[Frameworks] film undone series

[David Tetzlaff]

Land - New improved Institutional Quality...; Film In Which...

Maclaine  - The End

Frampton - Critical Mass

Conner - Report

Jack Smith - Normal Love (of which no fixed version has ever existed)

Jacobs - Blonde Cobra (it has an end, but neither that or any other part of it are logical in any traditional sense)

McCall - Line Describing a Cone (some of the newer ones like Doubling Back are even more cool, but I don't think you can rent them...)

Tex Avery - [selected clips - Avery generally had no more than one meta-gag per cartoon breaking the boundaries of the diegesis and entering the realms of animation or projection, and a fair number of the other gags have the potential to offend contemporary audiences. Not that there's anything wrong with that in and of itself, but it would be a deflection from the theme of the screening, as what would be undone there are not CINEMATIC boundaries, but social norms.]

....

And finally, my highest rec. (as always) to Barbara Rubin's Christmas on Earth: with the caveat that it should not be projected from a booth, but with the projectors set up in the auditorium, and a collection of colored gels on hand, so the audience members may participate in the performance by taking turns manipulating the gels on each projector. When I screened it in class, this interactive element made it the highlight of the semester every time, and it's perfectly consistent with the work's broader aesthetic. 

Rubin specified that the film should be accompanied by sound from top 40 radio broadcasts, which would create a boundary-defying randomness. Not having radio reception in the auditorium where I showed it, and feeling that the music played  on contemporary pop music radio is utterly different than anything that would have been on the dial in Rubin's era, I created a soundtrack emulating a top 40 broadcast circa 64-65, with hits of the period mixed with DJ patter and promos. This was SOMEWHAT random in that I did not choose or sequence the material with the sequence of images in mind -- I just picked representative of the top 40 that I also happened to like, and sequenced it for variety and some kind of 'flow' as an old school jock would have done. So the chips just sort of fell where they may in terms of what played on the soundtrack while any given image was on screen. And as a 'wild' track without a precise starting point, the timing of the juxtapositions of sound and image varied somewhat from one showing to the next, which did sometimes result in distinctly different associations.

However, it has just occurred to me that an additional element of randomness could be injected by making an iTunes playlist of the sort of period hits, DJ patter, ad spots etc. i used, but gathering enough of this material to cover, say, twice the running time of the film, and putting that on shuffle play, so there would be a large element of chance in terms of which audio segments would be heard during the projection, and in what order...

....

I know all of these are Old and Canonical, but I'm not being a fuddy-duddy on principle, I just can't think of any newer work by younger artists that fits the bill right now. I'm sure it's out there though, and I hope some of y'all will post recommendations thereof to the list.