James Whitney – Page 2 – { feuilleton }

Turn, Turn, Turn, a film by Jud Yalkut

I’m currently reading my way through Rob Chapman’s lysergic doorstop Psychedelia and Other Colours, a comprehensive study of a cultural phenomenon that’s well-represented on these pages. So expect more posts like this one which concerns another gem of abstract/psychedelic cinema. Turn, Turn, Turn (1966) is a collaboration between Jud Yalkut (visuals) and the Us Company aka USCO (sound). The latter receive several mentions in Chapman’s detailing of the early psych scene in San Francisco in the mid-60s; here they put a Byrds song through the mangler while Yalkut’s mechanical and other effects flicker and gyrate. The visuals are reminiscent in places of the film made by László Moholy-Nagy of his Light-Space Modulator, fittingly so when Chapman credits Moholy-Nagy’s machine with being one of the many forerunners of psychedelia in the art movements of the early 20th century.

The YouTube copy linked here has a bonus at the end with a truncated version of a later Yalkut collaboration with Nam June Paik, Beatles Electronique.

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Mothlight, a film by Stan Brakhage

One of the common methods of making a no-budget abstract film was to scratch or paint directly onto the film itself, a technique popularised by Len Lye in the 1930s. Mothlight (1963) by Stan Brakhage works a variation on the process by gluing broken moth wings, leaves and other bits of natural detritus to a length of film. It only runs for three minutes but it’s a classic piece of experimental cinema. As usual with Brakhage, the titles are hand-drawn, and the film itself is silent.

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Walter Ruttmann’s abstract cinema

Histories of abstract cinema often begin with Oskar Fischinger, a filmmaker and animator who was certainly a pioneer of the form. But these four silent shorts by Walter Ruttmann (1887–1941), Lichtspiel: Opus I, II, III & IV (1921–25) predate Fischinger’s work, and also prefigure Fischinger’s own animations of swooping shapes, blooming circles and stabbing triangles. Ruttmann’s abstractions are very sophisticated considering they’re such early examples of this type of experimental cinema. Some of the sequences in Opus IV resemble the kinds of graphics seen during title sequences in TV programmes of the 1960s.

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7362, a film by Pat O’Neill

This week is a psychedelic one for Londoners: on Monday Britain’s first Psychedelic Society was launched at Conway Hall (the Society uses my Psychedelic Alice artwork in some of its graphics); today (the 4th) there’s an evening of short psychedelic films at BFI Southbank: Jet Propelled Cinema: How Psychedelia Infected Hollywood Sci-Fi. A couple of these—James Whitney’s Yantra and Scott Bartlett’s OffOn—have featured here already but Pat O’Neill’s 7362 (1967) was one I’d not seen before. O’Neill’s film is a 10-minute exploration of vertical symmetry, solarisation and rapid strobing of a kind that no doubt carries an epilepsy warning when it’s screened in public. An electronic soundtrack by Joseph Byrd and Michael Moore connects the film to the psychedelic music scene via Joe Byrd whose cult band The United States of America recorded one of the best albums of the period a year later. 7362 is currently available on DVD together with 25 other shorts in Treasures IV: American Avant-Garde Film, 1947–1986.

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Here and There, a film by Andrzej Pawlowski

I only realised earlier today that the post about The Saragossa Manuscript provides continuity with last week’s examples of Polish cinema; unintentional but it shows where my head is at just now.

Here’s another example, and another abstract filmmaker I hadn’t come across before. Andrzej Pawlowski (1925–1986) was also a painter, and his films take a painterly approach to their manipulation of light and colour. Here and There is a short from 1957 that would have been labelled psychedelic if it had been made ten years later. The gorgeous visuals seem at odds with the score by Adam Walacinski, a typical piece of mid-century dissonance that now seems less avant-garde than merely unsuitable. One challenge of abstract cinema is to find music (if music is required) that doesn’t seem to have been chosen at random. Here and There would work just as well with many other six-minute pieces as its score.

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