds of experience and perception leaving us with an amazing sense of the uncanny and the possibility of a human story that expands and extends beyond the ordinary world but is only a "mirror" away.Yes, these great filmmakers show us films power and potential to create myths and worlds, this is what I wanted to focus on. To use my camera as an all seeing eye witnessing the divine mystery of creation, to see the soul's movement into matter, to see that first glimpse of Eden. To do this I wanted to create a silent film from the future as well as the past; utilizing the extreme polarities of technology from the beginning of cinema to present day.It needed to be a handcrafted film, incorporating miniature sculpted sets inspired by the innovation of Fritz Lang's city of "Metropolis", handmade lenses inspired by the Lumiere brothers to software and technologies created specifically for this project.So how is this to be accomplished? Do I use my usual crew of production facilities and producers to call in favors from labs and post houses and rental companies to work for free on something they may not even care about? Or should this be done in a manor that is totally hand made and totally personal?In my case I decided the later. I stripped my idea down to its simplest form and peeled my crew back to people I trust- my friends- a computational visual neuroscientist, a visual philosopher/painter, a multi-media performance artist, a gifted musician composer, and a sculptor/painter.I then took off to search for creation in its simplest and purest form. This is what I found.


 From: http://www.tcm.com/thismonth/article.jsp?cid=144228&mainArticleId=142631 



Din of Celestial Birds | MySpace Video

Alice in Wonderland (1903) by Cecil Hepworth and Percy Stow

The first-ever film version of Lewis Carroll's tale has recently been restored by the BFI National Archive from severely damaged materials. Made just 37 years after Lewis Carroll wrote his novel and eight years after the birth of cinema, the adaptation was directed by Cecil Hepworth and Percy Stow, and was based on Sir John Tenniel's original illustrations. In an act that was to echo more than 100 years later, Hepworth cast his wife as the Red Queen, and he himself appears as the Frog Footman. Even the Cheshire cat is played by a family pet.

With a running time of just 12 minutes (8 of which survive), Alice in Wonderland was the longest film produced in England at that time. Film archivists have been able to restore the film's original colours for the first time in over 100 years.

Music: 'Jill in the Box', composed and performed by Wendy Hiscocks.

To find out more about the film, visit http://www.screenonline.org.uk/film/i...

The first video below includes commentary by film historian, Simon Brown.
The second is the film without commentary.




Limbo Land (1984) by Joe Reitzer

This is an example of early video art developed by students at the Electronic Visualization Lab. This video was created by Joe Reitzer.

More information can be found on the EVL website - http://www.evl.uic.edu/core.php?mod=4...


Strings and Vectors (1984) by Marilyn Wulff

This is an example of early computer graphics animation developed by students at the Electronic Visualization Lab. This video was created by Marilyn Wulff.

More information can be found on the EVL website - www.evl.uic.edu


Two Boxes at Once (1979) by Mark McKernin

This is an example of early computer graphics animation on the Datamax UV-1, developed by students at the Electronic Visualization Lab. This animation was created by Mark McKernin.
More information can be found on the EVL website - http://www.evl.uic.edu/core.php?mod=4... and http://www.evl.uic.edu/core.php?mod=4...


Calculated Movements (1985) by Larry Cuba

(1985) Calculated Movements by Larry Cuba is an example of early video art using software developed at the Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL). The video has a minimalist/ambient original sound piece.

In the 1970s the computer graphics for the first Star Wars film (1977) was created by Larry Cuba at the Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) (at the time known as the Circle Graphics Habitat) at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Calculated Movements is a sample of Cuba's later work.

More information can be found on the EVL website - http://www.evl.uic.edu/core.php?mod=4...


FREIHEIT (1966) by George Lucas

Freiheit (German for "freedom") is a 1966 short film by George Lucas. It follows a student's attempt to escape to freedom. This student (Randal Kleiser) tries to run across the Berlin border, but ends up being shot in the chest and side gut and is mortally wounded. While he dies, he thinks about dying for freedom. It was made while Lucas was a film student at the University of Southern California.

George Lucas is a writer-director that established him as a major figure in Hollywood consists of just three titles, made between 1971 and 1977 -- THX 1138, American Graffiti, Star Wars -- and there was a 22-year hiatus between Star Wars Episode IV and his only other feature-film directing credits, the three Star Wars prequels.

Randal Kleiser has directed several feature films, including Grease (1978), The Blue Lagoon (1980) with Brooke Shields, Summer Lovers (1982) with Daryl Hannah, Grandview, U.S.A. (1984) with Jamie Lee Curtis, Flight of the Navigator (1986), featuring the first use of digital morphing in a film, Big Top Pee-wee (1988), White Fang (1991) and Honey, I Blew Up the Kid (1992).

Refrences:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Lucas
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randal_Kleiser

My Best Friend's Birthday (1987) by Craig Hamann and Quentin Tarantino

My Best Friend's Birthday is a black and white amateur film written by Craig Hamann and Quentin Tarantino and directed by Quentin Tarantino, while he was working at the now shuttered Video Archives in Manhattan Beach, California. The project started in 1984, when Hamann wrote a short 30-40 page script about a young man who continually tries to do something nice for his friend's birthday, only to have his efforts backfire.

Tarantino became attached to the project as co-writer and director, and he and Hamann expanded the short script into an 80 page script. On an estimated budget of $5,000, they shot the film on 16mm over the course of the next four years. Hamann and Tarantino starred in the film, along with several video store and acting class buddies, and worked on the crew, which included fellow Video Archives employees Rand Vossler and Roger Avary. It is the most overtly comedic film that Tarantino has made. In an interview with Charlie Rose (available on the Region 1, Collector's Edition DVD), he referred to it as a "[Dean] Martin and [Jerry] Lewis kind of thing."

The original cut was about 70 minutes long but due to a fire only 36 minutes of the film survived. The 36 minute cut has been shown at several film festivals. It has never been officially released. Several actors in this film later appeared in Tarantino's other films Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, and Kill Bill.

Tarantino has referred to this film as his "film school". Although the film was by his own admission very poorly directed, the experience gained from the film helped him in directing future films.

Refrences: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Best_Friend%27s_Birthday










"HWY: An American Pastoral" (1969) Jim Morrison's student film


"HWY: An American Pastoral", is a 1969 student film created by Jim Morrison, Frank Lisciandro, Paul Ferrara y Babe Hill with music by Fred Myrow and sound engineering by Bruce Botnick.

Jim Morrison attended the Florida State University (FSU) in Tallahassee where he appeared in a school recruitment film. In January 1964, Morrison moved to Los Angeles, California. He completed his undergraduate degree in UCLA's film school, the Theater Arts department of the College of Fine Arts in 1965. He made two films while attending UCLA. First Love, the first of these films, was released to the public when it appeared in a documentary about the film Obscura.

Refrences: www.wikipedia.com















Interview with the Philip K. Dick Android


An android-portrait of Philip K Dick—In an unparalleled technical collaboration, a team of artists, writers, engineers, literary scholars, and freethinkers are creating a lifelike, android portrait of one of America's well-known science-fiction writers.
Video of Philip K. Dick robot at AAAI-05 conference: [1] [2] [3] [4] [5]
A Strange Loss of Face—The robot made several public appearances last year, including at the Comic Con in San Diego, where he (it?) was on a panel for the film, "A Scanner Darkly," which is based on a Dick novel.
The android, which looked just like the author and was able to conduct rudimentary conversations about Mr. Dick's work and ideas, was at the cutting edge of robotic technology, able to make eye contact and believable facial expressions...using the latest artificial intelligence...and a skin-like substance called "frubber."

Below videos of interviews conducted with the Philip K. Dick android at the NextFest in Chicago, 2005. The android's head has subsequently gone missing and is believed to have been stolen.

Article on the PKD android's creator: 
 http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/24/books/review/how-to-build-an-android-by-david-f-dufty.html?_r=1&smid=fb-share

Refrences: deoxy.org/media/
PKD












Daniel Zurawski's, The Eye of Silence

UK artist Daniel Zurawski's, The Eye of Silence is about a doll's head which is lost down a dark sewer. An experimental animation which is inspired by the idea of returning to the womb.


Dylan Elise, Percussion Prodigy

This video features Dylan Elise's amazing solo drum performance at the Tauranga National Jazz Festival. He is sixteen years old in this clip.

Gumbasia (1955) by Art Clokey

Arthur "Art" Clokey
(born Arthur C. Farrington)
October 12, 1921 - January 8, 2010

Arthur "Art" Clokey was born in Detroit, Michigan and became a pioneer in the popularization of stop motion clay animation, beginning in 1955 with a film experiment called Gumbasia, influenced by his professor Slavko Vorkapich at the University of Southern California.[citation needed] He is best known for his animated television character Gumby. Clokey and his wife Ruth invented Gumby in the early 1950s at their Covina home shortly after he had finished film school at USC. Since 1955, Gumby and his horse Pokey have been a familiar presence on television, appearing in several series—and even in a 1995 feature film, Gumby: The Movie. Clokey's second most famous production is the duo of Davey and Goliath, funded by the Lutheran Church in America.His student film Gumbasia (1955), consisting of animated clay shapes contorting to a jazz score, so intrigued Samuel G. Engel, then president of the Motion Pictures Producers Association, that he financed the pilot film for what became Art Clokey's The Gumby Show (1957). The title Gumbasia is an homage to Walt Disney's Fantasia.

For more information on Art Clokey: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_Clokey


GUMBASIA, an amazing surrealist film by the late, great Art Clokey
(October 12, 1921-
January 8, 2010)
 
A video clip from an interview where Clokey describes his experiences with LSD


Giuseppe Arcimboldo 1527-1593

Giuseppe Arcimboldo, self portrait


Giuseppe Arcimboldo (also spelled Arcimboldi; 1527 - July 11, 1593) was an Italian painter best known for creating imaginative portrait heads made entirely of such objects as fruits, vegetables, flowers, fish, and books — that is, he painted representations of these objects on the canvas arranged in such a way that the whole collection of objects formed a recognizable likeness of the portrait subject.

For more on Giuseppe Arcimboldo: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giuseppe_Arcimboldo


Autumn, 1573
oil on canvas
Louvre Museum, Paris

Winter, 1573
oil on canvas
Louvre Museum, Paris

Winter (L'Inverno)

Winter (4)

Whimsical Portrait

Vortumnus (Vertumno)

Vegetables in a Bowl or The Gardener

The Water the Water, 1563

The Sense of Smell

The Seasons Pic-4

The Seasons Pic-3

The Seasons Pic-2

The Seasons Pic-1

The Fire, 1566

The Cook

The Admiral

The Librarian, 1566
oil on canvas
Skokloster Castle, Sweden


The Jurist, 1566
Nationalmuseum, Sweden




Summer, 1573
oil on canvas
Louvre Museum, Paris


Summer (4)

Summer (4), (detail)

Spring (3)

Spring (2)

Spring, 1573
oil on canvas
Louvre Museum, Paris

Seated Figure of Summer, 1573

Portrait of Eve

Portrait of Adam

Earth, 1570

An earlier version of 'Summer', 1563
Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna, Austria