Music by Joel Haertling and Stephen Foster. This is a setting-to-film of a “collage” of Stephen Foster phrases by composer Joel Haertling. The recurring musical themes and melancholia of Foster refer to “loss of love” in the popular “torch song” mode; but the film envisions a re-awakening of such senses-of-love as children know, and posits (along a line of words scratched over picture) the whole psychology of waiting. (SB)
Filter Films
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“Whilst part of what we perceive comes through our senses from the object before us, another part (and it may be the larger part) always comes out of our own mind.” – William James, The Principles of Psychology This is a hand-painted double-step-printed film (i.e. each frame repeated once) which begins with some ephemeral forms and pale tones reminiscent of the “blues” of frothing ocean breakers, the dun “yellows” of the beach, and a complexity of fleeting inter-mixed various other colors and lines suggestive of a variety of vegetable and animal life such as might appear within a sea scape. The black lines gradually become hieroglyphic and then thicken (whenever they appear) across the length of the film – becoming more and more globular in their vertical inter-weave with increasingly brilliant and then darkened colors. Sometimes there is a beseeming thicket of multiply colored shapes, sometimes a complexity more akin to animal cellular internal systems, and then, again, pale washes of tone remindful of the film’s beginning. Finally the vertically moving globs and coils of glyph begin to thin, break up into broken lines interspersed with pointillistic imagery and horizontal washes of tone, punctuated by beseeming rock-hard (usually centered) shapes like brilliantly colored, but battered, flecks of form. Then the “washes” are interrupted by spaces of pure white which come, finally, to a whitened end. (SB)
I …
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This series of films, each extraordinarily unique from every other (except “0 + 10” going together) is inspired and governed by strata of the mind’s moving-visual-thinking different from that of the “Roman Numeral Series” or perhaps one should say that the Arabic Numerals come to fruition thru some tree-of nerves separate from that which gave birth to the Romans (as it is physiologically deceptive to think of thought as existing in “layers”). The Arabics range in length from approximately 5 min. to 32 min. and may be projected at 24 fps as well as 18, tho’ the latter speed seems preferable for starts. I think each film’s integrity of rhythm would allow viewing at a greater variety of speeds, were there the 16mm projectors to allow that exercise. So far as I can tell, they defy verbal interpretation (even more than their Roman equivalents) and would, thus, seem to be closer to Music than any previous work given me to do; but if that be true, it is (as composer James Tenney put it to me) that they relate to that relatively small area of musical composition which resists Song and Dance and exists more purely in terms of Sound Events in Time/Space. Finally, then, the inspiration of all those modern (and a few ancient) composers I’ve most loved since my teens overwhelms the easier, and comfortably lovely, habits of jig and do-re-mi AND creates a visual correlative OF music’s eventuality – i.e. each Arabic is formed by the intrinsic grammar of the most inner (perhaps pre-natal) structure of thought itself.
Arabic Numeral Series – Arabic 12
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“‘Hybrid’ shows, in near-documentary fashion, the planting of flowers crosscut with a looming military presence viewed in photographs. This polarity of life and death, still and motion, courses throughout the film until its final eruption into colour drafts between a war-scarred generation of Vietnamese children and a flowering London stalk. A defiantly personal response to a war whose images haunted the public imagery of the 60s, ‘Hybrid’ stands in answer to any who feel an irreconcilable divide between art and politics…” – Mike Hoolboom “The Vietnam War was very upsetting to me: I did not agree with the American presence in Vietnam. I thought that a film showing some of the tragic aspects of the war would serve as a useful tool for fundraising.” – Jack Chambers
Hybrid
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Winner of Honourable Mention (Experimental) at the 1987 Canadian Student Film Festival/Montreal International Film Festival, “Human on My Faithless Arm” shatters the common stereotype of the deaf. The main character, remaining nameless throughout, has rejected “the institution of the deaf” only to find herself, years later, rejected by society. In this multi-dimensional portrait of an individual trapped between self and self-image, issues of sexuality and economics are questioned. This film is an exploration of alienation through techniques of superimposition, sound displacement ,and deconstruction/reconstruction of language, exposing the hearing-impaired women’s comprehension of sound and conversation. “‘Human on My Faithless Arm’ is an experimental drama about a handicapped woman who lives in poverty, on welfare. She portrays a simple and honest love for her daughter, whom the authorities threaten to take away because of the mother’s sexual preference.” – Maria Insell
Human on My Faithless Arm
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“Huey Lewis and the News: Be-Fore!” follows one of the world’s top rock-and-roll bands of the 80s and a crew of fifty technicians to the Bahamas for the making of a music video for their number one hit single, “Stuck With You” for their album, “FORE!” Blank takes us behind-the-scenes for an off-beat look at what happens when a song is transformed into visuals and musicians are transformed into actors. Hidden in the straightforward reportage are sly comments on the MTV machine, sexism in the media, and the business of rock-and-roll. Best of all, Huey Lewis and the News maintain their sense of humour even when absurdity threatens to overwhelm them.
Huey Lewis and the News: Be-Fore!
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Based on a correspondence with a gay friend in the sixties, this collage film is a portrait of a person and a decade. Against a montage of found images, the narrator comments on life, love, and the American Dream.
How the Hell Are You?
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“House Movie” is a direct autobiography, with events interpreted as they were in progress. It is about living intimately with another person, in a rented house which never becomes home, due to an unavoidable separation. At times the camera almost takes the point of view of the architecture, as witness to the kind of transient emotions common to houses like this. Using a Rachmaninoff excerpt, the film is edited symphonically, with theme and subordinate theme, development and re-capitulation, echoed in the recurring visual motifs and rhythmic cutting. “The extravagant camera movement that marks ‘House Movie’ is not so much lyrical as deterministic; the camera, though curious, has somewhere to go and is content to move forward without prejudice to the reality beyond its own set course. This sense of being in a world in which the familiar exists to be rediscovered and reexperienced, comes through in the best of these ‘home movies’… Films like ‘House Movie’ permanently deepen commonplace immediate experiences…” – Ian Birnie, Independent Views, Art Gallery of Ontario
House Movie
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“Hot Pepper” plunges the viewer deep into the music of Clifton Chenier and its sources in the surroundings of rural and urban Louisiana. The great French accordionist mixes rock and blues with his unique version of Zydeco music, a pulsating combination of Cajun French with African undertones. In addition to scenes of Clifton belting it out at sweaty dance halls, the film winds his music through the bayous and byways of the countryside and into the streets and homes of his people.
Hot Pepper
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This series of films, each extraordinarily unique from every other (except “0 + 10” going together) is inspired and governed by strata of the mind’s moving-visual-thinking different from that of the “Roman Numeral Series” or perhaps one should say that the Arabic Numerals come to fruition thru some tree-of nerves separate from that which gave birth to the Romans (as it is physiologically deceptive to think of thought as existing in “layers”). The Arabics range in length from approximately 5 min. to 32 min. and may be projected at 24 fps as well as 18, tho’ the latter speed seems preferable for starts. I think each film’s integrity of rhythm would allow viewing at a greater variety of speeds, were there the 16mm projectors to allow that exercise. So far as I can tell, they defy verbal interpretation (even more than their Roman equivalents) and would, thus, seem to be closer to Music than any previous work given me to do; but if that be true, it is (as composer James Tenney put it to me) that they relate to that relatively small area of musical composition which resists Song and Dance and exists more purely in terms of Sound Events in Time/Space. Finally, then, the inspiration of all those modern (and a few ancient) composers I’ve most loved since my teens overwhelms the easier, and comfortably lovely, habits of jig and do-re-mi AND creates a visual correlative OF music’s eventuality – i.e. each Arabic is formed by the intrinsic grammar of the most inner (perhaps pre-natal) structure of thought itself.
Arabic Numeral Series – Arabic 11
