Like the first time I ate haggis, I was nervous walking into the BFI to watch a night of North American Structural Film from the 1960's. Nervous of the foreign density which awaited me, but eager to experience the transcendantal (yeah I've found haggis transcendental...and what?) nature of works by people such as Michael Snow and Paul Sharits. But let's stave off a discussion about the similarities between avant garde film and Haggis until another day and have a little discussion about cinema (I'll do most of the talking thanks), we'll get to the avant garde film in a bit...
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| The Thin Red Line |
The amount of times people have said to me 'You've gotta see it on the big screen!! You've gotta see it at the cinema!' about a newly released film, is a lot more than I've eaten haggis, sadly (sorry). Not withstanding the obvious benefits of seeing a film in a space specifically reserved for the very act of watching, this urging, or at least the reasoning for this urging, has always seemed to me rather diminutive, for various reasons. For one, it undermines the film in question's strengths by tying it irrevocably to the cinema screen as the exclusive place where the film's true potential can be understood. Most of my favourite films, films that have burned themselves through my retina and branded their very conceit and being into the intricate, spongy matter of my brain, I watched either in my bed or on a sofa. In a house. On a rather normal sized screen. And some of these films fucking blew my mind. Some of these films haunted me for days, weeks, months, years, they still do, that's why they're my favourite films. I watched Terrence Malick's
The Thin Red Line (1998) four times in one week after it brought out the obsessive in me shortly after my first screening (at home). And it's three hours long. It's possibly my favourite film, and I've never seen it at the cinema.
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| Eraserhead |
Another thing about the 'You have to see it at the cinema, you absolutely have to, you can't see it anywhere else!' comment (or goading, as I like to call it. One smarmy ignoramus from my school once told me that I couldn't watch
The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002)
anywhere else other than Leicester Square Odeon) is that it suggests that you can either view a film at the cinema or 'anywhere else', and every location contained within 'anywhere else' will basically amount to the same experience. Well surely that's nonsense? The environment we watch a film in greatly affects our experience of the film and also possibly our opinion of it. The first time I watched David Lynch's
Eraserhead (1977) I was sitting on a uncomfortable wooden chair with a very rigid back, in my friend Guy's parent's very minimal, modern living room. This physical discomfort was exacerbated by my being very tired and it being very late. This situation made watching an already gruelling film into an even more demanding experience, heightening every skin crawling and tortuous moment in that bizarre and disturbing movie. It was brilliant! But when
Eraserhead rears it's head, or should I say misshapen haircut, in conversation, do I say 'Oooh, you've got to see it in my friend Guy's minimal lounge on one of those really uncomfortable chairs with the really straight back! And get up real early that morning, maybe go for a few runs that day as well. It's the only way to take in the mise-en-scene properly!' ? No, I do not. Maybe I should...
When we do say this to each other ('You've got to see it on the big screen') it's often about major, Hollywood-type films. These films are more universal and have a wider audience, have general release, etc etc etc, so it's not surprising. What's funny is these films generally have tightly planned plots, beautiful faces and swelling music. Surely films as manipulative as these can be viewed almost anywhere? So geared as they are to grabbing the audience with every element in a way the audience can easily settle into. You're generic plot based film is made for the sofa...
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| N:O:T:H:I:N:G |
Well, I've rambled a fair bit there, possibly it's time to completely denounce my argument of the previous four paragraphs. The four film's showing at 'Purity: North American Structural Film' screening at the BFI on 7th March, put in good stead the argument of those people who berate me with 'You have to see it on the big screen!', although I'm not entirely sure they had these 1960's exercises in formalist potency in mind. First up was Paul Sharits'
N:O:T:H:I:N:G (1968) and at 36 mins it was the most intimidating of the films. As the lady who introduced the films (I forget her name but she was very good) noted, it is pointless to try and describe these films, but I will give you a rough idea.
N:O:T:H:I:N:G pounded at me for half an hour, flashing and strobing different coloured frames at me with hints of images in between and the ocasional ruthless interjections of musique concrete. As I watched, the changing rhythm's in the pacing of the flashing hypnotised me, echoing music. I could say more, but instead I'll just quote Sharits: 'The film will not 'mean' something it will 'mean', in a very concrete way, nothing'. So why waste words?
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| Film in which there appear sprocket holes, edge lettering, dirt particles, etc |
Second up was George Landow's
Film in which there appear sprocket holes, edge lettering, dirt particles, etc (1965).
We look at an almost still image (it's a few frames looped) of a young woman. It is actually an image that film processing labs used to calibrate the colours when developing material, but Landow was interested in the bits of the film process which were normally cut out. Hence we get this image, topped with all the hair, dirt and specs that would normally be cleaned off a reel before it is printed, as well as a very conspicuous cut where the loop is made. Through this we start to look at the very material of film itself, and although this is almost a still image, the activity demonstrated by the dirt and purposeful flaws on the celluloid create a jittery, shifting, dirty hive of activity on the screen.
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| Serene Velocity |
Okay lastly was a Michael Snow film called
Standard Time (1967) which I liked, buuuut what I really want to talk about was the third film, Ernie Gehr's
Serene Velocity (1970). Wow. Ostensibly a shot of an empty basement corridor in a university, this 23 minute film subsumed me into the BIG SCREEN. Perhaps this is the sort of film that I will grab people and yell at them 'You have to see it at the cinema!! You have to see it on the big screen!' about. By rapidly cutting between different focal lengths, Gehr took me out of my cinema seat and into an ever moving, almost kaleidoscopic filmscape. Because of the natural depth of the corridor, I felt like I could jump into the screen, at other times I felt like the corridor was jumping out at me. Because of the rapidity of motion the corridor is abstracted into various patterns of symmetry made by the different elements of the location: the horizontal lines of the overhead lights and the strip of white that these lights make on the floor, the straight lines that shoot out at you, these being where the floor meets the walls and the walls meet the ceiling, these are just some. This hallway image, abstracted by simple cutting, completely dominated me in a weird ritual that felt like it was sucking me in then spitting me out. For a shot of an empty corridor it was one of the most alive, exhilarating film's I've seen in a while; full of activity and expressing, for me, a heightened love for two of the very basic elements of film itself: zooming and cutting. Because of the speed of the cuts my mind started to interact with the images on a visual level, I created movements in my head, merged patterns on top of the patterns that already existed;
Serene Velocity was a beautiful, exuberant adventure and seeing it at the cinema was to experience a complete domination of my visual and mental state.
So, as usual, I'm left rather befuddled as to where I stand on a subject. All I know is that I bloody love all sorts of films. And I can watch them in most places. Till next time...
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