The art of Jordan Belson

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Target (Spectrum) (c.1953).

The static art, that is. When you read about Jordan Belson’s abstract films there’s occasionally some mention of his artworks but these haven’t always been easy to see. This situation has changed recently thanks to a dedicated Belson website which includes a gallery section for drawings, pastels, paintings and his collage landscapes. Landscapes aside, most of these are also abstract pieces, which doesn’t come as much of a surprise, and very good they are too. In addition, the site has seven of Belson’s films available for viewing which may not be everything but it’s an improvement on the sole Belson DVD which only features five films. This is all very positive, here’s hoping the site stays around. (Thanks to Stephen for the tip!)

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Nebula (1965).

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Thoughtform (2001).

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The abstract cinema archive

Oskar Fischinger: Visual Music

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Every so often I go looking for more of the documentaries about avant-garde cinema that Keith Griffiths produced for Channel 4 (UK) in the 1980s and 1990s. Oskar Fischinger: Visual Music (1992) is one I’d been after for a while but it took some time to finally surface in searches as a result of the uploader misspelling the name of its subject. Film historian William Moritz describes Fischinger’s films as “visual music”, a term which has since become more widely applied to abstract cinema although not all abstract films have musical scores. Fischinger was a pioneer in this area, not necessarily the first but a film-maker who in the 1930s pushed his techniques to a peak of complexity far beyond anything being attempted elsewhere. The acclaim for his short films attracted the attention of Paramount, MGM and Disney but Hollywood typically didn’t allow him to do the things he was best at once he’d been hired. As I’ve said before, Fischinger’s tests for the Toccata and Fugue in D Minor section of Fantasia were rejected as “too dinky” by the creator of an anthropomorphic cartoon mouse.

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Griffiths’ documentary ought have been twice as long as its 25 minutes but at least it was commissioned and broadcast. The interviewees are the aforementioned Moritz and Fischinger’s widow, Elfriede, who helped create some of the films and talks a little about her husband’s techniques. Half the running time is taken up with extracts from the films but the video quality does these no favours (and the picture is too damned dark…uploaders: adjust your gamma!), you’d be better off looking for copies of the complete films elsewhere. More from Moritz’s interview session turned up a year later in Griffiths’ Abstract Cinema, an excellent history of the form which, of course, included Fischinger’s films.

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An Optical Poem by Oskar Fischinger

California Images: Hi-fi for the Eyes

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More psychedelia-adjacent visuals. California Images (1985) is another of those video collections that pairs computer graphics and animation with music that’s mostly electronic, 54 minutes of cathode exotica aimed at armchair psychonauts with video-recorders. This one was produced by Pilot Video, and is subtitled “Hi-fi for the Eyes”, the term “hi-fi” doing a lot of work there for an NTSC video cassette. The quality, artistic as well as technical, may not be first-rate but I’m still pleased to see videos like this being resurrected. As I’ve said before, nobody would want to reissue these compilations today, especially the present example whose contents don’t always work well together.

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All the pieces are presented as separate shorts rather than running into each other, with most of them being very simple computer animation or the products of video feedback plus video synthesis. On the visual side, many of them seem to have had the slit-scan lightshow from 2001: A Space Odyssey as their ideal, while their soundtracks are mostly New-Age synth burblings which range from the okay to the mediocre. Between these clips are a couple of other items which don’t suit the hippy-trippy mood at all, especially the one titled Speed, several minutes of nocturnal driving footage accompanied by harsh industrial rhythms more suited to the TV Wipeout collection released by Cabaret Voltaire in 1984. Oddest of all is the inclusion of Oskar Fischinger’s Allegretto (1936), a classic of abstract animation whose meticulous artistry puts to shame many of the other offerings. The collection ends with Ed Emshwiller’s Sunstone (1979), one of the earliest attempts to push computer animation beyond pattern-making. Emshwiller’s luminous faces look towards the digital future. I remain partial to analogue video effects, however, and Electric Light Voyage, aka Ascent 1, is still my favourite of all the TV lightshows I’ve seen to date. The search for more like this one will continue.

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Dazzle
The Gate to the Mind’s Eye

Into the Midnight Underground

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Browsing Vimeo recently I found a film by Anna Thew, Cling Film, which I remembered seeing years ago on Midnight Underground, a TV series devoted to avant-garde cinema. The series was broadcast by Channel 4 (UK) for eight weeks in 1993, with each episode being screened shortly after midnight. The presenter was the always reliable Benjamin Woolley, sitting before a backdrop resembling one of Verner Panton’s psychedelic environments from where he introduced the cinematic offerings, an eclectic blend of avant-garde and experimental films, unusual dramas plus a couple of animations. Episodes ran for around an hour, with each installment following a different theme. The films were a mix of the old and the new: “classics” (for want of a better term) of underground cinema set alongside more recent works. This was very much a television equivalent of the screenings of avant-garde cinema which Film and Video Umbrella had been touring around Britain’s arthouses since the mid-1980s; one of the founders of FVU, Michael O’Pray, is thanked in the series credits. Midnight Underground was so tailored to my interests at the time it was easy to feel like this was being screened for my benefit alone. I taped everything as it was broadcast but I never got round to digitising all the episodes, so that many of the films shown there, Cling Film included, I haven’t seen for a long time.

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Benjamin Woolley.

The discovery of Anna Thew’s film set me wondering whether it would be possible to replicate the contents of Midnight Underground via links to various video sites. Since this post exists, the answer is obviously yes, or almost… Of the 44 films shown in the series only 5 are currently unavailable, with one more being limited to an extract and another as pay-to-view. This was a much better result than I expected, especially for works with such a limited appeal. The majority of the films shown in the series were being screened on British TV for the first time, also the last time for most of them. In 1993 Channel 4 was still maintaining its original brief, offering a genuine alternative to the programming on the other three terrestrial channels. As I’ve often complained here, this didn’t last; the underground remained underground. Woolley’s series was a brief taste of a televisual world where the concept of diversity could apply to form and content as well as identity. It’s a world the corporate channels will never show you, one you have to find for yourself.

* * *

1: Strange Spirits
The opening episode shows why I felt they were broadcasting this for me alone. Derek Jarman’s grainy film of a Throbbing Gristle performance is probably the first (and only?) time the group appeared on British TV. This was the first surprise. The second one was Kenneth Anger’s film being shown with its Janácek score. I’d seen this at an FVU screening a couple of years before with its ELO soundtrack, the so-called “Eldorado Edition”, which Anger later discarded. As for Daina Krumins’ weird and creepy religiose short, I expected this one to be unavailable but the director now has several of her films on YouTube. Don’t miss her even-weirder animated slime moulds, Babobilicons. The angel in Maggie Jailler’s film is artist (and Jarman/TG associate) Cerith Wyn Evans.

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TG: Psychic Rally in Heaven (Derek Jarman, 1981)
The Divine Miracle (Daina Krumins, 1973)
Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (Kenneth Anger, 1954)
L’ange frénétique (Maggie Jailler, 1985)


2: Music for the Eye and Ear
Bruce Conner’s films are continually elusive on the internet, especially those made to accompany music by Devo and Eno & Byrne. The version of Mongoloid linked here differs slightly from the original but it’s essentially the same film. Versailles II is taped from the Midnight Underground broadcast, and includes Benjamin Woolley’s introduction.

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Eaux d’artifice (Kenneth Anger, 1953)
Mongoloid (Bruce Conner, 1978)
Versailles II (Chris Garratt, 1976)
Stille Nacht II: Are We Still Married? (Quay Brothers, 1992)
All My Life (Bruce Baillie, 1966)
Scorpio Rising (Kenneth Anger, 1964)


3: New Sexualities
Stephen Dwoskin’s film is the one that shows a close-up of a woman’s face during the act of masturbation. This is paralleled later in the series by Antony Balch’s masturbatory self-portrait in Towers Open Fire. Cling Film is all about safe sex, and was broadcast in a slightly amended form to avoid being too explicit. The version on Vimeo is uncensored.

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Kiss (Chris Newby, 1992) (no video)
Kustom Kar Kommandos (Kenneth Anger, 1965)
Cling Film (Anna Thew, 1993)
Stain (Simon Pummell, 1992)
Asparagus (Suzan Pitt, 1979)
6/64: Mama und Papa (Materialaktion Otto Mühl) (Kurt Kren, 1964)
Moment (Stephen Dwoskin, 1969)


4: London Suite
Sundial and Mile End Purgatorio have both appeared here before as a result of my seeing them on Midnight Underground.

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Latifah and Himli’s Nomadic Uncle (Alnoor Dewshi, 1992)
Sundial (William Raban, 1993)
The London Story (Sally Potter, 1987) (pay-to-view)
Mile End Purgatorio (Guy Sherwin, 1991)
London Suite (Vivienne Dick, 1989) (no video)


Continue reading “Into the Midnight Underground”

Dazzle

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One of the things I used to enjoy doing with my old Sinclair Spectrum computer was stitching together short pieces of graphics-generating BASIC code in order to create a much longer compilation of the same, a visual mix comprised of the Spectrum’s crude logarithmic spirals, nested polygons and blinking squares. From the looks of it, Dazzle (1993) is a similar process applied to slightly more sophisticated computer graphics (made with an Amiga?), and with additional help from a vision mixer.

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The graphics were created to accompany 45 minutes of electronic music by Jonn Serrie, so this is essentially a video album although it also looks like another of those Laserdisc releases targeted at psychedelic voyagers. As I’ve noted before, the Internet Archive now has a lot of this stuff, none of which seems likely to ever be reissued so it may as well be archived there. Dazzle is simpler than the tripping discs but its formal qualities place it closer to abstract cinema than all those reels of dated 3D renderings.

Previously on { feuilleton }
The abstract cinema archive