FLICKERED

FLICKERY LIGHTS: (/ˈflɪkə/) (lʌɪts/) (noun) Unusual animation, things that move, experimental puppetry, stop motion, cinematographs.

Happy Birthday Mr. Lynch

| Paul Greer

image via

Yesterday, as well as being New President Day, it was the birthday of illustrious film maker David Lynch.

I recently finished reading his book “Catching the Big Fish“, a very personal account of his approach to creativity, and the role that meditation plays in it.

I have often felt that techniques like meditation may result in bland art, due to lack of “pain”, a deluded idea partly inspired by Captain Kirk (I’ll explain another time). Mr Lynch is a very good example of how this is not the case.

In the book he writes:

“Anger and depression and sorrow are beautiful things in a a story, but they’re like poison for the film maker or artist. They’re like a vice grip on creativity. If you’re in that grip you can hardly get out of bed, much less experience the flow of creativity and ideas. You must have clarity to create. You have to be able to catch ideas.”

Here is a little seen, very short film by Mr Lynch:

movie via Attentiondeficitdisorderly Too Flat

Belated birthday greetings to you, Mr Lynch.

Judex (1963)

Video | | Paul Greer

 

“The French fictional character Judex is a mysterious avenger who dresses in black and wears a slouch hat and cloak, created by Louis Feuillade and Arthur Bernède. Originally conceived as a heroic version of the criminal character Fantômas, Judex appears to have been an inspiration for the American pulp hero The Shadow, who was himself an inspiration for Batman.”

Stan Brakhage – Comingled Containers (1996)

Video | | Paul Greer

“Comingled Containers is an experimental short film by Stan Brakhage. “This ‘return to photography’ (after several years of only painting film) was made on the eve of cancer surgery – a kind of ‘last testament,’ if you will… an envisionment of the fleeting complexity of worldly phenomenon.””

“Commingled Containers is often interpreted in light of Brakhage’s health problems at the time, and is considered to represent the director’s own spiritual quest.  Scott MacDonald describes the film as “a talisman that expresses Brakhage’s determination to continue his spiritual quest and to offer viewers something of Light, despite his fear of mortality, for as long as it was given to him to remain in the flow of life.” R. Bruce Elder wrote that Commingled Containers, unlike most of Brakhage’s work, “remains a nearly organic (or biomorphic) abstraction across its entire length.””

Swinging the Lambeth Walk

Video | | Paul Greer

An Ingenious Abstract Colour Film Interpreting a Famous Dance Tune on the Screen in the Form of Moving Patterns
‘In this film coloured designs convey in simple visual form the rhythm of “The Lambeth Walk.” Patterns move and mingle in time to the music. The sounds of the various musical instruments are interpreted in as simple and direct way as possible, and each note was studied for its individual characteristics before it was drawn and coloured. Double-bass notes are conceived as thick cords of colour vibrating vertically on the screen, while the notes of the guitar are shown as separate horizontal lines. The different sound qualities are indicated by the extent of vibration, and the pitch of the notes by their position high or low on the screen.
The music is composed of excerpts from recordings by popular dance bands. Len Lye, a New Zealander, who developed this original film technique, chose the excerpts for their orchestration of the original tune, and aimed at capturing the emotional spontaneity of good jazz, rather than at creating an intellectual exercise in visual accompaniment.’
(Films of Britain – British Council Film Department Catalogue – 1940)

A memo from the 1945 British Council Film Department lists the reasons for films being withdrawn from circulation. It states that “Swinging the Lambeth Walk, a colour cartoon film made by Len Lye, is a failure in that no theatrical manager will show it. A sneak preview of this film was given at the Cosmo Cinema, Glasgow, but the audience howled it off the screen and the manager had to take it off before the reel finished.”

Stan Brakhage – Mothlight (1963)

Video | | Paul Greer

Mothlight is a silent “collage film” that incorporates “real world elements.” Brakhage produced the film without the use of a camera, using what he then described as “a whole new film technique.” Brakhage collected moth wings, flower petals, and blades of grass, and pressed them between two strips of 16mm splicing tape. The resulting assemblage was then contact printed at a lab to allow projection in a cinema. The objects chosen were required to be thin and translucent, to permit the passage of light. Brakhage reused the technique to produce his later film, The Garden of Earthly Delights (1981). Mothlight has been described as boasting a “three-part musical structure.”

“Here is a film that I made out of a deep grief. The grief is my business in a way, but the grief was helpful in squeezing the little film out of me, that I said “these crazy moths are flying into the candelight, and burning themselves to death, and that’s what’s happening to me. I don’t have enough money to make these films, and … I’m not feeding my children properly, because of these damn films, you know. And I’m burning up here… What can I do?” I’m feeling the full horror of some kind of immolation, in a way.”

Over the lightbulbs there’s all these dead moth wings, and I … hate that. Such a sadness; there must surely be something to do with that. I tenderly picked them out and start pasting them onto a strip of film, to try to… give them life again, to animate them again, to try to put them into some sort of life through the motion picture machine.”

 

see also: Comingled Containers (1996)