Siren

It takes a little courage to describe the sound/light show of Ray Lee Siren last night.

Siren is a sound installation, and it is a light installation too but only after all the lights in the room go out. The whole installation is composed of 22 machines powered by electric motors. For each machine, there is a metal tripod on the bottom with a metal stick on top spinning like two arms. There is one siren and one small red spot light attached on each end of every arm. While the two sirens on one arm are same, each machine is attached with different sirens.

I was the first to arrive in the theatre. An usher explained to me that all the audience would be taken onto stage behind the curtain, so it didn't matter where to sit for the moment, and I was warned in advance that nobody would be allowed to enter or leave throughout the 45 minutes of performance, so I should take care of all my personal business before the performance. Before the performance started, an usher read a statement from the artist, in which it says please don't touch the installation because it's very dangerous. Then we were directed onto the stage. After all the audience had entered the room on stage behind the curtain, Ray Lee and his partner started all the machines one by one. The arms started spinning at different speed and sirens started singing different tones.

I was intrigued by those tripod machines as well as Ray Lee and his partner. They wore dark gray suits in very thick and raw fabric, looking like cavement playing with technology. The technology is really not high, but very basic physics. They have little expression on their face. They walk around those tripod machines gracefully, like well-choreographed dance (I'm sure it's because they've practiced many many times), having their hands in the front of back so that they wouldn't hit the machines. The somewhat rusty machines had their own rawness too.

Like everybody else, I walked around the whole installation setting to listen and observe the difference. The sirens on one side tend to be lower-pitched than the other. The very first siren Ray Lee started sounded like Scottish Highland bagpipe. After listening to 44 sirens for a little while, I started having a minor headache. Just as I wonder where the performance was going, all the lights in the room were out, leaving the red spot lights creating beautiful red circles in the air as they were spinning.

I didn't know the red light has such exciting mission. I had thought they were just signal lights to show whether the sirens were on. I was immediately intrigued by the fascinating spectacle. Ray Lee and his partner adjusted something and all the arms started spinning faster.

The performance came to an end as everything was slowly turned down. One great thing about the performance is that you get to see the whole process of opening and ending.

It is one of those shows that make you wonder does one have to be a scientist before s/he becomes an artist nowadays. I left the performance feeling like an earth woman whose mind had been intervened by aliens. it's quite an interesting delight.

Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles

Last night Jennifer and I went to Wexner for Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. It's the screening of a new 35mm print. Jennifer invited me earlier this week. I got really excited when I saw that the film was 201-min long. When it comes to films, I am a sadist. I like really long films and I like challenging my own limit. So far my record stays 4 hours for a single film and 24 hours for a film marathon.

The film was magnificent. It is one of those master pieces that make me want to write a big fat paper on it. As a big film nerd, even the idea of watching a film like this for many times, taking notes and elaborating on the greatness of the picture turns me on.

-film spoiler alert-

The film tells the story of 3 days in a woman's life. Jeanne is a widow living with her son who is a student in school She prostitutes herself at home everyday to make a living and leaves her son in the dark. The first day, she lives as the machine she's always lived. (In my opinion) because of the short yet intense conversation between Jeanne and her son about whether one can and/or should make love with someone they're not in love with, her life starts to change. The machine that runs her body is out of order, starting with her overcooking potatos. Jeanne keeps screwing up more and more things in her life. On the second night, her son had another short yet intense conversation with her about his growing knowledge of sex intercourse and his earlier sexual fantasies over Jeanne. Jeanne's third day is aggravated by an out-of-stock condom vending machine. Later on the day, she experiences a sexual awakening during sex and kills the man-to-fuck of the day afterwards. Then she sits in front of her dinning table. At this point, I'm sure every audience is wondering how the film is going to conclude. Is her son coming home? Is she going to kill herself?...I looked at my watch. There were 5 minutes left till the time the film's supposed to end. For an over-3-hour film that tells a 3-day story, I knew that was it. The film ended with her sitting in front of the dinning table, her hands and shirt having blood on them, and a slight smile of relief appearing on her never-had-an-expression face.

It sounds like a very long and boring film, except for the ending which probably woke up many half-asleep audience. Three hours of a woman who and whose life are even more boring than bare bricks. There's barely any dialogue, or for that matter sound, in the film. However, we were all very absorbed by the extremely well-crafted details. The film is like a big puzzle. Like Hitckcockian suspense, the film intrigues us with an over peaceful face. You know there's more beneath it. You know something is going to happen, so you wait, with great patience and interest. Even though things begin to change from half way, but only in a very subtle fashion. So when Jeanne stabs her scissors into the man, everyone is shocked. Imagine an orgasm after a 3-hour foreplay. That's how mind-blowing the ending is.

The cinematography of the film is pristine. On the first day and a half, when everything is ''normal", every shot is an established shot, very well framed and very patient. Once things start going wrong, shots become cutting-edge and anxious. Shots are still long, the change is not dramatic, but as subtle as the change in Jeanne's body. Jeanne's face is never clear before and after her sex deal with different men, either in the dark or cut out of the frame. Only on the third day can we see her face while she's having sex. It's a high-angle shot which clearly shows all her facial expressions and body movement. This is the moment her body and mind awake and come into light.

Chantal Akerman is a female director, and Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles is obviously a feminist film. The awakening of identity (or whatever) of women has been part of French cinema history forever. This film slowly and thoroughly digests its feminism theme through several motives: clock, room(closure/space), machine, processing, cleansing...all of which are very connected yet strong on their own.

After the screening, Jennifer, Catherine, me and another girl whose name I don't quite remember, went to a cafe for some chitchat. This is why I love Jennifer. She left her husband, her one-year old son and her 4 cats home and hung out with 3 single girls at a cafe after midnight. It was a Friday night. Party people were everywhere. We were probably the nerdiest bunch. At the cafe, we talked about the film and joked about it too: how retarded Jeanne's son looks; how Jeanne and her son look like a sexless old married couple; how the baby cried like an old wild cat, blah blah blah. It was so much fun! Master pieces like this, you have to take it with a grain of salt.

Two Dreams of Lewis Klahr

When I was in New York, I complained to Chris about how I missed James Benning's Landscape Suicide because of work and how I was going to miss Saul Levin's show at Anthology and Bruce McClure's Only in Darkness Is Your Shadow Clear at Light Industry. As a consolation award for the successful survival of my nightmare job in NYC , after I came back to Cbus he gave me two new films by Lewis Klahr and Landscape Suicide by James Benning. I watched them last night.

Lewis Klahr's two films:

The Diptherians Episode Two: The Rhythm That Forgets Itself

Fake Aging

Both films were made in 2008 and haven't received much publicity yet. Diptherians was recently screened as part of a short film program Cracking The Surface at International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) in late Jan 2009. As a west-coast based filmmaker, Lewis Klahr's films are screened in L.A. a lot more than the east coast. Googling two films, I found that two films are only on the screening schedule of Rotterdam. Hopefully Rotterdam is just a kickoff not the end of their screening journey.

In Diptherians, Lewis Klahr uses the cut-out of photos of Wooster Group members like Willem Dafoe and Kate Valk. According to Lewis Klahr, he and those Wooster actors improvised their way "through a series of photo shoots trying to determine exactly what a 'Diptherian' is. Here's the first definition-- an elliptical narrative of what could become an ongoing serial of feature length duration".

Quote Chris from the website of CalArts:
The video-based Episode Two: The Rhythm that Forgets Itself is an elliptical narrative that presents a group of sartorially gifted demigods or super-villains (played by Wooster Group all-stars Kate Valk and Willem Dafoe, among others) as they go through their extra-temporal paces. The arcane mythology that surrounds them indicates that they exist outside of the laws of physics and man but, despite that, are trapped in their own patterns of asymmetrically cyclical behavior, somnambulistic decadence, and cosmically petty intrigues. And, similarly, the fumetti-like use of photographs gives a verisimilitude to the characters that almost grants them a sense of individual agency but the flatness of the cutouts squelches any sense of free will. That even the flattest of objects casts a shadow is one of the many paradoxes and mysteries that is hidden within The Diptherians.

Quote Tom Gunning (Chair of Film Studies Committee at Univ. of Chicago) on Lewis Klahr:
Miming the processes of memory, Klahr pulls together 'the discards of contemporary life into scenarios that seem like Hollywood films dimly remembered after a night of serious drinking.

I watched both films for three times. They are both under 15 minutes, so it's quite affordable timewise. At the second round, I finally found my best way to watch and understand his film. Instead of watching and thinking, I started living the films like my own dreams. Suddenly all the seemingly illogic fragments started to make sense. I don't know how Slavoj Zizek or any psychoanalyzist might put my case into theory, but I do believe if I could understand my memory, me dreams, and why and how my brain selected and invented them, if I could reach my unconsciousness and manipulate it consciously, I would be able to read Lewis Klahr like riding a bike.

It is really difficult to describe what Lewis Klahr's films are like. Every film is like a mystic episode of a superhero movie. He's a collagist and his films are collages. The material he uses is very nostalgic. Cut-out from old comic stripes, photos, stamps...I don't know if he really cut them out somewhere or he actually made them and made them vintage-looking. There always seems to be a narrative, but never easy to decipher. Fragmented aesthetics and narratives. One word, delirious.


A big part of Diptherians is uploaded on youtube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4OpIMf8N0hM

I want this!

30 of Millenium Film Journals for $304, shipping included o_O!
a decision to be made before the end of march.

Devotion is here/信仰到家了

终于收到了Nathaniel Dorsky的Devotional Cinema。自从太平洋电影收藏馆/伯克利艺术博物馆的Susan Oxtoby为我写毕业论文推荐了这本书，我就一直想买一本。

Nathaniel Dorsky是一个住在旧金山的电影人，曾在伯克利大学，旧金山艺术学院和斯坦福大学任教。他的电影以极具影像感的画面闻名，而他个人是出名的电影纯净主义者。他对电影的放映，尤其是他自己片子的放映条件要求极为严格，特定的灯泡，特定的放映机，以他决定的放映速度...放映速度对于叙述题材的电影当然是好把握的，通常都是24格，如果速度出错也很容易发觉，但对于许多纯画面的实验电影，一般电影放映师都不具备足够的耐心和足够好的态度把握放映速度，尤其在放有些电影时，放映速度是变化的，不同的部分以不同的速度放映。这种做法在叙述片中很少见，但放映速度是很多实验电影人的玩具之一。

这本书的内容原本是Nathaniel Dorsky在普林斯顿大学举办的“宗教与电影”的一次会议上的演讲。虽然只有短短的34页，但很难总结归纳这本书的内容。书是他多年思考宗教与电影的关系后写下的。短，却都是精化。Chris说看Nathaniel Dorsky在放映后和观众对话非常搞笑，观众提个老长的问题，他的回答都没多过三个词儿。想必纯净主义者的Nathaniel Dorsky也不会是喜欢长篇大论的人。内容根教会教堂圣经都没什么关系，大概用他的话解释宗教与电影的关系来形容书的内容最为准确：电影本身就是一种宗教精神和宗教体验。

我在写论文的时候将此书读过一遍，其中的灵感和洞察力是超乎形容的。相信未来还会读很多遍，争取将那些启蒙的明亮时刻记录下来。但是现在就先让我享受一下消费主义里拥有的快感吧。

最后特别感谢B同学给我买了这本珍贵的小书。（书已经是第二版了，很高兴这样的书没有走在绝版的路上）

Devotional Cinema, a book by Nathaniel Dorsky just arrived. Ever since Susan Oxtoby from Pacific Film Archive/Berkeley Art Museum suggested the book to me when I was working on my thesis, it's been on top of my wishlist.

Nathaniel Dorsky is a San Francisco based filmmaker. His films are famous for the extremely filmmic imagery and he is famous for being the purest among film puritans. His films must be screened in his way, which means the most strict way a film is supposed to be screened. The right projector, bulb, speed...aka the perfect screening condition that varies with every film, because film is God.

Devotional Cinema was originally a talk at Princeton University as part of a conference on Religion and Cinema. It has nothing to do with church stuff, it is about...well, it'd be impossible and unfair to summarize a highly condensed book like Devotional Cinema. As short as it is only 34 not-so-heavy pages, its themes and ideas were developed over a period of years when he was lecturing at UC Berkeley , the San Francisco Art Institute, and Stanford Univ. The best description of the book could be drawn from Dorsky's explanation of the relationship between religion and cinema: film itself is the spirit or experience of religion.

I read the book once when preparing for my thesis. The inspiration and insight gained from Dorsky's writing were beyond my verbal ability. As I am reading it for a second time, I'll try to document those glowing moment of enlightment. Right this moment I am going to just enjoy the very customeristic delight of ownership.

Special thanks to B boy for buying me this precious little book.

Electric Edwardians

Mitchell & Kenyon, a good place to start my blog.

I put a disc labeled Electric Edwardians into the dvd player this morning, knowing nothing about what it's going to be. My film-watching is far behind my film-collecting. I am working on it.

From the very first 1/24 second, it is obvious that it's one of those historically interesting and significant films. As a matter of fact it is a collection of films, all of which were made by Mitchell & Kenyon Production Company in early 20th century.

Quote Milestone:
The films of Sagar Mitchell and James Kenyon were commissioned between 1900 and 1913 by routing showmen in the days before purpose-built cinemas.
advertised as "Local Films for Local People", they were screened at town halls, village fetes and local fairs.

Ancient documentaries like these usually appeal to film scholars and some film studies students only. There's no glamorous settings, no melodramatic stories, no special effects, no fast editing...no nothing but often just a stationary single shot of workers walking into a factory. Voila, straightforward as it is and maybe boring at the first sight. But give them a little time and patience, they'll grow on you. The Milestone dvd categorizes all the films into 4 chapters: Youth and Education, Workers, High Days and Holidays, and People and Places. I was first drawn to the beautiful image texture of "Whitesuntide Fair at Preston", and when it came to "Tram Ride Into Halifax", I was totally captivated by the scenery out of the tram window. The depth of the shot and the slow camera movement bring out all the beauty of those images and stories behind.

BFI channel on Youtube presents many, if not all, Mitchell & Kenyon films they preserved. They also do a good job by adding some short comments interpreting the significance and beauty of these films.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Another movie I watched this morning is Le Doulos by Jean-Pierre Melville. A french gangster-cop story, as "le doulos" means informer in French. They story is quite hard to follow, to be frank. While I totally enjoyed the beautiful black-and-white image and the tempo of the movie, I am not sure I quite understood what happened.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
One final note on movie Naissance des Pieuvres, aka Water Lilies. It is a French movie about young girls, who are on a water ballet team, exploring their sexuality. One interesting moment is after the coach lady notices that one of the girls on the team hasn't shaved her legs yet before a competition, she asked her why. The girl answered she hasn't had time to do it, and the lady said: will you tell your husband that?