[Frameworks] Experimental Editing - writings and films

[Mónica Savirón]

EVERYWHERE AT ONCE (1985) by Alan Berliner.

On Thu, Aug 4, 2011 at 7:07 AM, David Tetzlaff <djtet53 at gmail.com> wrote:

> A citation eludes me (and my library is all in boxes), but one way I would
> locate experimental film vs. conventional film in class discussions was by
> referring to the concept of the 'content curve.' This is the idea, used in
> conceptualizing 'mainstream' editing that any image - depending on its
> visual complexity and context within the larger structure - takes a certain
> period of time for the viewer to read. This is apart from narrative content
> and concerns of rhythm or pacing: just as visual information there is a
> certain 'natural' time window for an image to be on screen. Cut away too
> quickly and the viewer says 'hey, I didn't get a good look at that.' Hold it
> too long, and the viewer says, 'OK, be there, dne that. Now what?'.  It's
> pretty common for mainstream forms to mess with the content curve for
> individual shots: the most common example probably being beer commercials
> and music videos involving 'hot babes'seen only briefly as a form of tease.
> (There was one by Van Hale
>  n/Hagar, 'Finish What You Started' as i recall).
>
> Anyway, it's very common for works in the experimental mold to just ignore
> the content curve completely, for a variety of different reasons and via a
> variety of different methods. 'Recreation' being sort of the extreme
> paradigm on the short end of the scale. One of the problems newbies have
> with experimental work, it seems to me, is that they stunble on the content
> curve hurdle: the visuals move 'too fast' or 'too slow' and that's all the
> newbie registers. Everything kinds of looks alike - Breer, Brakhage,
> Kubelka. But, of course, they're not.
>
> It takes some getting-used-to to view work without engaging this convention
> via reflex, to realize that there may be different things going on
> temporally in different kinds of fast and slow, and to absorb what they may
> be, and I've found that just discussing this issue, calling it to
> consciousness, helps that process of getting-used-to for students.
>
> Another example on the other end of 'Recreation' I'm reminded of is
> '(nostalgia)'. Some newbies tend to freak out as the ashes just sit on the
> hotplate long after the photos are done burning. One tends to think that HF
> is doing this as a tease, since you're trying to remember things to match
> picture to story. It took me several viewings to figure out the duration
> principle - each shot is a full 100' load, and the photos just take
> different lengths of time to burn due to conditions of the paper etc.,
> leaving different amounts of ash-on-burner time before the film runs out. I
> don't know (or really care) if this was HFs intent, but there's a reflection
> of the photographer-to-filmmaker progression in this, where each daylight
> spool = a single shot, like changing the plate in  a view camera.
>
> On Aug 4, 2011, at 4:47 AM, Yoel Meranda wrote:
> > Breer's REcreation (as an example of how some people think that the
> > unit of cinema is frames, not shots, seems to me to be an obvious
> > example). You could use Breer's own writing (or Kubelka's) as reading
> > material.
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