I Take These Truths

This film is entirely hand-painted and is composed of such an evolution of variably coloured shapes that their inter-action with each other should constitute a purely visual “self evident” (as prompted by the title): everything beyond the title is as far removed from language as I could possibly make it: and thus it is, to me, practically impossible to describe. Each frame is printed twice, so that its effective speed (24 fps) is 12 frames per second. A variety of organic and crystalline painted shapes (painted on clear leader, thus as if brilliantly back-lit in a blazing space of light) are interspersed with very dark (black leader) passages as if etched with scratches of light and strained radiances: the juxtaposition of these two contrasting qualities of painted and scraped film are “interwoven,” sometimes with vine-, or vein-, like irregular lines in black or alternately, scratched-etched white. There are also some straight, multi-coloured, bars which move diagonally from one side of the film frame to the other. All these “themes” finally give way to clear thick gelantinous effects which resolve themselves in a long passage of beseemingly-struggling hieroglyphic white shapes in a black field, ending on a brief spate of variable colouration. The film is the first part of “The Hand-Painted Trilogy.” Dedicated to Phil Solomon. (SB)