{abstract cinema} – { feuilleton }

Doodlin’ – Impressions of Len Lye

Finally, finally, Keith Griffiths’ documentary about Len Lye (1901–1980) turns up on YouTube. Doodlin’ – Impressions of Len Lye was made in 1987, and is one of several films that Griffiths made about avant-garde film-makers. There’s some slight crossover with his later history of abstract cinema—Stan Brakhage turns up in both films—but Lye was always much more than a film-maker despite his pioneering work of the 1930s. Doodlin’ charts Lye’s progress from his youth in New Zealand, where his earliest artistic impulses were oriented towards painting, to his travels through Samoa and Australia, and from there to London where almost by accident he ended up making short, semi-abstract films for the General Post Office’s promotional division. The single constant in Lye’s life was a restless creativity, something he later brought to kinetic sculpture after he moved to America in the 1940s. Lye is justly celebrated for his short films: Free Radicals (1958/79) is an extraordinary piece of abstract cinema, white lines and marks scratched onto the emulsion of a strip of unprocessed film that jump and flash in time to a recording of African drums. Griffiths’ documentary is a reminder that Lye was also an artist who was never constrained by a single medium.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The abstract cinema archive

Weekend links 827

Dante in his Study with Episodes from the Inferno (1978) by Tom Phillips.

• “This set, featuring two of the surviving members of Cabaret Voltaire, is as clear and powerful as any of the live albums the group released while Richard H. Kirk was alive.” Derek Walmsley, reviewing what we’ve been told will be the last ever Cabaret Voltaire album. I can also vouch for its excellence but then I’m not what you might call an impartial listener. My copy arrived in the post only a couple of hours before Boards Of Canada made the announcement they’d been teasing for the past two weeks—the new BOC album, Inferno, will be released at the end of May—a coincidence that felt vaguely significant. “How random is random?” as William Burroughs used to say. It’s tempting to describe the moment as the passing of a creative torch but I doubt either of the groups would agree. Boards Of Canada’s approach to electronic music has always been very different to that of Cabaret Voltaire: less aggressive, more melodic, more pastoral, more concerned with memories and the past than with the present or the near future. But the promotional videos for Inferno are reminiscent of the scratch videos that Cabaret Voltaire were creating in the 1980s: degraded VHS assemblages collaged from TV broadcasts and home-movie footage, visual equivalents of a tuning dial running through the shortwave radio spectrum. Then there’s the latest BOC album art which, when taken with details from the teaser video, foregrounds the same fascination with American bastardisations of Christianity that the Cabs were referring to in Sluggin’ Fer Jesus and The Covenant, The Sword And The Arm Of The Lord. I’ll leave it to others to play with the interpretations that can be brought to an album title like Inferno. We’ll no doubt be seeing a great deal of journalistic musing around this and related issues before and after the end of May.

• Jiří Barta’s Expressionist animated adaptation of the Pied Piper story, Krysař (1985), has turned up in high definition at YouTube. Ignore the credit for Wilfred Jackson, an American animation director who had nothing to do with Barta’s film.

• At Public Domain Review: Magic by return of post: Allan Johnson explores the history of those mail-order occult outfits whose ads fill out the pages of the early American pulps.

• Visual Music: a lecture by Simon Reynolds describing the use of electronic music as a soundtrack for abstract cinema.

• At the BFI: Anton Bitel selects 10 great Brazilian horror films.

• There’s more intermediate eyeball fodder at Unquiet Things.

• Your Name in Landsat

• FruitierThanThou

• Disco Inferno (1976) by The Trammps | Inferno (Main Title Theme) (1980) by Keith Emerson | Om Riff From The Cosmic Inferno (2005) by IAO Chant From The Cosmic Inferno

Three short films by Piotr Kamler

Telemann.

The DVD of Piotr Kamler’s animations released by aaa a few years ago contained almost all of the director’s works, comprising a handful of short films together with the 50-minute Chronopolis. The most recent film in the collection was Une mission éphémère, made in 1993, but this wasn’t the last of Kamler’s films. He was still active in the 2000s, and exploring new animation methods using computer graphics. Four shorts resulted from this period: Telemann (2006), Continu-discontinu 2010 (a reworking of one of his earliest films), Five Visual Pieces for Solo Computer (2013), and Perpetuum Mobile (2015). Continu-discontinu 2010 turned up on Vimeo a few years ago, and still seems to be there although you now have to be logged in to see it. The other three films were uploaded recently to the Internet Archive, and together form a distinct quartet in the Kamler filmography.

Five Visual Pieces for Solo Computer.

All four films are exercises in abstract animation, where shapes and colours evolve and change in time to a musical accompaniment. This is a very old cinematic form yet one that still seems fresh because of its scarcity. Telemann, which harks back to the “visual music” of Oskar Fischinger, pairs a dancing group of vertical lines with a piece by Baroque composer Georg Telemann. The animation isn’t as strictly choreographed as Fischinger’s films or Lejf Marcussen’s Tone Traces but it functions well enough as another abstract rendering of musical transcription. The other two films are closer to Kamler’s earlier shorts in the restless motion of their separate elements, with music by Beatriz Ferreyra and Polish group Kwadrofonik.

Perpetuum Mobile.

I thought for a while that the Kamler DVD was out of print but the aaa website still has a page with an active purchase link. A high-definition collection of all of Kamler’s films would be the ideal but for now the DVD is the best you can get.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The abstract cinema archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Continu-discontinu 2010, a film by Piotr Kamler
• L’Araignéléphant
• Le labyrinthe and Coeur de secours
• Chronopolis by Piotr Kamler

Locked Groove

It’s been a while since Scotto Moore’s newsletter turned up any of the abstract animated visuals I enjoy. Locked Groove by Emanuele Kabu fits the bill perfectly, an exercise in vibrant random symmetry which bears the subtitle “A hypnotic audiovisual animation inspired by pareidolia”. The video might also have been inspired by psychedelic hallucination given the way it captures the tendency of the abstract patterns generated by psychedelic delirium to continually change their size, shape and colour. This is one feature of the psychedelic experience you don’t see reproduced very often even though animation has long been the ideal medium for creating such effects. Kabu has soundtracked the metamorphoses with analogue synth noises but you could just as easily watch them with a suitably psychedelic piece of music.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Short films by Hideki Inaba

Weekend links 777

The Seven Wonders of the World (1886). 1: Lighthouse on the Island of Pharos, Alexandria; 2: Statue of the Olympian Jupiter; 3: The Colossus at Rhodes; 4: The Temple of Diana at Ephesus; 5: The Mausoleum of Artemisia; 6: The Pyramids of Egypt; 7: The Walls and Hanging Gardens of Babylon.

• “The space of possible languages is vast, and full of exotic languages that are much weirder and stranger than any we have yet imagined.” Nikhil Mahant on the many possible forms of alien language.

• Among the new titles at Standard Ebooks, the home of free, high-quality, public-domain texts: Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse (translated by Basil Creighton).

• At Alan Moore World: A new interview with Mr Moore about Long London, magic and the future of humanity.

• New music: The Reverent Sky by Steve Roach; and Contrary Motion by Scanner & Nurse With Wound.

• At Public Domain Review: Tangled Dürer: The Six Knots (ca. before 1521).

• At The Daily Heller: A Typographer’s Mother Goose by Louise Fili.

• At Colossal: Woodblock prints by Utagawa Hiroshige.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Jud Yalkut’s Day.

• The Strange World of…Steve Aylett.

• Seven And Seven Is (1966) by Love | Seven By Seven (1973) by Hawkwind | Seven, Seven, Seven (1995) by Money Mark