[Frameworks] Magic Lantern Presents: SELF-OBLITERATION (May 8)

[Watter, Seth]

[image: Inline image 1]

(Still from *Monster Movie* by Takeshi Murata. Courtesy of EAI.)


Magic Lantern Presents:

SELF-OBLITERATION

Curated by Seth Watter

May 8th, 2013
9:30 PM
Cable Car Cinema & Café
Providence, RI
$5

FEATURING: Gregory Bateson & Margaret Mead; Ed Emshwiller; Carolyn Tennant;
Takeshi Murata; Jud Yalkut & Yayoi Kusama; Oskar Fischinger; Valie Export;
Jonas Mekas

In 1965, Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama began an installation series
titled *Infinity
Mirror Rooms*. The viewer enters a space entirely made up of reflective
surfaces, which indeed infinitely mirror one another in a dizzying
mise-en-abîme. This impulse to dissolve the visitor in a play of pure color
or shimmering light was carried over into Kusama’s happenings, which took
place in galleries, studios, or in public locations like Washington Square.
They were variously advertised as “body festivals” or “anatomic
explosions,” and Kusama became notorious for covering her nude performers
(like most everything else she touched) with painted polka dots to help
erode the barriers of the individual self, body pressing against body in a
drug- and music-filled delirium. When asked in 1999 what the phrase
“self-obliteration” meant, the aging and mentally ill artist replied: “By
obliterating one’s individual self, one returns to the infinite universe.”

Several of these relics from the psychedelic age were recorded by American
filmmaker Jud Yalkut in collaboration with Kusama. The resulting work forms
the centerpiece of this program, which explores the theme of
self-obliteration throughout the history of avant-garde film and video.
What is a body? Where does the body begin and end? And what are the
aesthetic, spiritual, or political possibilities that might arise from its
radical negation? Each work featured in Self-Obliteration poses these
questions in one shape or another. Dissolution and disfiguration are
terrifying prospects, and the odd subgenre of “body horror” caters to a
real and deep-seated human anxiety. Yet the spectacle of bodily breakdown
continues to hold both filmmakers and viewers in its thrall, promising
self-transcendence even if only in the form of, precisely, a
self-obliteration.



PROGRAM:

*Trance and Dance in Bali*, Gregory Bateson & Margaret Mead, 1952, 16mm,
b&w/sound, 22 min.

Filmed in 1937 and 1939 by then-married anthropological duo Bateson and
Mead, Trance and Dance is culled from hours and hours of footage of
Balinese possession rituals, and forms part of a much larger archive that
would result in their 1942 study, Balinese Character. Funded by the
Committee for Research in Dementia Praecox, the film was “supposed to lead
to methods of child rearing in America that would reduce the incidence of
schizophrenia and thus build a stronger individualist culture” (Catherine
Russell). While the scientific project of Bateson and Mead has been widely
discredited, the film appears to us now as a precursor to cinéma vérité and
a testament to modernism’s primitivizing impulse, as well as an object
lesson for ethnographic analysis: How can one represent the
unrepresentable, the ecstatic moment of possession by the Other?


*Thanatopsis*, Ed Emshwiller, 1962, 16mm, b&w/sound, 5 min.

Generally considered one of Emshwiller’s early dance films, Thanatopsis
might more accurately be described as psychological horror: a stark
meditation on death or, at the very least, extreme torment. A man with
downcast eyes is somberly lit against a black background while a stuttering
female body—the angel of death?—flits about him in circles. Successive
close-ups render the image as little more than abstract shapes, an agitated
composition in high-contrast black and white, while the sounds of a beating
heart and power saws heighten the sense of existential angst.


*Hysterionics: A Buffer Between Expression and Meaning*, Carolyn Tennant,
2006, DVD, color/sound, 6 min.

Based on the early Biograph short Photographing a Female Crook (aka A
Subject for the Rogues Gallery), the performance recorded in Hysterionics
probes “the resistant body’s relationship to the camera eye” (CT). Whereas
the woman of 1904 disfigured herself by grimacing wildly in an attempt to
thwart the disciplinary gaze of the police, Tennant’s disturbing rendition
over a century later is further eviscerated by the accumulation of digital
artifacts.


*Monster Movie*, Takeshi Murata, 2005, DVD, color/sound, 4 min.

Kanye West wasn’t the first to exploit datamoshing to great artistic
effect. In this piece, footage sourced from the 1981 Ringo Starr vehicle
Caveman joyously explodes into pixellated anarchy, crumbling and reshaping
itself at a rate of thirty times per second. Murata’s humanoid creature
seems to relish its own digital dispersion.


*Kusama’s Self-Obliteration*, Jud Yalkut & Yayoi Kusama, 1967, 16mm/color,
sound, 24 min.

“… an atomistic collection of figures interacting but one emergent,
undulating Meat-Cloud-Being” (Paul Sharits).


*Spiritual Constructions*, Oskar Fischinger, 1927-29, 16mm, b&w/silent, 10
min.

Two seated figures guzzle mugs of beer. They begin to morph into all kinds
of grotesque and comic shapes; architecture and landscape take on animate
qualities, poking, prodding and violently expelling the two tipplers; and
any distinction between figure and ground soon becomes entirely
meaningless. William Moritz has described the film as a “meditation on
violence,” a reaction to Fischinger’s childhood years spent at the family
brewery and a reflection of “all his loathing of the German penchant for
drunkenness and aggression.” A landmark in experimental animation, its
nightmarish quality may also reflect the inflationary crisis then gripping
the Weimar Republic. Spirit, of course, can mean ghost, wit, and
alcohol—each of which has its place in this marvelous ‘silhouette film.’


*Syntagma*, VALIE EXPORT, 1983, 16mm, color/magnetic sound, 17 min.

The fragmentation and fetishization of the female body is, of course,
endemic to the history of Western representation. Yet one cannot return to
an imaginary unity and coherence—a masculine ideal in any case. Rather, the
feminist artist finds agency through a rearticulation of the fragments,
“taking structures apart and selecting each part for its value as raw
material” (Roswitha Mueller). Indeed, Syntagma is multiple to its very
core. Projections overlap with live action; film, video, photography,
sculpture and painting intermingle; and the screen is diffracted into two,
sometimes four discrete sections—the city made over into a playground of
difference.


*Hare Krishna*, Jonas Mekas, 1966, 16mm, color/sound, 4 min.
Later included in Walden (1969), Hare Krishna is a stunning document of a
Krishna street gathering, where the participants fissure and dissolve in
Mekas’ trademark frame-by-frame style. The droning chant further adds to
the feeling of communion with the infinite rhythms of the universe.
Featuring Allen Ginsberg and Barbara Rubin.


** Magic Lantern is supported by the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation and the
Malcolm S. Forbes Center for Culture and Media Studies at Brown University.


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