[Frameworks] My Trip To PFA Part 7

Thu May 2 00:16:57 UTC 2013

Wed, Oct 3rd, 2012

Jordan Belson's Magical Motion Pictures

I saw some other wonderful Belson movies on vhs tape that day, such as "Re-Entry", "Chakra", "Northern Lights", "Bardo", and "Cycles". I immensely enjoyed all of them. I thought the beautiful moving color light effects of "Northern Lights" were especially interesting as they seem to mark a departure in his life. He started to foreground those kinds of visuals in his later works such "Fountain Of Dreams" and "Epilogue" and that imagery is always flowingly colorful and luminously gorgeous to behold.     

"Sausalito" Frank Stauffacher

A lovely black and white piece with some nice camerawork and editing. Some striking shots of a man's eye peering through a peephole of some kind, intercut with the imagery of the small Bay Area town on the pier; the interior close ups of the man's face reminded me of similar close ups in Vertov's "Man With The Movie Camera". I could definitely tell that it suffered from being on seen dvd and projected that way but it still retained a lot of gorgeous filmic qualities. From this piece and "Notes On The Port of St. Francis" it is clear that Mr. Stauffacher possessed a fine control of cinematic craft, with a beautiful camera eye and smooth editing rhythm. He had a subtle, excellent visual sensibility and style and I really wish he hadn't passed away so young. I'm sure we would have more of these exceptional movies to enjoy if he had lived to an old age.

"Image, Flesh, and Voice" Ed Emshwiller  

A very strange black and white 35mm piece by the great abstract movie maker Ed Emshiller. For the last few years he's been one of my top cinematic passions and interests. I love his 16mm work "Thanatopsis", "Carol", "Film With 3 Dancers", and "Life Lines", and I really enjoyed his lyrical portrait "George Dumpson's Place". I'm also excited to see his extraodinary-sounding "Relativity" and his other celluloid work such as "Dance Chromatic", "Transformations", and "Totem". 

He was a very skilled and agile camera man. He could operate 16mm and 35mm movie cameras with a graceful dance-like precision and control. This talent of his was especially valuable in the days before the steadicam and he found easy employment as director of photography and camera operator on many other director's features such as dance movies, narrative independent features, and a beautifully shot docmuentary from the 70s on modern New York painters called "Painters Painting".

Having said this, "Image, Flesh, and Voice" is a purposely odd and truly experimental work. It is very dark and stark, floating camera moves in interiors, gliding past people in people in seetings such as living rooms, usually when they're together at parties, with a constant soundtrack montage of conversations, presumably between those people. They are all reflecting on different aspects of social behavior, such as learning how to visually observe people's physical mannerisms and behavior in a more concentrated non-verbal manner. It's a long piece, over an hour I think and it didn't help that I saw it projected on dvd. it seemed to especially suffer visually this way. I was bothered by what looked to me to be a technical flaw - he has a lot of match cuts on black screens when he slowly moves the camera from people to an unlit black space and cuts to another screen of black and moves the camera to reveal some other lit setting; on these cuts
 there are jarring frame lines on the bottom of thw image that are especially noticeable because they're purely black. Emshwiller was a technically meticulous craftsman and he never has these kinds of mistakes in his other work, so i don't if they're intentional. maybe he had an esoteric reason for including them?

Robert Haller has said that it is an important and overlooked work that needs to be seen more than once to be comprehended. I'd definitely like to see it again, preferrably on 35mm on the big screen.

Doug Graves

4636 Talbot Drive
Boulder, CO 80303

702-580-4293
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