Jordan Belson – { feuilleton }

Moirage, a film by Stan VanDerBeek

Further proof that if you wait long enough (almost) everything turns up eventually. In 2011 I mentioned a fruitless search for Moirage (1970), a short film by Stan VanDerBeek, and here it is, in a rather scratched print at the Internet Archive. The film proves to be as I expected, an abstract work that animates the kinds of patterns that would have been deemed Op Art in the few years before LSD use became widespread, but which were unavoidably psychedelic by the time VanDerBeek came to make his film.

The patterns were provided by Gerald Oster, a biophysicist who used his discoveries in photochemical research to create works of art. My Studio Vista guide to Op Art lists two Oster studies in its bibliography: a book, The Science of Moiré Patterns (1959), which included sheets of overlays for the reader to play with; and an article co-written with Yasunori Nishijima, Moiré Patterns, for Scientific American (May, 1963). (The magazine also had a moiré pattern as its cover illustration.) I was playing with moiré interference myself a few weeks ago so this discovery is a timely one. My experiments involved vector graphics, a much more versatile medium for creating these effects than the printed sheets that Oster and his colleagues had to create. I’d been thinking of using the patterns as part of a book design but haven’t decided yet whether they’re suitable.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Heavy-Light, a film by Adam K. Beckett
• An Optical Poem by Oskar Fischinger
• Moon 69, a film by Scott Bartlett
• Us Down By The Riverside, a film by Jud Yalkut
• Turn, Turn, Turn, a film by Jud Yalkut
• Mothlight, a film by Stan Brakhage
• Walter Ruttmann’s abstract cinema
• 7362, a film by Pat O’Neill
• Here and There, a film by Andrzej Pawlowski
• Power Spot by Michael Scroggins
• Kusama’s Self-Obliteration, a film by Jud Yalkut
• OffOn by Scott Bartlett
• The Flow III
• Science Friction by Stan VanDerBeek
• Chris Parks
• Len Lye
• Matrix III by John Whitney
• Symphonie Diagonale by Viking Eggeling
• Mary Ellen Bute: Films 1934–1957
• Norman McLaren
• John Whitney’s Catalog
• Arabesque by John Whitney
• Moonlight in Glory
• Jordan Belson on DVD
• Ten films by Oskar Fischinger
• Lapis by James Whitney

Heavy-Light, a film by Adam K. Beckett

In the early 1990s the UK’s Channel 4 still operated as an avant-garde television channel, broadcasting films, dramas and documentaries that the other channels would be unlikely to show. Late nights were often filled out with resolutely uncommercial fare, as was the case when Abstract Cinema was shown in 1993, a 50-minute documentary by Keith Griffiths that traced the history of abstract cinematic experimentation from the animations of Oskar Fischinger to the growing field of computer graphics. The documentary was followed by an additional 25 minutes of abstract shorts, one of which, Heavy-Light (1973) by Adam K. Beckett, is a particular favourite.

Most of Beckett’s films are free-form doodles, hand-drawn and dreamlike in their endlessly shifting and often erotic metamorphoses. Heavy-Light is different for being the product of some optical process that sends billowing waves of vivid colour blooming out of darkness. The effect is very similar to Jordan Belson’s films where the realisation is equally mysterious and the result equally (that word again) psychedelic; a bonus in Beckett’s film is the excellent score by Barry Schrader. Beckett died young at the age of 29 so there isn’t much of his work to see although a few of the animated films are also on YouTube at the moment (see here, here, here and here). They may not remain there for long so watch them while you can.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• An Optical Poem by Oskar Fischinger
• Moon 69, a film by Scott Bartlett
• Us Down By The Riverside, a film by Jud Yalkut
• Turn, Turn, Turn, a film by Jud Yalkut
• Mothlight, a film by Stan Brakhage
• Walter Ruttmann’s abstract cinema
• 7362, a film by Pat O’Neill
• Here and There, a film by Andrzej Pawlowski
• Power Spot by Michael Scroggins
• Kusama’s Self-Obliteration, a film by Jud Yalkut
• OffOn by Scott Bartlett
• The Flow III
• Chris Parks
• Len Lye
• Matrix III by John Whitney
• Symphonie Diagonale by Viking Eggeling
• Mary Ellen Bute: Films 1934–1957
• Norman McLaren
• John Whitney’s Catalog
• Arabesque by John Whitney
• Moonlight in Glory
• Jordan Belson on DVD
• Ten films by Oskar Fischinger
• Lapis by James Whitney

An Optical Poem by Oskar Fischinger

Oskar Fischinger’s only successful collaboration with a Hollywood studio was this 7-minute animation made for MGM in 1937. As with some of Fischinger’s earlier films, a piece of classical music is illustrated with dancing shapes of cut-out paper. The music in this instance is Liszt’s Second Hungarian Rhapsody, and this short was one of the films that brought Fischinger’s to Walt Disney’s attention when the Disney studio was planning a similarly abstract sequence for Fantasia. Fischinger worked on the Toccata and Fugue opening but his early efforts for Disney were dismissed as “too dinky” by the man responsible for a ubiquitous anthropomorphic mouse.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Moon 69, a film by Scott Bartlett
• Us Down By The Riverside, a film by Jud Yalkut
• Turn, Turn, Turn, a film by Jud Yalkut
• Mothlight, a film by Stan Brakhage
• Walter Ruttmann’s abstract cinema
• 7362, a film by Pat O’Neill
• Here and There, a film by Andrzej Pawlowski
• Power Spot by Michael Scroggins
• Kusama’s Self-Obliteration, a film by Jud Yalkut
• OffOn by Scott Bartlett
• The Flow III
• Chris Parks
• Len Lye
• Matrix III by John Whitney
• Symphonie Diagonale by Viking Eggeling
• Mary Ellen Bute: Films 1934–1957
• Norman McLaren
• John Whitney’s Catalog
• Arabesque by John Whitney
• Moonlight in Glory
• Jordan Belson on DVD
• Ten films by Oskar Fischinger
• Lapis by James Whitney

Language of the Birds: Occult and Art

Astrological Ouroboros (1965) by Paul Laffoley.

Language of the Birds is an occult-themed art show at 80WSE, New York University, that opened this week and runs to 13 February, 2016. Curator Pam Grossman has assembled a stunning collection of work by artists, occultists, and occult-artists old and new:

Kenneth Anger * Anohni * Laura Battle * Jordan Belson * Alison Blickle * Carol Bove * Jesse Bransford * BREYER P-ORRIDGE * John Brill * Robert Buratti * Elijah Burgher * Cameron * Leonora Carrington * Francesco Clemente * Ira Cohen * Brian Cotnoir * Aleister Crowley * Enrico Donati * El Gato Chimney * Leonor Fini * JFC Fuller * Helen Rebekah Garber * Rik Garrett * Delia Gonzalez * Jonah Groeneboer * Juanita Guccione * Brion Gysin * Frank Haines * Barry William Hale * Valerie Hammond * Ken Henson * Bernard Hoffman * Nino Japaridze * Gerome Kamrowski * Leo Kenney * Paul Laffoley * Adela Leibowitz * Darcilio Lima * Angus MacLise * Ann McCoy * Rithika Merchant * William Mortensen * Rosaleen Norton * Micki Pellerano * Ryan M Pfeiffer & Rebecca Walz * Max Razdow * Ron Regé, Jr. * Rebecca Salmon * Kurt Seligmann * Harry Smith * Kiki Smith * Xul Solar * Austin Osman Spare * Charles Stein * Shannon Taggart * Gordon Terry * Scott Treleaven * Panos Tsagaris * Charmion von Wiegand * Robert Wang * Peter Lamborn Wilson * Lionel Ziprin

El Nigromante (1950) by Leonora Carrington.

More details for lucky New Yorkers may be found here. In addition, there’s an Occult Humanities Conference that runs through the weekend of February 5th.

Moon 69, a film by Scott Bartlett

Scott Bartlett was the director of OffOn (1967), one of the key works of psychedelic cinema, and an earlier example of experimental film making use of video effects. Similar effects may be seen in Bartlett’s follow-up, Moon 69, which subjects footage from the NASA archives to a variety of processing techniques, especially solarisation. The copy linked here is the only available one at the moment, and is hosted by a channel where several similar films have amended soundtracks. Consequently, the soundtrack on this one may not be the original.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Us Down By The Riverside, a film by Jud Yalkut
• Turn, Turn, Turn, a film by Jud Yalkut
• Mothlight, a film by Stan Brakhage
• Walter Ruttmann’s abstract cinema
• 7362, a film by Pat O’Neill
• Here and There, a film by Andrzej Pawlowski
• Power Spot by Michael Scroggins
• Kusama’s Self-Obliteration, a film by Jud Yalkut
• OffOn by Scott Bartlett
• The Flow III
• Chris Parks
• Len Lye
• Matrix III by John Whitney
• Symphonie Diagonale by Viking Eggeling
• Mary Ellen Bute: Films 1934–1957
• Norman McLaren
• John Whitney’s Catalog
• Arabesque by John Whitney
• Moonlight in Glory
• Jordan Belson on DVD
• Ten films by Oskar Fischinger
• Lapis by James Whitney