Rubbery Pneumatic Cine Kisses: On Malevich and Film
Curated by Laura Harrison and Andrea Grover
Live score by Loreta Kovacic
October 18 and 19, 2003
Programmed in conjunction with
Suprematism: Kazimir Malevich at The Menil Collection,
www.menil.org, 713-525-9400, October 3, 2003 — January 11, 2004
"That is the charmed circle of concreteness in which painters have been turning around and around for a thousand years; and in which cinema too has begun to spin, having thoroughly convinced itself that the concrete can only be manifested in rubbery, pneumatic cine-kisses." --The Artist and the Cinema, Kazimir Malevich, 1926
"Cinema will only reach a new dynamic-kinetic structure of film through new art forms, through pure abstraction, similar to that already reached by the painter...the film artist...is waiting impatiently for a palette of colored rays, in order to weave with them painterly planes of textures in the likeness of Renoir, Degas, Millet and the rest."--Kazemir Malevich (circa 1920)
According to legendary art historian TJ Clark, avant garde cinema never lived up to Malevich's contention that it would be the final frontier for abstraction because of film's inherent lack of surface materiality. This series will look at 20th century works that pushed the boundaries of abstraction in cinema, perhaps farther even than Malevich ever imagined. Including early avant garde films from The Museum of Modern Art, NY, as well as contemporary works.
Live musical score by Loretta Kovacic. Ms. Kovacic is a Kroatian immigrant and a celebrated performing pianist. She is the founder of The Alchemist Piano Academy, and performed a solo recital at Carnegie Hall in 1997.
Laura Harrison is an Aurora Advisory Board Member and the award-winning director of “Secret People: The Naked Face of Leprosy in America”. She is currently working on documentaries about The Ant Farm, and citizens who choose not to vote. Andrea Grover is the Executive Director of Aurora Picture Show.
Opus II, III, IV, 1921-24, Walter Ruttmann, 10:00 (live score)
Walter Ruttmann’s (1887-1941) Lichtspiel Opus I (1921) is thought to be one of the first abstract, animated films seen by a general audience. Ruttmann, who was well known as an architect, painter and musician as well as a filmmaker, continued his work in abstract film for the next few years, and his Opus II, Opus III and Opus IV were widely shown in Europe. The techniques for producing these early films are not fully understood, though it is known that Ruttmann used clay forms molded on sticks which, when turned, changed their visible shapes and that he painted directly on glass. One of Ruttmann’s primary objectives was to fuse sound and image, so that tones of music would be made visible in light and color.—MOMA, Circulating Film Library Catalog
Rhythm 21, 1921, Hans Richter, 3:00 (live score)
Born in Berlin, Hans Richter (1888-1976) became intrigued with music early on, and his interest in finding ways to portray visual rhythms would last throughout his life. Already recognized for his achievements in visual art, which would eventually encompass affiliations with Constructivism, Dada, Surrealism and Expressionism, Richter became involved with film in 1919, when he met Viking Eggeling and they began to collaborate on “scroll paintings” that attempted to convey a sense of dynamic movement in painting.
As Richter began working on his first film, Rhythm 21, he quickly realized that instead of “orchestrating form,” as he had been doing for two years with the scroll paintings, he had to conceive of film as an orchestration in time. For Richter, film space was not plastic but temporal, being constructed by changes in light quality (light or dark) that had no real volume. Using shapes cut out from paper that were photographed one frame at a time, Richter choreographed the squares and rectangles of the film screen to create a sense of pure form and rhythmic motion.
Symphonie Diagonale, 1924, Viking Eggeling, 7:00 (live score)
A Swedish musician and painter, Viking Eggeling (1880-1925) emigrated to Germany at the age of 17 and soon met Hans Richter, with whom he collaborated. Eggeling believed that art should connect all people, and he searched for a universal language that could be communicated to any viewer, getting past the usual divisions of nationality or class. For Eggeling, the universal could be found in abstraction, which was free of representation or bias.
From 1923-25, he worked on what would become Symphonie Diagonale, using animated cutout shapes of paper and tin foil that were carefully added then erased line by line. The organization of these figures into visual themes created a visual structure similar to that of many musical forms. Sixteen days after Symphonie Diagonale had its first public performance (May 3, 1925), Eggeling died of syphilis in Berlin.
Lightplay: Black, White, Grey, László Moholy-Nagy, 1930, 6:00
Born in Hungary, László Moholy-Nagy (1895-1946) moved to Berlin in 1920, made contact with Dadaists and the Russian Constructivists like El Lissitzky and became known for his paintings, photography and graphic design. Moholy-Nagy was interested in manipulating light for new ways of seeing, and explored film as a means of stimulating unique sensory responses in the viewer.
Lightplay is a filmic experience of the Light-Space Modulator, a kinetic sculpture constructed by Moholy-Nagy to produce intricate optical effects of abstract light, shade, motion and rhythm. A celluloid materialization of the machine experience, Lightplay consists of just 49 shots of the Modulator, many of them super-imposed, which serve to dislocate the viewer’s perception of material in space.
Rhythm in Light, 1934, Mary Ellen Bute, 5:00
From 1924 to 1959, Texas-born Mary Ellen Bute (1906-1983) made eleven abstract films which screened theatrically across the country as short films which preceded features. One of the few women recognized in the early abstract film community, Bute was interested in blending music, abstract imagery and movement. She eventually moved to New York where she studied with electronics wizard Leon Theremin; Thomas Wilfred, who developed a color organ; and musician-mathematician Joseph Schillinger. She collaborated with experimental filmmaker Melville Webber and Ted Nemeth, a cameraman with experience in advertising, documentaries and special effects.
Composition #2/Contrathemis, Dwinell Grant, 1941, 4:00
Dwinell Grant (1912-1991) spent many years as an abstract painter and as a theatre lighting designer before embarking on making films. Between 1938 and 1941, Grant made several abstract animations while working at the Guggenheim in New York. After 1950, finding no more support for his film work, Grant abandoned his creative enterprise for more commercial ventures, not reconnecting with his films until the 1970s, when his work was rediscovered. About abstraction, he wrote: “Nonobjectivism is a part of the earth itself…In creating it we do not say something about something else, but rather we produce a rhythm which is part of nature’s rhythm and just as deep and fundamental as a heartbeat, a thunderstorm, the sequence of day and night or the growth of a girl into womanhood…Nature is not something to be commented on, it is something to be.”
An intuitive inquiry into balance, rhythm and pure form, Contrathemis involved the production and animation of almost four-thousand drawings.
Permutations, 1968, John Whitney, 8:00
John Whitney (1917-1995), with his brother James, helped to define the possibilities of abstract graphic animation. In 1960 Whitney founded Motion Graphics Inc., which worked to produce motion-picture and television sequences and commercials with an analogue computer. The analogue computer that Whitney started off with was created from machinery that was used for an M-5 Antiaircraft Gun Director. In 1966, IBM awarded John Whitney its first "artist in residence" status to "explore the aesthetic potentials of computer graphics." It was at IBM that Whitney created Permutations--- a visual tour de force of constantly changing forms in color, motion, and variations of shape.
The Garden of Earthly Delights, 1981, Stan Brakhage, 3:00
Stan Brakhage (1933-2003) began making films in 1952, and had made close to 400 by the time he died. Living for many years in the Colorado mountains near Boulder, Brakhage made films informed by and expressive of the natural world. One of his main concerns was the nature of visual perception, and the mechanics of vision as constructed by the conventional, culturally-defined camera eye versus the human eye. An intense inquiry into subjectivity, Brakhage’s work explored the possibility of recovering the “pre-linguistic seeing of children, an interest which transmuted itself into a desire to free objects and light from structures based on language.”
--Fred Camper
A tribute to the painting by Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights was made without a camera. The dense
collage of flowers and grasses placed directly on the 35mm film creates a fast-paced musical rhythm that alludes to the struggle of nature to survive.
Starman, Andy Mann, 1990s, 10:00 excerpt
Andy Mann (1947-2001) began working in video in the late 1960s in collaboration with New York’s legendary video collectives--TVTV, Global Village, Raindance, and People’s Video Theater. Out of the tradition of media artists like Nam June Paik, Dan Sandin, and Stephen Beck, Mann was interested in video image processing and modified his electronics to produce abstract effects.
Starman is one of seven videos that Mann called “The Scrolls of Andrew, “and was created for viewing in one of his video kaleidoscope sculptures (Sparkle Boxes). Of his interest in electronic visualization Mann stated, “Video is the most lifelike of all art forms. Video is the most dynamic generator of color of any art form, I mean how many tubes of oil paint would you have to buy before you could get a red as intense as the red you get on television? You can't do it. There is no other art medium that is a source of light. It's all reflected light.”
Structural Filmwaste, Dissolution 1, 2003, Siegfried Fruhauf, 4:00
Born in 1976 in Grieskirchen (Upper Austria), Sigfried Fruhauf began experimenting with film and video in 1993. In Structural Filmwaste, leftover film footage was assembled and shown in split screen format. What begins as a formal experiment in the tradition of structuralist filmmaking is gradually stripped down to a digital whiteness.
Transistor, 2003, Michaela Schwentner, 10:00
Michaela Schwentner was born in 1970 in Linz, Austria and since 1989 has studied philosophy, theater arts, history, journalism in Vienna with an emphasis on film theory.
Transistor is a pixel-etched circuitry designed as a post-facto blueprint for a composition by Viennese music trio Radian.—NYUFF
Special thanks to: Deborah Velders, Tony Martinez, Matthew Drutt, Margarita Tupitsyn, Loreta Kovacic, Joe Parani, Ralph McKay and Sixpack Film North America, Kitty Cleary and MOMA Circulating Film Library, Cecille Starr, Carlos Lama, Pepper Mouser, Paul and Elizabeth Nelson, and August Galiano.