[Frameworks] Letter to other Filmmaker Artists

[Pip Chodorov]

Hi Matt, I'll tackle that one!

Black Ice is a great example.

A) You know that Brakhage's hand-painted films at that time were 
based on poetic visions of real-world inspiration: Chartres Series 
was inspired by the stained-glass windows of Chartres and in their 
particular blue color that he strived to remember ; Autumnal by the 
colors and feelings of the season, etc. Black Ice was made after he 
fell on black ice and the visions that gave him. Just like a poet 
trying to communicate a deep feeling from one human to another 
through the clunky words of everyday language, he picked up his film, 
paints, brushes and tools, sat in the cafe in Boulder and scratched, 
scraped and painted these visions onto pieces of film. The work was 
physical, manual and it was about making an imprint and impression on 
that solid material that would also be projectable as a visual, 
meaningful, beautiful, communicative image in light. The first 
impulse was then to make painterly gestures, not with a keyboard and 
mouse, and those gestures, those imprints by those thumbs, are 
visible on the screen today.

B) These sources of inspiration are about light (transparency and 
opacity) and color: blue glass, black ice... Working with film 
material and paint is also about transparency and opacity and color. 
There is a direct relationship there, unlike the indirect 
relationship of a computer emulating the way something could look 
("virtual" is the term I think).

C) The painted strips were then used as a base to be optically 
printed following a score. Brakhage himself did not do the printing, 
but carefully noted his ideas for Sam Bush, the technician at Western 
Cine. A fugue of rhythms and patterns were created from the painted 
material. In the case of Black Ice, the image turning and zooming in 
gives us the feeling of falling into the blackness. The black of 
film, being a total absence of light, is really a black void compared 
to the grey of the video screen which is illuminated even when there 
is no picture. This gives Black Ice almost a 3D effect, pitching 
forward and losing consciousness.

D) If you have only seen Black Ice on DVD, of course you won't have 
the experience of these colors and this depth. As I wrote on 
FrameWorks August 25, 2003, the MPEG2 file on the Criterion DVD 
"contains less information about how the colors bleed and blend into 
each other, in that particular way they do in Black Ice, for example, 
when different hand-painted stocks are superimposed in the printer. 
There are blues blending into whites blending into blacks, and these 
subtle smooth gradations and grains seem to be reduced on the DVD to 
fields of hues of delimited color, with shapes to them, shapes with 
contours instead of hazy edges. There seem to be less of a range of 
subtle colors, a reduced palette." And on 17 June 2005 I added "The 
colors may look bright and beautiful but there is a lot of detail 
from the film that is missing on the DVD. They used a clever 
compression strategy that makes the work look good, but quite 
different from the original. I suppose that is a matter of taste at 
this point, the way things are going." I think, Matt, that you are 
right when you say Brakhage could have made a film like that on 
video, if you are refering to the DVD experience, but the film 
experience is quite different and I don't think the particular 
qualities of this film could be made on a computer as we know them 
today. The algorythms that have been developed and the way in which 
programmers and chip designers have chosen to manipulate pixels when 
representing light have led computer graphics in a certain direction 
from which there is little chance of return to that creative 
experimental space where Vanderbeek, or Whitney, or Paik, or 
Tambellini, found themselves in the 1960s, excited by what computer 
graphics could become. Brakhage in 1994 was still excited by film 
graphics, and Black Ice is a great example of a film that comes 
straight out of an idea applied to a manual, painterly technology, 
that would be hard to approach using information technology.

-Pip


At 23:29 -0700 22/07/10, Matt Helme wrote:
>
>With technology being what it is,Brakhage could have made a film 
>like "Black Ice " on Video .
>Matt
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman-mail5.webfaction.com/pipermail/frameworks/attachments/20100723/12e0d9af/attachment-0001.html