[Frameworks] 5 Films by Gregg Biermann at Millennium Film Workshop_June 8th, 8pm

[Stephanie Wuertz]

[image: Pasted Graphic.tiff]

**

*5 Films by Gregg Biermann**, *the filmmaker will be present**

*Friday June 8, 8:00pm*

*Millennium Film Workshop, 66 E 4th St, NYC *

*suggested donation $8/ $5** *


*Paradiso** – *video, 20 minutes, stereo, 2003, Libretto by Sarah Markgraf

*Paradiso* is the final section of my three-part *Material Excess*
 (2002-03). *Material Excess* is a large-scale animated movie, which
borrows its structure from Dante’s *The Divine Comedy*. Along with *Paradiso
* it also includes *Inferno* (25 min) and *Purgatorio *(25 min). These
pieces have been screened both separately and together. The animation is
for the most part created in a digital process related to the cameraless
hand-made film tradition. In a photo-editing program, scans of various
objects are placed on a digital image strip without regard for individual
frames. These images are translated into video sequences and the result is
an exploding jumble of colors and forms. By its very nature, the animation
cannot directly illustrate the various bits of narration that appear in the
soundtrack. The two things simply happen simultaneously.

*Paradiso* is constructed entirely out of junk food and pleasant, relaxing
music. Nothing in paradise needs to have nutritional value. The only
requirement is pleasure. In my best Monty Python accent a voiceover posits
the question “was Jesus ever truly happy?” as gummy bears and chicklets
dance on the screen in what critic Fred Camper calls a “half ironic vision
of redemption”.

    “a remarkable achievement”—David Finkelstein, Film Threat


*New Jersey Gradual** – *video, 17 minutes, stereo, 2008

The massive Garden State Plaza parking lot is a simplistic landscape, an
undefined territory with a single purpose: to temporarily store great
numbers of cars while consumers shop. It is a large flat expanse of
asphalt, punctuated only by painted lines, sign posts and street lights. It
has little apparent aesthetic value. Because of its singular purpose, there
is no reason for people to linger in this space and it becomes devoid of
street life. When compared with traditional downtown urban areas that have
a specific sense of place, spaces like this parking lot seem to obliterate
specificity. As my car-mounted camera passes by the facades of various
big-box stores, it records corporate signage. Ironically the signage does
not really locate the viewer in a specific geographic location because
these stores and restaurants are chains that have many locations across the
country. This could be anywhere. Yet, judging by their ubiquity, these
homogeneous places are ones that Americans seem to prefer over the
traditional urban downtown.

The virtual shape that is employed in *New Jersey Gradual* is a sphere.
Like the parking lot itself the sphere is simple. The computer graphics
term for it is a “primitive”.  Because of its relative simplicity *New
Jersey Gradual *comes the closest of the three pieces to depicting the
reality of its chosen location (although it too, at times, can verge into
the cosmic). In this piece the sphere undergoes a series of pre-programmed
rotations across several axes and this interacts with the single dolly shot
of the lot. The texture mapping of the video onto the sphere leaves two
blank areas that appear as “black holes” in the image. Parts of the image
near these black circular shapes become increasingly distorted. Perhaps
these black holes can be seen as consuming the landscape or perhaps they
are simply geometric abstractions jamming the pictorial space. The
cinematic recording of driving through the parking lot is heavily mediated
by the changing virtual position of the viewer, which is like moving one's
head along the surface of a curved screen. The original vantage point of
the video camera within the car is altered by the spherical projection of
the texture mapping such that part of the image that was originally in
front of the real camera is now behind the virtual camera. This leads to
the examination of formerly marginal parts of the original frame.


*Labyrinthine **– *video, 15 minutes, stereo, 2010

“In *Labyrinthine* (2010) Biermann takes forty-one shots of memorable and
iconographic moments in Hitchcock’s classic *Vertigo *(1958). The shots are
superimposed on top of each other creating a hypnotic labyrinth of
repetitions and transformations. The different moments overlap in a kind of
contra-punctual proliferation lasting 15 minutes. The superimposition of
images is not like we know it from classical (analog) editing, where the
image is partly transparent. The images are composite sequences of
concentric rectangles. The rectangular screen no longer frames one shot at
the time, rather, the screen becomes a theatre for a multiplicity of images
where each new shot is born within the previous shot as a new rectangle
which gradually increase in size and finally covers the last shot. As it
grows new shots are born within the shot and this goes on according to a
rhythmical scheme where each shot is repeated four or five times. As the
film develops several series of shots overlap. Cinematic motion as the
movement of objects in space *within* the image is here competing with the
movement *between *blocks of floating images. The blocks float like moving
pictures *through* the screen like an approaching bullet or projectile.
Ultimately, a labyrinth of movements appears both within the image (the
image within the image) and between the images (the changing relationship
between the images within the image). Continuity editing is replaced by a
discontinuous and labyrinthine editing, and the screen doesn’t show one
image at a time, but several.



In spite of the rhythmical slowness of floating concentric rectangles, it
is at times confusing to distinguish between them. It is as if this virtual
multiplicity of time folding images *indexes* in intangible ways the
constant confusion and dizziness of the protagonist of the film, Scottie
(James Stewart) – and the viewer – who both are at times unable to
distinguish between the different women (the woman remembered and the woman
seen) played by Kim Novak. Biermann’s hypnotic repetition and manipulation
of the characteristic sound track together with the “floating” iconography
of the film brings in the whole repertoire of genres at play in *Vertigo*,
which itself floats in between the Detective Mystery Thriller, Romance
Melodrama and Horror. Most of the shots are of Scottie as he observes or
thinks; he hardly moves here, or moves only his head slightly like in the
last sequence of the first shot. The images have a stuttering and
discontinuous logic which arrests and focuses on perceptual phenomena which
slips away when seeing the film. Biermann opens these intervals of the
imperceptible and enlarges them and turns them into art form of its own. It
is as if he uses the technologically enhanced object quality of the images
to explore the optical unconscious by means not envisioned by Walter
Benjamin.”


– Eivind Røssaak, Algorithmic Culture, or the New Multiplicity of the Image,
* **Between Stillness and Motion: Film, Photography, Algorithms (Amsterdam
University Press, 2011)*


*Crop Duster Octet* – HD video, 5 minutes, stereo, 2011

“Hitchcock’s North by Northwest is deconstructed and reassembled to
illuminate the patterns, rhythms and choreography of the original so as to
break through and make for a eight banded kinetic tour de force. As the
piece progresses the temporal displacement of each band gets closer and
closer until they all unite into a remarkable grand finale.”

– John Columbus, Black Maria Film Festival


*Cinema Study – *HD video, 5 minutes, sound, 2003

“Cinema Study” is a reworking of images and sounds taken from Orson Welles
landmark film “Citizen Kane”. The piece breaks the frame into multiple
smaller rectangles, each with short video and audio samples from the
original film. Part of the activity of the viewer seems to be the activity
of keeping track of the images, which pop around the screen, and how they
relate to the sounds. All of the sounds in the piece are in a precise
synchronous relationship with the images on the screen. The original
narrative film breaks down almost completely.

**

*MILLENNIUM  FILM  WORKSHOP ~ 66 East 4th Street NYC 10003*

212-673-0090  *millenniumfilm.org/calendar*.html<http://millenniumfilm.org/calendar.html>
  cinema.millennium at gmail.org <cinema at millenniumfilm.org>


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