{film} – Page 268 – { feuilleton }

Animating Piranesi

Piranesi Carceri d’Invenzione (2010).

When Peacay at BibliOdyssey linked to this short film by Grégoire Dupond I thought it might be one I hadn’t seen before but it turns out I have, and I mentioned the exhibition it was produced for in 2010. No matter, it’s worth drawing attention to again since Monsieur Dupond makes an impressive job of sending a virtual camera through the vast spaces of Piranesi’s Carceri d’invenzione, joining several of the etchings into a series of contiguous chambers.

The Sound of the Carceri (1998).

Dupond’s film uses Bach’s Cello Suite #2 as a musical accompaniment. As noted earlier that choice probably came from Yo-Yo Ma’s Inspired by Bach (1998) in which Bach’s six solo cello suites are performed in different settings. Suite #2 was The Sound of the Carceri directed by François Girard which places the cellist inside a CGI rending of one of Piranesi’s Careri etchings. YouTube has a copy here.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The etching and engraving archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Carceri, thermae and candelabra
• La Tour by Schuiten & Peeters
• Set in Stone
• Piranesi as designer
• Vedute di Roma
• Aldous Huxley on Piranesi’s Prisons

The Fourth Dimension

This post ought to have followed the one about Tango since it concerns another experimental film by Zbigniew Rybczynski. The Fourth Dimension was made in 1988 and like many of the director’s films uses a single effect to create striking results. In this case the effect involves photographing people and objects one narrow line at a time. When the lines are combined then shifted slightly the objects seem to bend and twist like melting plastic. This is the kind of semi-analogue technique which has now been made redundant by computer animation but Rybczynski gives his compositions a quasi-Surrealist quality, reinforced by the Magritte-like windows in some of the rooms.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Tango

Tango

Further film formalism. Tango (1980) by Polish filmmaker Zbigniew Rybczynski is a static shot of an empty room. A boy throws a ball in through the window, retrieves it, exits then throws the ball in through the window. His repeated action is the first of an interwoven series of looped actions by thirty-six different people who eventually form an impossible crowd passing through the room. All human life is here: eating, drinking, sex, death, exercise, breastfeeding, theft, an accident—there’s even a man carrying a toilet bowl. Rybczynski spent seven months doing this the hard way with optical printing which is why the quality fluctuates as the room becomes more crowded. The whole thing lasts eight minutes and you can watch it here.

La Région Centrale

I would have posted this yesterday if it hadn’t been for the news about Ray Bradbury, Michael Snow’s La Région Centrale (1971) and Tony Hill’s Downside Up being related in my head if nowhere else. For anyone interested in experimental cinema Michael Snow occupies a key position with a pair of films that aspire to a kind of epic formality: Wavelength (1967), his 45-minute zoom into a photograph at the opposite end of a room, and La Région Centrale which is shots of the Canadian landscape (and the sky above it) filmed by a continuously moving camera attached to a robotic arm. Since the the latter runs for three whole hours it’s not the kind of thing you’ll find on TV or even at at most arts cinemas. Consequently all I’ve ever seen are extracts like this but it fascinates all the same. The electronic noises are the sound of the camera arm in operation. Snow apparently said that he wanted the effect to be that of an alien probe exploring a new planet; given this you could probably class La Région Centrale as a piece of science fiction formalism along with Chris Marker’s La Jetée.

YouTube is the worst venue for films intended to absorb the viewer’s intention but for the curious there’s a rough copy of Wavelength here.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Downside Up
• Expanded Cinema by Gene Youngblood

Downside Up

Downside Up (1984)

For a long time I didn’t know which came first, Downside Up, a 16-minute short by experimental filmmaker Tony Hill, or Sensoria, the Cabaret Voltaire music video directed by Peter Care. Both were made in 1984 and both employ the same technique of a camera fixed to a special rig that allows shots to begin at ground level, rise parabolically into the air then descend to the ground again showing a reverse angle. Thanks to this Quietus interview with Peter Care last year we now know that Tony Hill’s film came first and that Care borrowed the rig for his video. Both are memorable pieces of work. Hill starts out with a series of slow shots accompanied by sounds that imply the camera is passing through the earth. This is contradicted later (and with gathering speed) when some of the shots are rotated through ninety degrees so they materialise out of building walls. Care stripped the technique down using faster shots that he cut with stop-motion footage of Richard Kirk and Stephen Mallinder. It’s the best of the promo videos made for the group.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Crackdown by Cabaret Voltaire