{abstract cinema} – Page 2

Into the Midnight Underground

Browsing Vimeo recently I found a film by Anna Thew, Cling Film, which I remembered seeing years ago on Midnight Underground, a TV series devoted to avant-garde cinema. The series was broadcast by Channel 4 (UK) for eight weeks in 1993, with each episode being screened shortly after midnight. The presenter was the always reliable Benjamin Woolley, sitting before a backdrop resembling one of Verner Panton’s psychedelic environments from where he introduced the cinematic offerings, an eclectic blend of avant-garde and experimental films, unusual dramas plus a couple of animations. Episodes ran for around an hour, with each installment following a different theme. The films were a mix of the old and the new: “classics” (for want of a better term) of underground cinema set alongside more recent works. This was very much a television equivalent of the screenings of avant-garde cinema which Film and Video Umbrella had been touring around Britain’s arthouses since the mid-1980s; one of the founders of FVU, Michael O’Pray, is thanked in the series credits. Midnight Underground was so tailored to my interests at the time it was easy to feel like this was being screened for my benefit alone. I taped everything as it was broadcast but I never got round to digitising all the episodes, so that many of the films shown there, Cling Film included, I haven’t seen for a long time.

Benjamin Woolley.

The discovery of Anna Thew’s film set me wondering whether it would be possible to replicate the contents of Midnight Underground via links to various video sites. Since this post exists, the answer is obviously yes, or almost… Of the 44 films shown in the series only 3 are currently unavailable, with one more being limited to an extract and another as pay-to-view. This was a much better result than I expected, especially for works with such a limited appeal. The majority of the films shown in the series were being screened on British TV for the first time, also the last time for most of them. In 1993 Channel 4 was still maintaining its original brief, offering a genuine alternative to the programming on the other three terrestrial channels. As I’ve often complained here, this didn’t last; the underground remained underground. Woolley’s series was a brief taste of a televisual world where the concept of diversity could apply to form and content as well as identity. It’s a world the corporate channels will never show you, one you have to find for yourself.

* * *

1: Strange Spirits
The opening episode shows why I felt they were broadcasting this for me alone. Derek Jarman’s grainy film of a Throbbing Gristle performance is probably the first (and only?) time the group appeared on British TV. This was the first surprise. The second one was Kenneth Anger’s film being shown with its Janácek score. I’d seen this at an FVU screening a couple of years before with its ELO soundtrack, the so-called “Eldorado Edition”, which Anger later discarded. As for Daina Krumins’ weird and creepy religiose short, I expected this one to be unavailable but the director now has several of her films on YouTube. Don’t miss her even-weirder animated slime moulds, Babobilicons. The angel in Maggie Jailler’s film is artist (and Jarman/TG associate) Cerith Wyn Evans.

• TG: Psychic Rally in Heaven (Derek Jarman, 1981)
• The Divine Miracle (Daina Krumins, 1973)
• Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (Kenneth Anger, 1954)
• L’ange frénétique (Maggie Jailler, 1985)

2: Music for the Eye and Ear
Bruce Conner’s films are continually elusive on the internet, especially those made to accompany music by Devo and Eno & Byrne. The version of Mongoloid linked here differs slightly from the original but it’s essentially the same film. Versailles II is taped from the Midnight Underground broadcast, and includes Benjamin Woolley’s introduction.

• Eaux d’artifice (Kenneth Anger, 1953)
• Mongoloid (Bruce Conner, 1978)
• Versailles II (Chris Garratt, 1976)
• Stille Nacht II: Are We Still Married? (Quay Brothers, 1992)
• All My Life (Bruce Baillie, 1966)
• Scorpio Rising (Kenneth Anger, 1964)

3: New Sexualities
Stephen Dwoskin’s film is the one that shows a close-up of a woman’s face during the act of masturbation. This is paralleled later in the series by Antony Balch’s masturbatory self-portrait in Towers Open Fire. Cling Film is all about safe sex, and was broadcast in a slightly amended form to avoid being too explicit. The version on Vimeo is uncensored.

• Kiss (Chris Newby, 1992) (no video)
• Kustom Kar Kommandos (Kenneth Anger, 1965)
• Cling Film (Anna Thew, 1993)
• Stain (Simon Pummell, 1992)
• Asparagus (Suzan Pitt, 1979)
• 6/64: Mama und Papa (Materialaktion Otto Mühl) (Kurt Kren, 1964)
• Moment (Stephen Dwoskin, 1969)

4: London Suite
Sundial and Mile End Purgatorio have both appeared here before as a result of my seeing them on Midnight Underground.

• Latifah and Himli’s Nomadic Uncle (Alnoor Dewshi, 1992)
• Sundial (William Raban, 1993)
• The London Story (Sally Potter, 1987) (pay-to-view)
• Mile End Purgatorio (Guy Sherwin, 1991)
• London Suite (Vivienne Dick, 1989) (no video)

Continue reading “Into the Midnight Underground”

Dazzle

One of the things I used to enjoy doing with my old Sinclair Spectrum computer was stitching together short pieces of graphics-generating BASIC code in order to create a much longer compilation of the same, a visual mix comprised of the Spectrum’s crude logarithmic spirals, nested polygons and blinking squares. From the looks of it, Dazzle (1993) is a similar process applied to slightly more sophisticated computer graphics (made with an Amiga?), and with additional help from a vision mixer.

The graphics were created to accompany 45 minutes of electronic music by Jonn Serrie, so this is essentially a video album although it also looks like another of those Laserdisc releases targeted at psychedelic voyagers. As I’ve noted before, the Internet Archive now has a lot of this stuff, none of which seems likely to ever be reissued so it may as well be archived there. Dazzle is simpler than the tripping discs but its formal qualities place it closer to abstract cinema than all those reels of dated 3D renderings.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The abstract cinema archive

Pixillation, a film by Lillian Schwartz

A new arrival at Rarefilmm, Pixillation (1970) is another example of short, abstract film-making which nevertheless may be unique in its combination of early computer graphics with organic effects created by illuminated oils and crystalline growths. This was Lillian Schwartz’s first film (made in collaboration with Ken Knowlton) after she become artist-in-residence at Bell Labs. Many more such films followed, continuing her exploration of computer graphics.

The electronic score for Pixillation is by Gershon Kingsley, a composer best known for the albums he recorded with Jean-Jacques Perrey, and for writing one of the first synthesized pop hits, Popcorn, although it was a cover of Kingsley’s tune that became an international success in 1972. Kingsley made a lot of electronic music but this is the first time I’ve encountered any of it as a film soundtrack. I think it’s also the first piece I’ve heard of his that isn’t a light-weight novelty.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The abstract cinema archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Switched-On… hits and misses

The World of John Whitney

John Whitney’s abstract films haven’t always been easy to see on YouTube, and when they do turn up they’re often poor quality, so this was a welcome discovery, a 38-minute compilation of Whitney shorts taken from a Japanese laserdisc. A couple of the items mentioned in the on-screen contents list are absent from the video. The actual contents are as follows:

• Arabesque (1976)
• Matrix III (1972)
• Matrix I (1971)
• Permutation (1968)
• Catalog (1961)

Catalog is a showreel of Whitney’s earliest film experiments, a compilation within the compilation. Many of Whitney’s films are among the earliest examples of computer animation, made in the days when creating any kind of computer graphics meant laboriously plotting co-ordinates into a program which would then be fed into a machine the size of a wardrobe; the resulting video output was captured on film by a camera pointed at a monitor, a process you can see in operation in a short demonstration of Whitney’s working methods, Experiments in Motion Graphics (1967). Colour overlays and superimposition transform these simple cathode-ray shapes into things of beauty, with Whitney’s soundtracks being the icing on the cake: Arabesque is accompanied by the santur playing of Manoochehr Sadeghi, while Matrix III features an extract from Terry Riley’s Poppy Nogood And The Phantom Band.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The abstract cinema archive

Weekend links 643

Freundschaftsfoto (1964) by Jürgen Wittdorf.

• “It’s truly astonishing how Laswell collided with vastly divergent musicians and genres while somehow still representing complementary musical spheres.” Yes, indeed. Mixes of the week: Bill Laswell Research Institute: Vol I & II, two 90-minute collections at Aquarium Drunkard dedicated to the career of the indefatigable musician/producer/catalyst.

• “These pieces are created using custom developed software and laser specialised machines resulting in highly detailed laser cut works on layered paper with some works comprising over a thousand individual parts.” Works in paper at Studio Ibbini.

• “The visual history of polyhedra is littered with false starts, poignant failures, and allegories unable to convey the weight of their subject matter.” Noam Andrews explores the history of rendering polyhedral objects in art.

• “When it came to homosexuality, the east was as bourgeois as the west.” Homoerotic art from the communist era by Jürgen Wittdorf (1932–2018) receives a reappraisal.

• More MR James: All of James’ ghost stories in a single volume at Standard Ebooks, the home of free, high-quality, public-domain texts.

• More mixes: A mix for The Wire by NikNak, and XLR8R Podcast 769 by The Sun Ra Arkestra.

• At Spoon & Tamago: Tracing the history of railways in Japan through art.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Marie Menken Day.

• Angeline Morrison‘s favourite albums.

• Ghost Train (1961) by Virgil Holmes | Ghost Train (1961) by Electro-Tones | Ghost Train (1962) by The Partners