Jordan Belson – Page 7 – { feuilleton }

Meshes of the Afternoon by Maya Deren

Meshes of the Afternoon (1943)
Dir: Maya Deren, Alexander Hammid.
Screenplay: Maya Deren.
Cast: Maya Deren, Alexander Hammid.
Music: Teiji Ito.
18mins, B&W.

Meshes of the Afternoon is one of the most influential works in American experimental cinema. A non-narrative work, it has been identified as a key example of the “trance film,” in which a protagonist appears in a dreamlike state, and where the camera conveys his or her subjective focus. The central figure in Meshes of the Afternoon, played by Deren, is attuned to her unconscious mind and caught in a web of dream events that spill over into reality. Symbolic objects, such as a key and a knife, recur throughout the film; events are open-ended and interrupted. Deren explained that she wanted “to put on film the feeling which a human being experiences about an incident, rather than to record the incident accurately.”

Made by Deren with her husband, cinematographer Alexander Hammid, Meshes of the Afternoon established the independent avant-garde movement in film in the United States, which is known as the New American Cinema. It directly inspired early works by Kenneth Anger, Stan Brakhage, and other major experimental filmmakers. Beautifully shot by Hammid, a leading documentary filmmaker and cameraman in Europe (where he used the surname Hackenschmied) before he moved to New York, the film makes new and startling use of such standard cinematic devices as montage editing and matte shots. Through her extensive writings, lectures, and films, Deren became the preeminent voice of avant-garde cinema in the 1940s and the early 1950s. (MoMA.org)

• Maya Deren at Ubuweb. Includes free film downloads
• Maya Deren at Senses of Cinema

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Jodorowsky on DVD
• Jordan Belson on DVD
• Kenneth Anger on DVD…finally
• Ten films by Oskar Fischinger
• Lapis by James Whitney
• La Villa Santo Sospir by Jean Cocteau
• Expanded Cinema by Gene Youngblood
• The Invasion of Thunderbolt Pagoda

Jodorowsky on DVD

I am an artist. Now the pictures are not made by artists. They are made by companies and produced by multinationals. The art in the picture is lost. Now when artists make pictures, they make them for museums. But museums, for me, are cemeteries.
Alejandro Jodorowsky.

More from the About-Bleeding-Time Dept. (emphasis on “bleeding” in this case). Some of the most extraordinary films ever made finally receive an authorised DVD release in May.

Anchor Bay will release a special limited edition collector’s box set, The Films of Alejandro Jodorowsky, on DVD on 5/1/2007 (SRP $49.98). The set will contain El Topo, The Holy Mountain and Fando Y Lis on DVD, fully restored and remastered from new HD transfers in anamorphic widescreen video, with Dolby Digital 5.1 and 2.0 audio (El Topo is 125 minutes in Spanish, The Holy Mountain is 114 minutes in English, Fando Y Lis is 93 minutes in Spanish). The box set will also include 2 music CDs containing the soundtracks for El Topo and The Holy Mountain, as well as a DVD of Jodorowsky’s never-before-released first film, La Cravate. El Topo and The Holy Mountain will also be available separately (SRP $24.98 each). The El Topo DVD will contain audio commentary by the director, the original theatrical trailer (with English voice-over), a 2006 on-camera interview with the director as well as an exclusive new interview, a photo gallery and original script excerpts. The Holy Mountain DVD will include audio commentary with the director, deleted scenes with commentary, the original theatrical trailer (with English voice-over), the Tarot short with commentary, a restoration process short, restoration credits, a photo gallery and original script excerpts. Fando Y Lis will include audio commentary with the director and the La Constellation Jodorowsky documentary. Subtitles on the discs will be available in English, French, Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese.

• Jodorowsky’s official site (in Spanish)
• Jodorowsky discusses the new releases with Premiere Magazine
• Jay interviews Jodo: Mean Magazine | LA Weekly

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Jordan Belson on DVD
• Further back and faster
• Kenneth Anger on DVD…finally
• The Brothers Quay on DVD
• El Topo
• Gangsters on DVD
• Blade Runner DVD
• The Invasion of Thunderbolt Pagoda

Moonlight in Glory

Great abstract animation from the Trollbäck design company for Moonlight in Glory, a track from My Life in the Bush of Ghosts by Brian Eno & David Byrne. Via Design Observer.

In a similar vein there’s Bruce Connor‘s 1981 film for another track, Mea Culpa. Connor also produced a film for America is Waiting from the same album. Continuing the interpretative theme, Eno & Byrne made the album tracks publicly available in 2006 to potential remixers. Some results of that, Our Lives in the Bush of Disquiet, can be found here and here.

Update: the original Moonlight link was deleted but you can still see the video on their site if you hunt through the sample of works shown on the Trollbäck home page.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The abstract cinema archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Tiger Mountain Strategies
• Generative culture
• My Life in the Bush of Ghosts

Jordan Belson on DVD

Samadhi (1967).

“Jordan Belson is one of the greatest artists of visual music. Belson creates lush vibrant experiences of exquisite color and dynamic abstract phenomena evoking sacred celestial experiences.” William Moritz

Good things come to those who wait. Following their collection of Oskar Fischinger films, the Center for Visual Music releases Jordan Belson: 5 Essential Films in March. Fischinger worked on Fantasia and Belson also exerted some small influence on Hollywood with the special sequences he created for Donald Cammell’s Demon Seed (imaginings of the film’s Proteus computer) and Philip Kaufman’s The Right Stuff (the vortex seen by Sam Shephard at the edge of the stratosphere). You can read more about Belson’s work in Expanded Cinema by Gene Youngblood, an essential guide to film outside the narrative mainstream.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The abstract cinema archive

Ten films by Oskar Fischinger

After complaining a couple of days ago about the difficulty of seeing works of abstract cinema, it turns out that a collection of Oskar Fischinger’s great animations appeared earlier this year.

Decades before computer graphics, before music videos, even before Fantasia (the 1940 version), there were the abstract animated films of Oskar Fischinger (1900–1967), master of “absolute” or nonobjective filmmaking. He was cinema’s Kandinsky, an animator who, beginning in the 1920’s in Germany, created exquisite “visual music” using geometric patterns and shapes choreographed tightly to classical music and jazz. (John Canemaker, New York Times)

Oskar Fischinger is one of the greatest artists of the 20th century, embracing the abstraction that became the major art movement of that century, and exploring the new technology of the cinema to open abstract painting into a new Visual Music that performs in liquid time. (Biographer William Moritz)

We now understand Oskar Fischinger not only as a link between the geometric painting of pre-war Europe and post-war California but as a grandfather of the digital arts.
(Art Critic Peter Frank)

That’s good, so now how about the Whitneys, Jordan Belson, Harry Smith…?

Via Boing Boing.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The abstract cinema archive