Film Programme: Feedback
Film Programme: Feedback
Here’s a programme for the cinema that looks at examples of how one process/ concept can be enacted alternately by filmmakers and musicians. How can filmmakers and musicians physically control (by moving a hand, by changing position) the amount of sound/ light feeding back into their microphone/ camera/ instrument, to create abstract art that reflects on the way it is made, whilst transcending that to approach real beauty. This programme switches between silent film/ imageless sound; we wanted to have a think about how ideas can take up residency on either side of the sound/ image border, without having to inhabit both at the same time.
Light Lick Series: Get it While you Can, Dir. Saul Levine, 2003, USA, S8mm, 10 mins
“Light Licks are a series of films which are made frame by frame often by flooding the camera with enough light to spill beyond the gate into frames left unexposed. Light Licksare ecstatic flicker films inspired by jazz and mystic visionary practice.” (Canyon Cinema)
Lenseless, Dir. John Du Cane, 1971, UK, 16mm, 5 mins
The screen is divided into four sections. In each a playful flicker of light and shadow takes place. A dynamic four-way conversation between the sections unfolds.
Sympathetic Magic (stone), John Butcher, 2006, UK, Audio, 7 mins 30 secs
Recorded in Hamilton Mausoleum, an absurd phallic shaped follyconstructed to immortalise the 10thDuke of Hamilton as part of Arika’s Resonant Spaces tour. “The feedback produced all these interesting high-pitched twitters, which I’ve never had before. The whole thing was responding to some ultra-high frequencies, and that’s what led to the title because it was such a surprise to get that. It’s completelyto do with the place, my technique was the same as I’ve used in other places, but with avery different effect.” (John Butcher)
Available Light: Yellow – Red, Dir. Luis Recoder, 1999, USA, 16mm, 12 mins
“In a series of single-screen, cameraless film studies titled Available Light,Recoder subjects the celluloid film strip to indirect light exposures, light flares, and fogging. In Yellow-Red, for example, a central core of red light diffuses gently outwards toward an aurora of yellow light, shuddering like a blurred candle flame.” (Chrissie Iles)
Unstable Contact, Toshiya Tsunoda, 2004, Japan, Audio, 6 mins 47 secs
“I used three glass bottles, three vibration plates and sine wave as material. Two vibration plates are put on the mouth of two bottles and a sine wave of the particular frequency for each bottle is recorded. A third vibration plate is contacted unstably to the outside of a third glass bottle. The conspicuous sound is made by high-speed cyclic contact between the vibration plate and bottle. The frequency of the sine wave shifts slowly and continuously, and intermittent change occurs. I regard this sound as a kind of decalomania between materials.” (Toshiya Tsunoda)
Tails, Dir. Paul Sharits, 1976, USA, 16mm, 4 mins
“A series of tail ends of varied strips of film, with sometimes recognisable images dissolving into light flares, appear to run through and off the projector. A romantic ‘narrative’, suggesting an ‘ending’, is inferred.” (www.atopia.no)
Below is an online link which you can use for reference. To see the film in its original glory, check with the distributor of the film for their terms and conditions.