My First Abstract Short Films (1999)

Vespers #3: Poetry In Motion

These films use a technique called ‘video feedback’ in which a camera is hooked up to a television display, and then pointed back at the television, effectively seeing itself. When arranged just right, this results in a colourful outpouring of abstract shapes and patterns, produced by the feedback loop of the video camera both seeing and being seen simultaneously. My interest in video feedback came out of wanting to apply ideas around “direct” and “abstract” cinema to the technology of video. At the time I was really inspired by early German abstract films, by Dada artists like Hans Richter (1888-1976), Walter Ruttmann (1887-1941), and Viking Eggeling (1880-1925);

“It is not the natural movement of film that gives the objects their expression, but the artistic movement, that is to say, a rhythmical movement regulated by itself in which variations and pulsations form a part of the artistic design.” (Hans Richter, ‘New Means of Filmmaking’, 1929)

“The rhythm of a work is equal to the idea of the whole. Rhythm is the thing that informs ideas, that which runs through the whole: sense = principle, from which each individual work first gets its meaning. Rhythm is not definite, regular succession in time or space, but the unity binding all parts into a whole… Rhythm expresses something different from thought. The meaning of both is incommensurable. Rhythm cannot be explained completely by thought nor can thought be put in terms of rhythm, or converted or reproduced. They both find their connection and identity in common and universal human life, the life principle, from which they spring and upon which they build further.” (Hans Richter, in Hans Richter, 1971)

The “direct cinema” of Len Lye (1901-1980), in which he painted and scratched directly onto the film-stock;

“It had been raining all night, and there were these marvellous fast little skuddy clouds in the blue sky. As I was looking at those clouds I was thinking, wasn’t it Constable who sketched clouds to try and convey their motions? Well, I thought, why clouds, why not just motion? All of a sudden it hit me—if there was such a thing as composing music, there could be such a thing as composing motion. After all, there are melodic figures, why can't there be figures of motion?” (Len Lye, ‘Ray Thorburn Interviews’, Art International, 1975)

The ‘poetic montage’ of Shirley Clarke (1919-1997);

"I'm revolting against the conventions of movies. Who says a film has to cost a million dollars and be safe and innocuous enough to satisfy every 12-year-old in America?" (Shirley Clarke, 1962)

The works of Stan Brakhage (1933-2003), such as Mothlight (1963), in which he stuck the wings of dead moths directly onto the film-stock;

“Imagine an eye unruled by man-made laws of perspective, an eye unprejudiced by compositional logic, an eye which does not respond to the name of everything but which must know each object encountered in life through an adventure of perception. How many colors are there in a field of grass to the crawling baby unaware of 'Green'? How many rainbows can light create for the untutored eye? How aware of variations in heat waves can that eye be? Imagine a world alive with incomprehensible objects and shimmering with an endless variety of movement and innumerable gradations of color. Imagine a world before the 'beginning was the word.” (Stan Brakhage, Metaphors on Vision, 1960)

And the early computer abstractions of John Whitney (1917-1995);

“The film contains various types of dot patterns which might be compared to the alphabet. The patterns are constructed into ‘words’, each having basically a two hundred-frame or eight-second time duration. These words in turn can be fitted contextually into ‘sentence’ structures. My use of the parallel to language is only partially descriptive; I am moved to draw parallels with music. The very next term I wish to use is ‘counterpoint’. These patterns are graphically superimposed over themselves forward and backward in many ways, and the parallel now is more with counterpoint, or at least polyphonic musical phenomena. Should it be called ‘polygraphic phenomena’?” (John Whitney, on Permutations, 1966)

Vespers

Poems by Dick Whyte, and other miscellanea. Explore the archive . . .